Today’s question comes from Erika M:

I see yea, nay, no, aye as the way congressmen voted.  What does aye mean?

Ah parliamentary procedure. There’s no meaningful difference between Yea and Aye, and Nay and No. They both mean “I vote in favor” or “I vote against”. The difference is just a matter of procedure. The Constitution actually requires “Yea” and “Nay” for votes on the passage of bills (Article I Section 7), and so the House and Senate both do that for those particular votes.

In fact, the Senate uses Yea and Nay for all votes. Good for them for keeping things simple. It’s another story for the House.

There are two peculiarities of the House that make the answer to the question not so simple. First, they use Aye and No for all voice votes, where congressmen just shout out their vote and the chair judges who won just by listening. (Anyone can subsequently demand that the votes be recorded individually, in which case a recorded vote is used. In the Senate, voice votes use Yea and Nay.)

The second peculiarity of the House is that it operates in two modes of procedure, and that determines which kind of vote is used for recorded votes not on the passage of bills (because those are always Yea and Nay). These final types of votes could be for amendments, motions, etc. The first mode is normal House floor debate, which uses Yea and Nay for recorded votes, so you will see Aye and No for voice votes but Yea and Nay for recorded votes. Yea and Nay are reserved for this mode of debate only. The second mode is when the House operates as if it were a committee made up of everyone, called “The Committee of the Whole on the State of the Union,” and in this mode Aye and No are used for recorded votes as well as voice votes.

Some more details are in House Rules, if you want to pour through the details. It’s in Rules of the House, Rule XX, and House Practice in the section Voting.

Visitor WB asks:

I understand there are different Bills passed by congress regularly. Some with “H.R.”, “S”, H. Res” and other variations. My questions is this: What are the types of Bills and what does each designations stand for? Where is each Bill valid? Who is subject to that specific Bill? Read it all..

Donny Shaw over at OpenCongress says that House Republicans are explaining their views on the health care bill by linking people directly to the paragraphs in the bills they find important. I think that’s great. They may be using OpenCongress, but we invented that feature over here on GovTrack — OpenCongress is based on GovTrack — so we’ll take some pride and credit too.

Here’s what Donny wrote:

Here’s a great example of the kind of textually-informed conversations about bills we have been trying to encourage. Republicans in the House of Representatives are extracting chunks of legislative text from the OpenCongress health care bill page (H.R. 3962), giving their take and opening them up for discussion. They’re using OpenCongress’ bill text permalinking tool to refer people back to the specific lines of text in the 1,990 page bill that they’re talking about.Check it out — House Republicans Read the Bill>>

They’re using a service called Amplify that lets you “clip, share and discuss interesting things you read on the web.” It integrates with Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites.

I just set up an account quickly and was able to leave a comment on one of Rep. Lynn Jenkins’ [R, KS-2] posts. Then I was able to easily share the post on Twitter. The whole process is open, transparent and social.

Having the links back to the exact portion of the bill under discussion make it engaging. It’s easy to be disingenuous about legislation by making a false claim and backing it up with a line of text taken out of context. That’s basically how the “death panel” myth was spread over the summer. But providing a link to the specific line within the bill invites people to look it up for themselves, read it in context and make their own judgement.

Anyways, go check it out. They’re putting up several new posts per hour.

I’m a wonk, you’re a wonk. We like reading legislation and we’re proud of it. Strut your stuff with GovTrack’s new merchandise.

About a month ago I started a t-shirt design contest. With a $100 prize at stake, about a dozen people submitted ideas — three submitted shirt-ready images. Congrats to Matt Pentifallo who stole the prize for his satirical design:

I Know What You Did Last Session

(For the older readers, this is a reference to a horror movie.)

Ben Rellick submitted some new logo images, based on the site’s current logo. In appreciation, I decided post-hoc to add a runner-up prize of $60 for Ben. Ben’s submissions are on t-shirts and a mouse pad. Here’s the mouse pad:

GovTrack Logo Mouse Pad

Finally, Susie Holderfield submitted a cute red G with an eye inside, which I turned into a mug:

Red G Mug

Thanks to all of the submitters!

I also added a design myself. It’s an image of a bill, the House’s health care bill, and on the back is the page with the supposed dead panels, which are clearly not mentioned on that page.

The merchandise is now available. It’s all created, managed, and shipped through a third-party website that does this sort of stuff — Zazzle.com. I just upload the designs.

Now, I didn’t do this to make money so all of the merchandise are available at the lowest rate that Zazzle.com will let me sell them for. But, people have asked me how to donate to GovTrack and I’ve always declined donations in the past (GovTrack is NOT an actual non-profit charitable organization), but if you want to support the site, you can also buy the same merchandise at a marked-up price. You choose.

Sara from Kentucky asks:

I don’t know if I am hearing accurate information. Some of us want bill numbers listed in newspapers so we can look them up. “America’s Healthy Future Act”  has no number and Baucus’s office says that it will not receive a number until it goes to the Senate Floor. It is not on GovTrack. Would it be on Thomas?

HR 676 has never gone to the House floor, yet it has a number.  Why is this?

The issue that Sara raises is an important one for government transparency: where does the legislative process begin? the first step in the parliamentary procedure for a bill to become law is for the sponsor of the bill in the House or Senate to submit the bill formally to the clerk of the chamber. At that point, the clerk assigns it a number. Then the bill gets assigned (”referred”) to committees which begin the deliberations for the bill, and eventually, if it is lucky, it may come to the full chamber for a vote.

The tricky thing for us on the outside is that there’s no stopping congress from deliberating on an idea before it is submitted to the clerk and officially becomes a bill under consideration. And if it’s not an official bill, it’s not on the government website THOMAS or on GovTrack. This isn’t something you can prevent. There will always be deliberations outside of the official way things work. And I think that’s fine. It does make things difficult to follow, though.

That’s what happened with the stimulus bills a year ago. There were a number of drafts and revisions all before the bill actually became an actual bill. And that’s what’s happening in the Senate with drafting its health care bill. (The House drafted H.R. 3200.) Until the bill gets formally submitted, it’s not “in the system”. You can only get a draft — an essentially unofficial bill — from the congressman’s or committee’s website that is working on it, if they care to share.

The Senate Committee on Finance posted a PDF of the latest draft. It’s called a Chairman’s Mark because it is the draft bill with the markups (i.e. revisions) that the chair of the committee (Max Baucus) wants to push forward. It’s what the committee voted on, and subsequently passed. I expect this to be submitted to the Senate clerk and get a bill number soon.

I would like GovTrack to start collecting draft bills where we can find them, but I haven’t had the time yet to build the infrastructure on the site for it yet.

Thanks for the question, Sara.

Hey, we need some cool GovTrack apparel, right? Design a GovTrack t-shirt or send me a funny expression related to GovTrack to put on a t-shirt, and if I get some good responses I’ll pick a winner and send back a $100 gift certificate to somewhere. Email your submissions to operations@govtrack.us.

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Here’s what’s been happening with the site this summer:

• We’ve upgraded our hardware to top-of-the-line equipment so that we can keep up with the increasing number of visitors coming to GovTrack.
• I’ve hired a moderator (my first staff member!) to process the submissions to the Community Q&A section of the site. A long backlog of submissions awaiting approval built up while I was on vacation — hopefully never again. This also frees up my time for other things.
• We’re now recommending Twitter hashtags like #usbill and #hr3200 for bills. See our recommendation. No sooner did we recommend #usbill that people started tweeting with it.
• Pages for bills now show industry supporters and opponents thanks to MAPLight.org, and for enacted bills now show who was president and signed it. Cosponsors are now shown in bold if you are tracking them.
• Pages for cloture votes now link to Filibusted.us which has more information on the issue of filibusters.
• You can now jump to a congressional distristrct by entering a street address, and if you hover your mouse over a congressional district on the maps page it tells you which district it is above the map.
• You now don’t have to create a new account on GovTrack to store your trackers or get email updates. You can log in using your Google, OpenID, or some other existing logins you may already have.
• Various small mistakes were fixed: California is now listed as having 54 districts, not 53, on the maps page.
• The bill text pages should load  faster now for long bills.
• Pages for Members of Congress now show their latest tweets, if they are on Twitter.

GovTrack is going to be upgrading its hardware very soon now. We’ll probably be down for about a day while we get the new hardware set up. Thanks for your patience. Read it all..

GovTrack has taken the plunge to Twitter. I’ll be tweeting from time to time as @govtrack. Also, I’ve put up recommended hashtags  on the pages for bills so we can more easily track the chatter on legislation happening in the twitterverse. (It’s in the blue box on the right side.)

You might have noticed the last blog post was a bit out of the ordinary here. It wasn’t written by me, and it’s coverage of a recent congressional hearing. I’m starting up a new experiment, a citizen reporters team to cover the goings on in congress that the mainstream press doesn’t. Stay tuned!

Bring your participation in government to Facebook with two new Facebook apps, RepresentedBy and Laws I Like. These apps, written by some other civic hackers, are based (in part) on congressional data shared by GovTrack.

RepresentedBy, by Will Turnage, lets you post to your profile a box with who represents you in Congress, shows the latest bills and news related to them. You can also challenge your friends to see if they know their Members of Congress, and it has an interesting metric of how digitally-transparent your Members of Congress are.  The app was an honorable mention in Sunlight’s Apps for America Contest (1).

Laws I Like, by Chris Poliquin, lets you search for bills, vote on them, and then post your votes to your profile to tell your friends what they should get their Members of Congress to support or oppose. You can also see what bills your friends have voted on.

These are listed now on the revised Tools page on GovTrack.

OpenCongress also has a Facebook app which is similar to the above two (and OpenCongress is also based on GovTrack data).