As the northeast gets blasted with snow — here in Philadelphia we’re on our third storm in two weeks — I’ve got a few new updates for GovTrack.

• Last month GovTrack Insider launched and it’s now getting integrated with GovTrack. The new site has reporting on what congressional committees are meeting about and other legislative analysis. If you are tracking legislation with GovTrack, when there’s a relevant GovTrack Insider article you’ll see an event in your feed. Plus, the Insider headlines are now featured on GovTrack’s homepage.
• The Research and especially Legislation pages have new “Popular Bills” lists. You can now see what bills people are searching for most and what search terms they are using. This way, if you’re not sure what bill you’re looking for you can get some short descriptions. No one has tried this before for bills, so we’ll have to see how it works out and tweak it in the future.
• If you’re tracking committee meetings, they now show up dated by when the meeting was posted (well, found by GovTrack) rather than with the date of the meeting. The reason we made this change is that if you really are tracking these meetings, you don’t want to keep seeing the same events a month in the future until they occur. We think you want to see them as soon as they’re posted, and then they’ll fade away as newer things come up. If also means if you get these events by email, you won’t get multiple emails for the same meetings over and over again. If you still want a calendar-oriented format, you can now get an actual calendar from the Committees page. And the feed page still links to an iCal feed which you can use in calendaring applications (including Google Calendar).

And that’s it for now.

This week we had a technical glitch that caused every bill to show up with no cosponsors. This should now be corrected.

As you may know, GovTrack derives its information from THOMAS, the website of the Library of Congress. Unfortunately, the Library of Congress does not publish legislative information in a way that makes it possible to accurately reuse the information on independent websites like GovTrack. I’ve spoken with them a number of times about it over the past 5 years, I’ve gotten legislation passed about it, but until they embrace the value of legislative data for the public this is the best anyone can do.

So what happens is that small changes to  THOMAS can break our data import until we notice and fix it. That’s what happened this week.

Everything should be back to normal now. Thanks for your patience.

Mogy asks:

How many bills have not been signed into law after passage in the House and the Senate?

Instead of just giving a number, let me break down the state of every bill proposed in Congress in 2009. As you may know, Congress operates on two-year cycles and bills don’t carry oveer from cycle to cycle. 2009 was the first year in the “111th Congress” cycle.

Enacted Laws: 123 bills have been enacted in this cycle by being passed by both houses of Congress and then being signed by the president. (This includes some joint resolutions but I’m just calling them bills on this count.)

Passed Both Chambers: 21 bills have passed both chambers but haven’t become law. There are a few reasons this can happen. In some cases, the House and Senate have passed different versions of the same bill and need to confer to produce a single final bill. In a handful of over cases, the House and Senate adjourned shortly after passing the bill, and so they have not gotten around to formally sending the bill to the President. Finally, we have the bill, H.J.Res. 64, which President Obama pocket-vetoed. It was his first veto, but it was also mostly a formality.

Passed One Chamber: 318 bills have passed either the House or Senate but not the other, and so are waiting for the second house of Congress to pick it up.

Failed: One legislative item, S.J.Res. 5, failed on its vote on passage in its originating chamber. This is relatively unusual because leadership avoids votes on bills they believe will not pass.

Failed Suspension Vote: 4 bills were voted on and failed in the House under what’s called “suspension of the rules” which is a technical term for when they try to move noncontroversial legislation forward under a two-thirds vote. Bills that fail this way can be tried again under a simple majority vote later on.

Introduced: 6,585 bills have been introduced and are awaiting a committee recommendation before being considered by the House or Senate as a whole.

And that’s every bill.

Here’s an update to what’s new on GovTrack over the last few months.

• You’ll now notice little buttons throughout the site that let you add or remove trackers when you see lists of bills, rather than having to click through to the individual bills.
• The bill search page now lets you search bills by references (i.e. citations) to the United States Code.
• You can now search GovTrack for historical Members of Congress and can browse Members of Congress by year.
• We’ve improved the way we notice changes to bill status so that the automatic processes that make GovTrack go keep the site better up to made.
• The images that go along with roll call votes have been made to look just a bit nicer.
• The congressional district maps can now be expanded into a full screen mode.
• When you are tracking individual bills, you’ll now get updates when cosponsorship changes.
• Logging into GovTrack was totally broken if you entered your email address with any capital letters. This is fixed now. Oops.

For developers reusing GovTrack data for other projects:

• We’ve now got MODS files for bill text from the GPO, which, among other things, includes the dates bill texts were published (something annoyingly missing up till now).
• I’ve been filling in the “class” field for Senators. This determines which election cycles each senator is in, and when one senator replaces another you should trace it back through the same “class”. I haven’t checked it carefully for accuracy yet. Additionally, we now have two people.xml files, one for current Members of Congress and one for the historical data that has everyone that has ever served in Congress.
• Bill XML files now have some new experimental status codes that more precisely reflect where a bill is in the legislative process.

I mentioned last post that Sunlight Foundation extracted some statistics out of the House’s recently released electronic 3,300-page report on disbursements. Their statistics showed a wide range of salaries for the different types of staff jobs in Congress. I did some further analysis on whether staff salaries are correlated with the congressman’s tenure in office, with some surprising results.

The Sunlight team had to go through a bit of roundabout effort to get these statistics. As I wrote elsewhere, the House did not really do this in a way that supports analysis. Granted, they have a lot of procedures in place and getting out data in a good way isn’t alway trivial. But this is Congress and we hold them to a high standard. That being said, I took Sunlight’s work and massaged the data a bit more to get what I wanted.

The District Director position had a salary that started at $81k for freshman congressmen and went up $580 for each year the congressman was in office. The two other senior positions of Chief of Staff (mean $126k) and Legislative Director (mean $75k) didn’t appear to change with the congressman’s seniority. For the jobs that multiple people could fill, I didn’t divide it by person, so for these we can see the total spend on Legislative Assistants started at $76k for freshman congressmen and went up $880 for each year the congressmen has held office, and for Staff Assistants a total of $48k freshman + $2,500/year. (These all reached high statistical significance.). Like Chief of Staff, Legislative Correspondent (mean $42k) had no variation by time in office.

Also reported is the yearly expense on franked mail. This interestingly decreased by $1,300 per year in office. Similarly, “printing and reproduction” decreased by $2,000 per year in office.

I think it is interesting that the Chief of Staff salary is so stable. It might mean that congressmen make sure they are on an equal footing by all hiring from the same pool of experienced candidates, and also that chiefs of staffs don’t consider it a perk (i.e. willing to take a pay cut) or a detriment (i.e. wanting more pay) to work for new or older congressmen either. Not that we should take the numbers too seriously without more research. Elder congressmen get access to committee staff, for instance. That might change how they make use of their office staff. On the other hand, the data is very messy and there are a lot of outliers that I haven’t cleaned up.

This week the House posted for the first time an electronic version of their master expense report. The report details the pay of everyone employed by Congress, from the Members of Congress to their staff, and other staff in Congress.

The folks over at Sunlight Foundation have extracted some statistics out of the House’s 3,300-page report. We can now see average salaries for different types of staff. Chiefs of staff top off at an average approximate salary of $120,052, with legislative correspondents — the staff members that read constituent mail — coming in near the bottom at $31,951.

The fact that the House has posted this document online at all is a great step forward for transparency, and signals that House leadership (i.e. Speaker Pelosi) understands that a big part of government transparency is putting the raw numbers up online for anyone to read. This is an important example of how to do transparency through technology, though it is not a perfect case. I’ve written an analysis of this case this over on my personal blog.

Today’s question comes from Erika M:

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

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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A Clockwork Orange move 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.

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I just set up an account quickly and was able to leave a comment on one of Rep. Lynn Jenkins’ [R, KS-2]

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posts. Then I was able to easily share the post on Twitter Total Recall psp . The whole process is open, transparent and social.

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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

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. 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 The Last Resort on dvd who stole the prize for his satirical design:

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(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!

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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 The Alphabet Killer movie download . 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.

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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.