If you’re interested in the math behind some of our statistics — the ideology/leadership charts and the bill prognosis scores — you might find interesting a talk I gave last week. I had the opportunity to kick off the application development track at the Law Via the Internet (LVI) 2012 conference at the Cornell Law School with my presentation “Observing the Unobservables in the United States Congress” [slides | video].

The political reality we know today is entirely manufactured. Can Big Data help us cut through the spin to see what is really going on? Yes it can. This talk will present several statistical techniques used on GovTrack.us to quantify what is really going on in the U.S. Congress, including applying Google’s PageRank algorithm to Members of Congress, principle components analysis on bill sponsorship, and logistic regression on the success of bills.

The slides have Python code samples for computing the statistics.

I previously blogged about leadership/ideology and bill prognosis.

Partisan politics drives us to look at differences. But during the time Rep. Paul Ryan served along side then-Sen. Joe Biden from 1999 to 2008, our VP candidates voted the same way on 52 substantive bills.

Here are the 52 bills which the two candidates both supported:

Major new laws:

• H.R. 4762 (106th): 527 Organization Disclosure bill
  This bill amended campaign finance law to require “527 organizations” to disclose their contributors. This bill came four years before the “swift boat” TV ad run by a 527 organization hurt Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004.
• H.R. 3162 (107th): Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001
  This is the PATRIOT Act, the highly controversial law that gave the executive branch new criminal justice powers following 9/11.
• H.R. 3295 (107th): Help America Vote Act of 2002
  Following the controversial close of the 2000 elections and its pregnant chads, this bill gave funding to the states to modernize their elections equipment.
• H.R. 1 (107th): No Child Left Behind Act of 2001
  This hallmark law of the Bush presidency tied federal education funding to performance measures, like test scores.
• S. 3 (108th): Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003
  This law bans late term abortion. 
• S. 1 (110th): Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007
  This law created new lobbying disclosure rules and gift bans in Congress. 
• S. 900 (106th): Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
  This 1999 law repealed the financial market regulations that prevented commercial banks and investment banks from being one and the same. The repeal is considered by some to have been a cause of the 2008 market crash.
• H.R. 5140 (110th): Economic Stimulus Act of 2008
  This bill, which created tax rebates, was an early response to the credit crisis that lead several months later to the world wide recession.
• H.R. 1424 (110th): Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008
  This bill created TARP, the program of massive investments in private banks to prevent the financial crises from worsening.

Finance, trade, and related laws:

• S. 2578 (107th): Debt Limit bill
• H.R. 10 (107th): Railroad Retirement and Survivors’ Improvement Act of 2001
• H.R. 3108 (108th): Pension Funding Equity Act of 2004
• H.R. 4 (109th): Pension Protection Act of 2006
• H.R. 4040 (110th): Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008
• H.R. 3009 (107th): Trade Act of 2002
• H.R. 434 (106th): Trade and Development Act of 2000
• S. 2796 (106th): Water Resources Development Act of 2000
• H.R. 1308 (108th): Working Families Tax Relief Act of 2004
• H.R. 1180 (106th): Ticket to Work and Work Incentives Improvement Act of 1999
• H.R. 4425 (106th): Cerro Grande Fire Assistance Act
• H.R. 2646 (107th): Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002
• H.R. 1000 (106th): Wendell H. Ford Aviation Investment and Reform Act for the 21st Century
• H.R. 2622 (108th): Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003
• H.R. 3 (109th): Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users
• S. 256 (109th): Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (also see H.R. 833 (106th): Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2000 and H.R. 333 (107th): Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2001)

• H.R. 4444 (106th): U.S.-China Relations Act of 2000
• H.R. 3167 (107th): Gerald B. H. Solomon Freedom Consolidation Act of 2001
• H.R. 4759 (108th): United States-Australia Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act
• H.J.Res. 97 (108th): Approving the renewal of import restrictions contained in the Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act of 2003.
• H.J.Res. 52 (109th): Approving the renewal of import restrictions contained in the Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act of 2003.
• H.R. 1828 (108th): Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003
• H.R. 2330 (108th): Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act of 2003
• H.R. 5682 (109th): Henry J. Hyde United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act of 2006
• H.R. 7081 (110th): United States-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Nonproliferation Enhancement Act

National security laws:

• S. 2845 (108th): Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004
• H.R. 3210 (107th): Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002
• H.R. 5005 (107th): Homeland Security Act of 2002
• H.R. 6061 (109th): Secure Fence Act of 2006
• H.R. 3275 (107th): Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism Convention Implementation Act of 2002
• S. 2271 (109th): USA PATRIOT Act Additional Reauthorizing Amendments Act of 2006
• H.R. 3199 (109th): USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005
• H.R. 1 (110th): Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007

Bills that did not become law (at least not under these bill numbers):

• H.R. 976 (110th): Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2007
• H.R. 6331 (110th): Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act of 2008
• H.R. 4810 (106th): Marriage Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2000

(There were no substantive bills that the candidates both opposed. That’s because it’s unlikely a bill will get a vote in both chambers of Congress unless there is strong support for the bill. That’s the same reason why most of these bills did become law, and why most had bipartisan support.)

There are at least 111 bills in all in which Ryan and Biden voted the same way when you include appropriations/authorizations bills. For the full list, see this spreadsheet on Google Docs. There are, of course, many more bills on which they voted differently, and many more bills that did not come up for a vote in both chambers that they probably would have disagreed on had they had the chance.

For more on Ryan’s record, see my previous post:

• Ryan’s Record: By the Numbers

Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republican party’s presumptive Vice Presidential nominee, took office 13 years ago. We can learn a lot from his legislative record as the congressman from Wisconsin’s 1st district.

Budget, taxes, and Medicare

During his tenure in Congress Ryan sponsored 75 bills, mostly related to the budget, taxes, and our government-run health care programs. Although he is known today for wanting to privatize Medicare, many of his bills attempt to reform Congress’s budgeting process in smaller pieces. His bill H.R. 5259 in 2002 would have changed budgeting to occur every two years rather than every year, in an attempt to make Congress’s time spent on budgeting more efficient.

The two bills he wrote that have become law modified excise taxes on arrows and named a post office. He’s currently the chair of the House Committee on the Budget. Budgeting hasn’t been going well. Last year the government almost defaulted on its debts because no budget had been passed! (The standoff between the two parties goes well beyond Ryan’s control, though.)

Ideology & Leadership

Our unique analysis of ideology and leadership in Congress puts Ryan right in the middle of the Republican House members:

Ideology is based on a statistical analysis that puts congressmen with similar patterns of co-sponsorship of bills closer together. Ryan co-sponsors bills that the middle of his party tends to co-sponsor. He’s neither extreme nor a centrist.

In this chart, congressional leaders are those representatives who tend to get a lot of cosponsors without necessarily cosponsoring other bills in return. Ryan is right about in the middle. But he is a little below the average leadership score of the 44 Republican representatives serving as long as Ryan.

Leadership is based on an analysis that’s similar to how Google decides which web pages to show first in search results. (More analysis details.)

Crossing party lines?

From Ryan’s position along the ideology axis of the chart above, you’d guess that he crosses party lines about an average number of times for House Republicans.

In a Washington Post story today that cites statistics from GovTrack, one former staffer said Ryan was all but compromising:

[T]hose who have watched Ryan’s recent career . . . say finding common ground has not seemed to be Ryan’s interest. “No, goodness, gracious.” said Steve Bell, a longtime Republican staffer on the Hill, who now works at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

But the statistics tell another story.

Of the 975 bills Ryan cosponsored since coming to DC, 22% were introduced by Democrats. That’s right in the middle. The freshmen members of the Republican caucus this Congress — many of them from the Tea Party — tended to cosponsor Democrats’ bills only 11% of the time. The Republicans except the freshmen did so 25% of the time. Overall, Ryan is at the 58th percentile, so a little more cross-partisan than most Republican congressmen.

Similar conclusions come from looking at the number of cosponsors of Ryan’s bills that were Democrats. Of the 75 bills he sponsored since he took office, 26% of his cosponsors were Democrats. Republican freshmen got 19%, Republicans except freshmen got 29%. Compared to the whole party, Ryan is at the 53rd percentile — he’s right in the middle.

So far this year we’ve had 4,288 bills introduced in the Congress. That puts our congressmen and senators on track for a banner year in terms of number of bills introduced, and probably for fewest bills enacted too.

Here’s how the numbers break down so far: 20 bills have been enacted this year so far. 7 bills have come to a vote but failed. (It’s rare that bills fail because party leadership doesn’t bother to call for votes on bills they know they don’t have the votes for.) Another 305 bills have had some sort of substantive action such as coming out of committee or having a vote in one chamber but not yet in the other. The remaining 3,956 are waiting for their moment to shine —- it’s up to the committee chair in the committee they are assigned to to bring the bill up for consideration.

Congress operates in two-year terms. 2011 is the first year of the “112th Congress”. The table below shows the breakdown for the last 13 years.

Just keep in mind that the 112th Congress is only 1/4th over, so the comparison to other years is tricky. Since 1999, Congress has been consistently passing about 5% of the bills it introduces, though it’s been introducing substantially more since 2005. The 103rd-108th Congresses (1993-2004) were actually more of a temporary lull. Before that, in the 102nd Congress, Congress introduced 9600 bills. So we’re not really seeing a general upward trend here in number of bills introduced, just a return to what had been fairly normal in years before.

The number above include bills (“H.R.” and “S.” bills) and exclude resolutions because they don’t go through the same life cycle and generally don’t end up being enacted as law.

Today I am publishing two new types of statistics for understanding the behavioral relationships between Members of Congress. The first is a new approach to the leader-follower scores, based on the same algorithm Google uses to rank pages on the web. The second statistic is an update to my political spectrum graph. New charts are presented at the end.

Read it all..

This post by Coby Logen (a pseudonym), who blogs on government website matters at and has worked to improve government websites for the past five years, is syndicated here with permission.Thanks Coby!

Senator Bennett from Utah is single-handedly quashing the most commonsense, bi-partisan bill this year–a requirement that the U.S. government write clear, concise, and intelligible English. And he is doing so based on a misreading of the bill.

Read it all..

This post comes from Martha Sherwood, 2nd time GovTrack blog submitter and a legal researcher in a consumer law office. Martha works for a lawyer who blogs at . Martha holds a doctorate in biology

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There are currently four bills pending in Congress to address the credit crunch in the Student loan industry. All of them were introduced in the last month in response to an acute situation that has only become apparent since the beginning of the year: lenders participating in the Federal Guaranteed student loan program do not have the money to loan to students, and as a result, more than fifty of them, including some major players, have withdrawn from it altogether, and most of the remainder have warned the government that they anticipate not being able to originate such loans at the level of previous years, because they cannot find buyers for securitized student loan bundles. The situation is very similar to what has been happening in the mortgage lending market in the last year and a half, but it is considerably more acute. Unless students planning to attend college in the fall can obtain loans, colleges will be without operating expenses, and many will be forced to shut their doors. This explains why the Democrats who have been most vociferous in opposing any government bailout to subprime mortgage lenders appear as sponsors for a set of bills providing equally unwise government sponsorship for student loan lenders and guarantee agencies.

Read it all..

Today’s post is from Joshua Freedman, a full time mortgage broker. He owns and operates in Pittsburgh, PA and specializes in commercial and residential loans. (By the way, I edit the posts a little bit…)

Over and over politicians have told us that they want to do what they can to mitigate the effects of the Foreclosure Crisis, but I haven’t seen anything other than bailouts and pleas.

has a clause in it that rids the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) qualification that requires brokers to have liquid assets, $60,000 in the bank, to get approved to do FHA loans. It replaces the liquid asset requirement with a $100k surety bond, which is a bond that a third party gaurantees that they will pay up to $100k to the federal government on demand if the broker does not live up to his/her commitments, aka fraud or regulatory fine).

This will allow more brokers to originate FHA loans for borrowers that have sub par credit and anytime you have more loans that translates to more borrowers and less of a seller market. Also keep in mind that, brokers will not be underwriting the files as the lenders will. The subprime crisis will be tapered as it will allow more origination options for homeowners to save their homes and will allow more buyers to buy homes. This is a simple fix to the problem, but it is getting jammed up.

The argument against is that allowing brokers to do FHA loans without liquid assetts and replacing it with the surety bond releases the broker from liability and you will have a bunch of fraudulent loans flying around. This just isn’t true. Every broker is still licensed by his or her respective state and does countless hours of continuing education for every state that they are licensed in. The reality is, most fraud is conducted by employees of brokers and not the broker and you are going to have fraud in any situation where there is lax supervision. A lack of liquidity doesn’t enter into the equation.

Today’s post comes from .

The United States Congress, like the State of South Carolina, has bills pending that address the problem of a paperless electronic voting system. We blogged about the dangers of the lack of a paper trail associated with the electronic voting system used in South Carolina, Trust But Verify

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The lack of a paper trail has also spurred Congress to action on the issue. There are currently two pieces of Democrat-sponsored legislation still alive and proceeding toward becoming law. (A Republican-sponsored House proposal, , is dead.) The Republican legislation had the beauty of simplicity. The Democrat sponsored legislation is much more detailed and will be costly for states to implement. In addition, the Democrat bill imposes detailed federal requirements on states (unlike South Carolina) even if they already have existing systems for creating an electronic voting paper trail.

Read it all..

This post comes from Martha Sherwood, a legal researcher in a consumer law office. Martha works for a lawyer who blogs at

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Student loan debt is a huge and growing problem for American families. As Congress rushes to patch the holes in the dike of the collapsing home mortgage industry, student loans have been shoved under the carpet. There is a widespread lack of recognition of the fact that hundreds of thousands of people are already saddled with educational loans they cannot repay, which cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and thousands more are being added daily. Our congresspeople seem reluctant to pick up the ball. Although has already become law, it provides no relief to the mass of student debtors. (See at BLN.)

Of the three relevant bills currently pending, only one,

(“A bill to Amend Title 11, United States Code, with respect to exceptions to discharge in bankruptcy for certain qualified educations loans”) provides any meaningful relief. Introduced by Senator Richard Durbin (D-Il), this bill removes the paragraph in the 2005 bankruptcy “reform” act which included private educational loans in the non-dischargeability provisions of the code. Senator Durbin’s introductory remarks recapitulate what bankruptcy attorneys are discovering: that this one paragraph, which slipped unnoticed into the act, opened the door to irresponsible lending and predatory debt collection practices. This bill deserves the unqualified support of anyone concerned with just fiscal policy.

, Thomas Petrie’s (R-Wis.) bill, would provide direct government funding for consolidation loans subject to income contingent repayment plans (ICRPs). Under present ICRPs, unpaid interest on guaranteed educational loans accumulates and becomes a public obligation to the lender at the end of the ICRP period. In the long run, this bill would save the government and the taxpayer some money, but it does not help the student borrower.

, is the brainchild of Hilary Clinton (D-NY). This bill purports to address the inadequate truth in lending disclosure requirements on educational loans, and a long litany of loan servicer abuses. If the bill had any teeth in it, it might help curtail mushrooming fees and penalties due to questionable lender practices. Otherwise it’s just an impressive-looking conglomeration of empty platitudes. In the mortgage sector, the government relies on private attorneys to bring action for violations, usually in conjunction with a home sale, and compensates them if the prosecution is successful. Nothing in S. 511 provides a comparable mechanism for sanctioning educational lenders for violating borrower’s “rights”.

Student loan obligations, bloated with unpaid interest and penalties, hover like a raptor over the incomes of working Americans. Every month adds to the growing pool of people trapped in this cage, as college-bound young folk and their parents are lured into signing contracts whose implications they do not understand, recent graduates, working full time, find they cannot pay down the principal, large numbers of people experience personal crises during the long repayment period and find their obligations doubled by penalties and interest, and older workers are downsized or forcibly retired with substantial obligations still in place. Given the magnitude of the problem while the economy is still considered to be healthy, the prospects should a real recession occur are frightening to contemplate.

Thanks for the report, Martha!