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.

A new site, Filibusted.us, sheds some new light into the filibustering process in the Senate. Actually it’s not filibustering so much as group action to obstruct progress. Filibusted.us was the well-deserved winner of Sunlight Foundation’s Apps for America contest and draws data from GovTrack.us to show which Members of Congress are obstructing progress. I’m going to take this opportunity to talk about the state of the filibuster and cloture vote, below the fold. [Update: Fixed link.] Read it all..

As a politically active citizen, you may have noticed that GovTrack seems to be missing the usual one-click Contact Your Congressperson tool, instead referring you from people pages here to the home pages of official websites at the House and Senate. Yesterday, I (Josh) attended a conference in D.C. on Communicating with Congress. (I was pretty sick yesterday, esp. by the end of the conference, and was probably fairly incoherent to those I talked to after…)

Two things that I learned stood out, and this goes to why I don’t provide such a tool here.

First, congressional offices are ridiculously overloaded with communication with the public. 313 million emails came into Congress in 2006 (iirc), which if you do the math (because I forget if anyone gave the exact number) is in the ballpark of 300-2000 emails per office per day. And given the current office budgets allowing for just a few people (in the House) to be dedicated to dealing with communications like that, there is no way, as passionate as they are about it (which also became quite evidence both from the staffer panelists and those that were in the audience), for them to respond to all communications. As a result, what we see on the outside — web forms, sometimes CAPTCHAs, limiting communication to constituents, and other barriers, are a means for them to triage the bombardment of letters they get. If they can’t deal with it all, they prioritize the letters that the writer took the most effort to create — e.g. personally written letters. That’s a very reasonable technique to me. (Though perhaps they should pass a resolution to up their office budgets?)

The second thing was that, as panelist Alan Rosenblatt presented, the method of triage has unintended ramifications. He put the point quite well: Members of Congress rely on their staffers to do research and craft public statements, and in the same way, Americans rely on advocacy groups to do research and craft letters to politicians. There’s nothing wrong, he said, with sending a pre-written letter, and it shouldn’t be discounted as it is today. And as another panelist showed, less than 10% (he later said 20%+ as a guess, but the numbers on the slide indicated otherwise) of those who participate in a letter-writing campaign modify a pre-written letter.

I got in under the wire with the last question of the day, which went effectively unanswered. I should have started with this: There seem to be three ways to deal with the problem of overloaded communications staffers (”LC”s?). One way is to increase the barriers to communication so they get fewer letters, eliminating the least important ones (as they see it). Another way is to streamline the process, which goes along the lines of what Rob Pierson suggested for a computerized, standardized (XML) letter submission format. But there is a third way, which is what I suggested, which is looking at other forms of communication entirely, to complement individual letter writing, that deal with more constituents at once. Clearly, to the extent that it makes any sense at all, dealing with communications that are sent collectively by citizens is more efficient than dealing with the same letter sent individually. There are many forms of many-to-one, aggregated communication, and I would sincerely like to know more about what Members think of those methods and whether the problems with those methods are technologically addressable.

Does it seem like Congress is getting less done than usual this year? Well, it’s true. Congress has enacted fewer bills in the last six months than in any first-six-months period after an election going back at least to 1993. I don’t have bill data going further back than that, so I don’t know just how “do-nothing” our Congress is. We’ve had 42 enacted bills so far this year, compared to the average of 94 for the similar time periods in the previous seven Congresses — so about half as much.

Excluding bills that designate the names of post offices and other buildings and bills that recognize birthdays and such, 25 bills were passed this year compared to the average of 71 for the seven previous comparable time periods back to 1993 — about a third as much. 40% of bills passed this year were designations/recognitions, whereas the average previously was only 23%. (Small caveat- It’s possible that a decade ago the throw-away bills weren’t post office designations and recognitions but something else I haven’t thought to filter out, so these numbers may overestimate the change.)

Now, granted, after the last major power shift in 1994, the productivity of Congress also dropped off, from 104 bills enacted at the start of 1993 to 77 at the start of 1995 (just after the Republicans took power), and then 56 two years later in 1997. But still the relevant comparison is 77 to 42, and that’s a big difference.

(As another caveat, it’s possible the drop in productivity isn’t Congress’s fault. For instance, Bush might be more reluctant to sign bills than Clinton was, or you could say that the Iraq issue reasonably needed more time than whatever was the leading issue in 1994 (I wouldn’t know, I was 12).)

Lawrence Lessig, someone I admire greatly, and someone I would really love to meet one day, is a lawyer and professor that over the last ten years has advocated and fought for sane copyright laws in the public’s interest, in the face of the media industry’s constant push for extensions of copyright terms, etc. If you’re not familiar with the issue it might seem academic and theoretical, but it goes to very deep free-speech concerns. I actually got involved in politics, and made this site, in response to my curiosity about the issues that I learned Lessig was interested in.

So I just read Lessig’s latest blog post describing how he wants to shift his focus from IP law to public corruption, by which I think he means the unbalanced control that commercial interests have over the content of the debates held by government officials (i.e. in Congress, etc.), and I’m so excited. Having Lessig, an unmatched public speaker and expositor (if that’s a word), working on these problems is going to be incredible.

He writes:

“I don’t mean corruption in the simple sense of bribery. I mean “corruption” in the sense that the system is so queered by the influence of money that it can’t even get an issue as simple and clear as [copyright] term extension right. Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests can provide. In the US, listening to money is the only way to secure reelection. And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars.”

Now, I don’t by any means mean to keep touting my own horn or anything, but as a matter of keeping readers up to date about news related to GovTrack, it happens that I keep having to point out where a bit of credit is due to GovTrack.

David Pogue of the New York Times writes a positive review of MAPLight.org’s new money-meets-votes interface for the U.S. Congress. (They have been doing California state data up till now.) Pogue writes:

“It’s a new Web site with a very simple mission: to correlate lawmakers’ voting records with the money they’ve accepted from special-interest groups . . . [N]obody has ever revealed the relationship between money given and votes cast to quite such a startling effect.”

MAPLight gets its voting records and legislation database from GovTrack. So when Pogue writes:

“On the other hand, it’s painstakingly non-partisan. And it uses very good data”

I’ll just pretend he knows MAPLight uses some data from GovTrack, and knows about GovTrack, and will take it as a compliment. (Actually he was referring to OpenSecrets.org.)

I like MAPLight, in principle. Unfortunately, I think their presentation is highly misleading, grossly misrepresenting the impact of money in votes, and enough so to trick Pogue into thinking that there was a big causal relation, or even a noteworthy correlational relation implicated on the page he viewed. Economists and political scientists study these things carefully, and from what (little) I’ve read about it, it would seem that when carefully studied, the relationship between money and congressmen’s votes is fairly small, in that it is actually difficult to find and not something you can see from a simple bar graph, although indeed the relationship probably exists.

From Ellen Miller’s blog at Sunlight, a note about OpenMass:

“We are delighted to point you to OpenMass — a new website that takes our OpenCongress.org open source framework and applies it to Massachusetts legislation, legislators and news about issues in the state. As they say, imitation is the highest form of flattery. Forty-nine more states to go.”

(I guess I get a second-level imitation effect?)

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Yesterday OpenCongress.org launched It is basically a sister site to GovTrack, but with different parents (i.e. we’re not affiliated). Based on the data that GovTrack makes available for others to reuse, OpenCongress will be focusing on collaborative analysis of legislation. I think there’s room enough in the world for two sites like this, so it’s great to see another avenue for transparency in government.

Just posted a new figure on the statistics page showing the increasing reelection rates of incumbents. Do they have a growing advantage over challengers or are we just growing more content with our representatives? Until 1900, incumbents were reelected just 60% of the time. By 1950, it was 80%; and these days it is around 90%.

It’s rare when Congress asks the people for help being transparent, and so I’m particularly pleased to announce the formation of The Open House Project, a Sunlight Foundation-sponsored project with the encouragement of Speaker Pelosi that will be making specific proposals about how The House can better use the Internet in the interests of transparency. Various people, including myself, will be blogging on that site over the next few weeks about some ideas on this point. Feel free to contribute your ideas by commenting on the TOHP website, joining the project’s mail list, or talking on GovTrack’s own mail list.