Filibusted.us is, no doubt about it, a very good site that helps shed light on how the filibuster and cloture vote are playing out in the Senate. Except, this is a very complicated topic:

That’s the strict reading of what is going on. I don’t think that’s the fairest explanation. Rather, I would say that the cloture vote has become a part of the standing conventions

of the Senate to pass a bill. What I mean is, probably no one thinks of it as gaming the system anymore. Instead, the cloture vote has taken the place of the final vote as the meaningful vote when passing a bill. Bills actually require a 2/3rds majority to pass now, period. When someone votes against cloture, it’s not necessarily a sinister act of gaming the system nor is it that they are necessarily trying to obstruct progress. It’s just how things work- if you oppose the bill, you vote against it (at cloture), and that’s the end of the story.

Not everyone who opposes a bill votes against cloture, though, so to some it must still feel

like gaming the system. These folks allow an up-or-down vote knowing that they are going to lose and the bill will pass. They give up their opportunity to kill a bill, knowing that the intention of Senate rules was to use a simple majority. These folks are noble, but perhaps misguided about what a cloture vote means now.

I don’t think it’s such a big deal if the Senate actually requires a 2/3rds majority. Lots of people seem to think that a simple majority vote is always the most fair/ethical/moral way to decide something (one person one vote), but I think this view is greatly mistaken. But this is a fair question to ask: should the Senate vote on bills by simple majority or 2/3rds? Senators are likely to waver depending on whether they are in the majority or minority party at any given time, and this is unfortunate.

If the Senate thinks a 2/3rds majority is a fine way to decide on bills, then that’s fine. We should just be transparent and honest about the process. Let’s get rid of the cloture vote, which is highly confusing for the American public, and change the fiinal vote to require a 2/3rds majority. But if Senators think a simple majority is appropriate, then the filibustering and cloture process ought to be revised so that it can’t be gamed by a bill’s opponents so easily.

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.

(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

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 of ‘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

— 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?)

Yesterday launched It is basically a sister site to GovTrack, but with different parents (i.e. we’re not affiliated). Based on the

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.

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