GovTrack.us Blog

Bill Allison at Sunlight quotes an article in Roll Call:

Every private entity that Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) favored with an earmark in this year’s defense bill recently has given political money to the lawmaker, according to an analysis of House Appropriations and federal elections records by Roll Call and Taxpayers for Common Sense.

PACs and employees of those 26 groups together have contributed $413,250 to Murtha since the beginning of 2005. He collected nearly a quarter of the sum — $100,750 — in the two weeks leading up to March 16, the original deadline for lawmakers to file their earmark requests.

To put it in perspective (because I hate numbers reported in isolation—for Eddie Izzard fans— “squeezy squeezy… is that good??”), $413k is about 15% of Murtha’s total receipts in 2005-2006. That’s huge, for 15% of your incoming contributions to be repaid in earmarks, and for sure the earmarks sent back at least that amount to the contributors.

Of course, I always like to see the methodology before taking any results too far, but Roll Call is subscriber-only. Murtha staffers or supports that might be reading that think the conclusion is off should email me.

Check it out. Someone makes a video praising GovTrack.

GovTrack has moved over to its new hardware so things should be working normally again. More or less.

Sunlight has posted a really nice review of GovTrack. If you’re not sure how to start using this site, the review highlights one path.

If you’ve used GovTrack at all lately, you’ve probably noticed the chronic outages that have grown considerably worse over the last few months as traffic has increased (with some 8,000 people visiting daily now). There have been a few independent problems. One was a software bug (it wasn’t my fault!) that I believe I fixed today, and so the outages should pretty much clear up. Another issue was that the machine running this site simply couldn’t keep up with all of the new traffic, and so today I’ve bought a newer and faster server. Over the next few weeks I’ll move the site to its new home, and hopefully you won’t notice the change, except that everything will hopefully be speedier by the time Congress returns from its summer break.

Actually, I do expect that there will be a week when accounts on this site will be locked — you won’t be able to log in and add or remove monitors or change email settings. Apologies in advance for that.

Yesterday the House passed the Senate’s ethics bill S. 1. I’ve covered the details of the bill on the Open House blog. All in all, it’s good progress.

GovTrack has had a few widgets that you can embed on your website to show tracked events or the status of bills, and, for developers, now it’s possible to use the Google Maps congressional district overlays on your own Google Maps mash-ups. There’s also a REST API for searching legislation. Details here.

This month, the 30,000th user created an account on this site!

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.”