You might have noticed the last blog post was a bit out of the ordinary here. It wasn’t written by me, and it’s coverage of a recent congressional hearing. I’m starting up a new experiment, a citizen reporters team to cover the goings on in congress that the mainstream press doesn’t. Stay tuned!

June 24, 2009

Witnesses:

Lt. Gen. Wallace “Chip” Gregson (USMC, Retired), Assistant Secretary of Defense, Asian and Pacific Security Affairs Ambassador

Richard Holbrooke, Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan

*All statements, unless otherwise noted, come from Holbrooke

Overall comments

Committee members emphasized that tax payer dollars must be well-spent. Holbrooke agreed. Gregson argued that the new strategy was the only possible course of action: we cannot rely on containment of Afghanistan and Pakistan issues because this is simply not possible in the age of globalization; we must focus more on activities related to nation-building.

Interagency efforts

Holbrooke explained that the Special State Department office which he heads has been created to integrate efforts of DoD, CIA, Treasury, FBI, Agriculture, USAID, DHS, DoJ, and UK Foreign Office. He mentioned Gates’ statement that this is a “genuine whole-of government effort.” Both witnesses argued that we cannot separate civilian and military efforts—civilians have a unique mission but are dependent on military for security; one recent integrated plan involved formulating cohesive approach to agriculture issues with USDA, USAID, and DoD. The government has developed metrics to evaluate performance in Afghanistan and Pakistan but these were created by other offices and are not yet publicly available; fundamental point with metrics is to distinguish between inputs and outputs (must focus on measuring outputs). In Afghanistan, US will insert civilian leaders to deal specifically with military, but only applies to US Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs); lead must still be taken by military. After personal appeals of senior leaders, e.g. Secretary Clinton, many people throughout government offered to fill civilian capacity positions; e.g. recruited Pakistani-American female doctors to work in Pakistan’s refugee camps. These efforts led to 800 volunteers for civilian surge from State, another 305 from DoD – ‘these are quality people’.

Oversight of Contracts

Holbrooke’s office is re-evaluating all current contracts in Afghanistan and has put on hold and re-negotiated hundreds of poorly designed and funded contracts with both for-profit and non-profit firms. Ex: Creation of office for women’s rights in DoS will replace $30 billion in contracts with non-profits. Both witnesses acknowledge the need for greater accountability and transparency in the interagency effort.

Pakistan

Pakistan is a clear strategic priority and a country with which the US must be involved, though the Pakistani government has rejected the idea of any US ground troops, so we must find different ways to support their efforts against the Taliban. Holbrooke noted that all elements of the Pakistani political spectrum (Zardari camp, Sharif camp, and military) now recognize and are committed to action against the threat that the Pakistani Taliban poses. Holbrooke would support expansion of aid monitoring in Pakistan; Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) not expansive enough (must apply to both Afghanistan and Pakistan) and must be totally independent from executive branch – this was Holbrooke’s personal opinion and not administration policy. H. noted that Obama was first leader involved in Pakistani refugee crisis; Secretary Clinton designated $110 M and more in supplemental, but US is funding 55% of effort (rest of world has not sufficiently responded, event after personal appeals by US senior government officials).

Afghanistan

H.  on narcotics: Efforts in Afghanistan aimed at stopping the drug trade are hugely important; US will cease crop eradication because of negative impact on subsistence farmers (potential for turning to Taliban) but increase interdiction efforts. Narcotics is the major source of funding for low-level Taliban in Afghanistan. Other beneficiaries include corrupt Afghan government officials and police. They are also funded by extortion and other illegal activities. Sufficient security is required to ensure that alternative crops are more profitable than drugs (improved transportation network, protection from extortion).  Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda are primarily funded by foreign support – mostly from individuals in the gulf – the US is currently working with international partners on this issue.

Strategic communications are essential; all propaganda from enemy is negative about US and US must have counter-propaganda but not with an “American accent” (must recruit locals).

Afghan presidential elections are in 55 days; US is emphasizing fairness but not endorsing any one candidate.

Gregson: All commanders and air crews recognize the need to avoid civilian casualties; in risking civilian casualties commanders must balance objective and risk of increased extremism. Gregson: US currently conducting another assessment of Afghan strategy after McChrystal appointment; must recognize need for whole-of-government and whole-of-nations approach.

*Both witnesses specifically shied away from questions on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and on drone strikes, citing confidentiality.  Holbrooke did note that it was his understanding (2^nd hand) that while the release of A.Q .Khan was of interest, he was no longer a threat because he has been disregarded by Gov. of Pakistan and is aging. U.S. should have been allowed to interrogate him.

RepresentedBy, by Will Turnage, lets you post to your profile a box with who represents you in Congress, shows the latest bills and news related to them. You can also challenge your friends to see if they know their Members of Congress, and it has an interesting metric of how digitally-transparent your Members of Congress are.  The app was an honorable mention in Sunlight’s Apps for America Contest (1).

Laws I Like, by Chris Poliquin, lets you search for bills, vote on them, and then post your votes to your profile to tell your friends what they should get their Members of Congress to support or oppose. You can also see what bills your friends have voted on.

These are listed now on the revised Tools page on GovTrack.

OpenCongress also has a Facebook app which is similar to the above two (and OpenCongress is also based on GovTrack data).

Our first experiment with group writing resulted in this letter opposing H.R. 45 collaboratively written by 450 people and then later signed by over 3,000 people. We took on this experiment because Congress can’t keep up with the volume of letters it receives. We wanted to try a novel way of aggregating voices, without using a simple petition. I wrote about this more here and here. The process used the writing tool MixedInk.com, where participants have three tasks: writing letters from scratch, remixing the content from letters written by other users, and rating the letters and remixes to pick the best one. I chose to start the experiment on a single issue, and a single side of the issue, because I knew that there was a critical mass of visitors to GovTrack that would want to contribute to such a letter. By no means does GovTrack endorse the content of the letter.

As part of the experiment, I promised the participants that I would deliver the top-rated letter to Members of Congress in person. (Mind you, I live in Philadelphia.) I met up with David Stern, the co-founder of MixedInk, in front of the Cannon House Office Building, one of the buildings where congressmen have their offices:

MixedInk’s David Stern in front of Cannon House Office Building

I picked out nine congressmen to bring the letter to: the bill’s sponsor Bobby Rush, the chair and ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee where the bill was referred to (that’s John Conyers and Lamar Smith), the chair and ranking member of the Crime subcommittee where the bill was referred to (that’s Bobby Scott and Louie Gohmert), and then the congressmen from the four districts that gathered the most number of signatures in the petition phase of the project (Todd Tiahrt and Peter DeFazio with 36 signatures, and John Boozman and Greg Walden with 32 signatures). Their offices are spread over three buildings, so we had a lot of walking to do. And we made some bad turns in the buildings a few times too. It took a while.

In delivering the letter we had two goals in mind.

First, we delivered a letter you wrote. We told the offices we were acting on behalf of some of their constituents. They were receptive and happy to respond to the names and addresses of the signatories in their district.

Second, we wanted to see what the staff in each of the offices thought of a group letter. Was this useful to them as a way to aggregate voices that was more thoughtful than a petition? In each office we asked to speak with an “LC”, a legislative correspondent whose job is to manage constituent communications in the office, or an “LA”, a legislative assistant who works on policy matters. We ended up speaking to two LCs, one LA, and some low-level staff. Their reactions were pretty much the same. Most thought the idea of group writing was interesting, but because we delivered it as esentially a petition that is how they saw it. We didn’t collect the names and addresses of the 451 people that actually contributed writing the letter, unfortunately — and with only 451 people spread across the whole country, that doesn’t make for a very strong petition in any given district.

If 3,000 people contributed to writing the letter itself, things might have been different.

So the moral here is that a group letter on this scale is probably not going to be seen any differently from a petition by congressional offices. It’s a good way to get a group to come to a consensus on a letter, but it’s not necessarily a more effective or efficient way to contact Congress.

[Update: Comments below on the merits of gun control will not be accepted. This isn't the place to argue that point.]

The basic idea is that to create a site like GovTrack, you need a good computer-oriented database of legislative information. Congress only makes a sliver of this type of information available in a way that makes it easy for others like me to remix it and transform it into new things (like this website). For the last decade, the Senate actually had a policy against using the latest technology because Senators did not want roll call vote results to be easily displayed on non-Senate websites. (If you think that’s ridiculous, you are quite right.) I don’t mean to take that much credit, but I’ve worked with some staffers over the last few years on pushing the Senate to get rid of this policy, and in the last few weeks the policy was finally undone. You can read about it in these press accounts:

• 5/11/2009. Columbia Journalism Review: Senate goes XML, by Clint Hendler
• 5/6/2009. Politico: Senate picks up the slack on data, by Victoria McGrane. (Again, no mention of GovTrack, but I could this as a bit of a personal victory.)
• 5/1/2009. Politico: Group wants Senate to get ‘techy’, by Victoria McGrane. (It doesn’t mention GovTrack, but I was involved behind the scenes.)
• 4/27/2009. Politico: Online voting records user unfriendly, by Victoria McGrane

Earlier in the year there were also a bunch of articles about how data can be used to improve government transparency and civic engagement. The first article below, especially, talks about how we (that is, me and some other folks) got the House of Representatives to instruct the Library of Congress to make legislative data better available to the public to build independent sites like GovTrack.

• 3/5/2009. Mother Jones: Congressional Data Mining: Coming Soon?, by Jonathan Stein
• 2/28/2009. Newsweek: The People’s Data: Government should make data openly available and then let outside talent reimagine how it can be used online, by Christopher Werth.
• 1/10/2009. Miller-McCune: Deep Throat Meets Data Mining: In the nick of time, the digital revolution comes to democracy’s rescue. And, perhaps, journalism’s, by John Mecklin.
• January 2009. The Atlantic: iGov: How geeks are opening up government on the Web, by Douglas McGray.

There was also a recent article about our experiment with MixedInk in writing group letters to Congress:

• 5/9/2009. Examiner.com: Online democracy, by Alexandra de Scheel

And another article mentioning GovTrack:

• 3/3/2009. TechNewsWorld: How to Use the Web to Track Government Goings-On, by Erika Morphy.

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:

The filibuster is the unique parliamentary rule in the Senate where a Senator can hold up debate in a dire case by holding the floor, unless a 2/3rds majority votes in favor of “cloture” to cut off debate. As it happens, no one ever fillibusters these days as in the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but the cloture vote is still very common. Now I don’t think a strict reading of the parliamentary procedure really captures what’s happening, but here it is first: When debate is wrapping up on a bill, the Senate moves to end debate so they can start a vote. The final vote only takes a simple majority (1/2) to pass the bill, but cloture requires 2/3rds. Opponents of the bill can raise the bar on passage of the bill by forcing a cloture vote. If cloture fails, debate continues — indefinitely postponing an actual vote. It’s easier to defeat cloture than to defeat a final vote, so opponents vote against cloture to prevent a simple majority vote, even though no single opponent may be intending to filibuster. This is an important distinction from the filibuster. No one actually wants to filibuster in any sense. The opponents that are voting no aren’t standing in solidarity with a colleague willing to put his head on the chopping block by filibustering. They simply don’t want the bill to pass. Essentially it is like gaming the system. The Senators that invented the cloture vote meant it to stop a filibuster (I assume), but Senators realized that they can use it to prevent a bill from passing. When someone votes against cloture when no one is actually filibustering, they’re taking advantage of a flaw in the system.

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.

The letter opposing HR 45, our first experiment with group writing, resulted in a letter collaboratively written by 450 people! We took on this experiment because Congress can’t keep up with the volume of letters it receives. We wanted to try a novel way of aggregating voices, without using a simple petition. Right now we’re collecting signatures for the letter so that Members of Congress know that people stand behind it, and I’m going to shortly figure out who to deliver the letter to. I intend to deliver it in person to a few Members of Congress later this month. Read the letter or sign-on here.

We’re also starting up two letters, one supporting and one opposing, for HR 1913, a hate-crimes bill that recently passed the House. Writers will have three weeks to write, mix, and rate letters. Then we’ll turn the top rated letter on each side into a petition as with the HR 45 letter, and after a period of time will deliver them in person to Members of Congress. Choose a letter to join in: Support | Oppose.

Thanks to everyone who participated! And thanks to MixedInk.com for creating the letter writing tool.

Subject Terms: At the start of the year the Congressional Research Service, an arm of Congress that assigns the subject terms to bills that you see on GovTrack, revised the set of terms it uses. As a result, trackers on old terms that are not in the new system will no longer generate events in your Tracked Events page or email updates. You’ll see a note warning you about the problem. Unfortunately the only fix is to look for a newer term to replace it with, if there is one. (More here.)

Social Action: SocialActions.com is a website that scours the web for petitions and other community group actions to create social change. On bill pages we’re now linking to any community causes like petitions that are relevant for the bill. The social actions are in a blue box toward the middle/bottom of the page. Some examples:Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, Blair Holt’s Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2009, Fair Tax Act of 2009. You won’t see the box if no relevant community actions could be found for the bill.

Leader-Follower Scores: We’ve added a new statistic to the pages for Members of Congress: leader-follower scores. Inspired by an idea by Joe Barillari (who I knew in college), this score looks at the sponsorship and cosponsorship patterns of Members of Congress to see if they consponsor others’ bills more than other Members cosponsor their bills, or vice versa. Basically, if Member X cosponsors Member Y’s bill but Member Y doesn’t cosponsor any of Member X’s bills, Member Y gets a point (but the actual computation is a bit more complicated). For example, see Minority Leader John Boehner versus relative newcomer Rep. Tim Murphy.

Bill Search & Voting Records: You can now search bills by sponsor or cosponsor even for bills in previous sessions of Congress. This was a long standing item on the to-do list. Also, in similar news, you can use the roll call votes page to see the voting record of any Member of Congress in previous years and get vote comparisons between Members in previous years. Previously the drop-down Member lists on these pages would only show current Members of Congress even when a previous year was selected.

New Map Widget: We have a new easier way you can embed a congressional district map on your webpage. If you bring up a map for a state or district, there is a new Map Tools link below the map. In addition to the other methods we’ve had, there’s now a really small code snippet that you can drop right into your webpage. (It uses an iframe.) It’ll also remember exactly how you’ve centered and zoomed the map on GovTrack.

Developers: Finally, the site has a reorganized Developers section. See the Dev link at the top of every page. Nothing too new, just reorganized & cleaned up.

On MixedInk, participants have three tasks. First, they can write letters from scratch — this gets the process rolling. Second, they can remix the content from letters written by other users. This helps the community synthesize the best letter, and MixedInk tracks the authorship of the remixed phrases in a pretty cool way. This makes sure users don’t feel alienated by being copied; rather, they remain a co-author of the remixed version. Last, users rate the letters and remixes to pick the best one. The tool is well-suited to writing a joint letter to Congress, which was one of the motivations behind MixedInk.

The experiment is in progress with 145 individuals contributing just in the last week to a letter expressing opposition to H.R. 45, a gun control bill. You can follow the process on MixedInk, or join in, here. I chose to start the experiment on a single issue, and a single side of the issue, because I knew that there was a critical mass of visitors to GovTrack that would want to contribute to such a letter. By no means does GovTrack endorse the content of the letter, and in the future we hope to faciliate letters on all sides of issues, provided there is a sufficient number of visitors interested in collaborating on it.

At the end of the experiment I’ll take the letter and deliver it in person to appropriate congressmen. I haven’t chosen who I will deliver it to, but I suspect it will be the sponsor and cosponsors, the chairmen and ranking members of the committees referred the bill, and perhaps congressmen of districts represented by the signatories of the letter (see below).

The experiment proceeds in three phases. The first phase going on right now is the writing phase. Contributors are writing, remixing, and rating letters on MixedInk. This will go on until April 8. From then until April 20 it will be a rating-only phase on MixedInk. This gives the community a final chance to pick the best letter.

On April 20 I will take a look at the top-rated letter and move the experiment to the third and final phase. (In the event that I find the content inappropriate to be delievered, I may consider the next-highest-rated letter.) In this phase, I will provide the community the opportunity to sign on to the letter. Letters to Members of Congress hold no weight if they are anonymous. So I’ll have a sign-up form where individuals can enter their name, address, and congressional district. Signatories will have the option to keep their entry private — it will appear on the letter I deliver in person but not on the letter I display publicly on GovTrack.

Wish us all luck!