We’ve hit the 50,000 mark, the number of people that have created an account on the site to configure their trackers and get email updates. More updates coming in a few weeks.
October 17, 2008
If the House version is defeated, does the Senate bill die too?
Q:”What happens to an approved Senate bill with respect to an identical House bill? If the House version is defeated, does the bill end?”
This is a great legislative process question. Let me rephrase it: What are companion bills and how do they work?
Economic Stimulus Bill details
You probably already noticed from the note at the top of the site, but just to archive it: here are some links related to the economic stimulus bill that was enacted this month (and then failed to do any good, apparently).
September 28, 2008
“Writing” versus “Sponsoring”, and who decides what gets a vote?
Here’s another legislative process Q&A post. We tackle two questions in this post. Here’s the first:
Does one know who writes a bill? Is writing a bill considered different than being the Sponsor of the bill?
September 25, 2008
Utah Senator Crusades for Bureaucratic Gobbledygook
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.
September 18, 2008
What Does “Ordered to be reported with an amendment in the nature of a substitute favorably” mean?
Using the new Q&A tool, a visitor asked (
):
What does “Ordered to be reported with an amendment in the nature of a substitute favorably” mean?
GovTrack tries to answer. Read on… Read it all..
September 9, 2008
Welcome to GovTrack's Fourth Year
. (Thanks to for the data!)
I have written a page on Tips for Commnicating With Congress
Pages for representatives now show a little map
Bills pages now show related pages based on what GovTrack users have selected as trackers. You have to go to the Related Bills page for a bill. See . This will help you find legislation that has superseded the bill you are looking at, for instance.
The feed and bill status that you can embed on your webpage (which by the way we had first) can now be customized easier.
. Should you write your rep? What should you include? Take a look.
now include some cute pie charts
, and, also, the time of day when the vote happened, in case you’re doing some deep research.
for their congressional district and a listing of the counties and towns in the district. See .
And for developers:
- There is a new page.
- The congressional district look-up API now supports lat/long, addresses, ZIP codes, and ZIP+4 codes. You may not know about the three other APIs either: see the page.
But much more is in the works. We’ll be completely overhauling our bill text page for easier navigation and comparison of bill text and to let you link directly from your website to particular paragraphs within bills, and to embed paragraphs in widgets on your own website — to help you make your case in your own writings. We’ll also be expanding and improving on the statistics we generate for Members of Congress, providing a new set of “indicators” to get the big picture on what your rep is actually doing. Lastly we hope to integrate some campaign contribution data to get another perspective.
July 6, 2008
Questions and Answers: Your questions, your answers!
Last week I added a new feature to GovTrack called Community Q&A. It was inspired by a question I received by mail (the subject of my last blog post). If one person that has a question actually took the time to email, then there must be hundreds of other questions you all have but haven’t asked. Read it all..
Can representatives change their vote?
A visitor to this site asked me:
Q:
How can I find out what a particular representative voted upon and then went back to change his/her vote? I understand that this is done very often so that the hometown folks think that he/she voted one way, but that they go back and change the actual vote recorded later.
Was it really true that Members of Congress can change their votes? Read it all..
April 29, 2008
Student Loan Bailout Bills Rife with Fiscal Pitfalls
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
.
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.