By Jason K. Chen, Climate Intern
cross-posted on the

Hearing: Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, , 11/17/09

Hearing: Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, , 11/19/09

Contrary to my expectations, the senate hearing on environmental stewardship policies related to offshore energy production only had to do with drilling; wind energy was completely left out of the discussion.

The witness panel was quite balanced by the presence of two representatives of oil companies and two representatives of environmental groups, the fifth witness being the Deputy Director of the Mineral Management Service. However, as far as I could tell, the witnesses as well as the senators were convinced of the fact that America still needs to drill. This is understandable because switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy will take time, but the length of time is the question that needs to be asked.

The representatives from the oil companies spent considerable time explaining how oil drilling is high tech and how the United States has the strictest standards when it comes to oil production. The representatives from the environmental groups reminded the senators that drilling is still dangerous and that our knowledge of the effects of drilling on the ocean is very limited. Everyone made their point, but I believe the oil companies came out on top; this was due not to their persuasion power, but to the existing opinions of the senators themselves.

Senator Landrieu of Louisiana was very critical of the environmental groups exaggerating the dangers of oil drilling. John Amos, the president of SkyTruth, tried to show that drilling is still dangerous by pointing out that an oil rig off the coast of Australia just recently had an accident. Senator Landrieu defended oil production by saying that the Australian oil rig’s design did not meet American standards implying that this accident would not have happened off the American coast. I don’t believe this is true. It was stated in the hearing that the cause of the accident was unknown, therefore, what actually did cause it might not necessarily have to do with whatever disqualified it from American standards.

A point that was not discussed was the negative effects of burning oil. Oil as a source of CO2 emissions might have been beyond the scope of that particular hearing, but it is definitely not beyond the scope of the general problem of drilling. In conclusion, I say that just because drilling is safer than ever, does not mean it’s ok.

Today’s ques­tion comes from Erika M:

I see yea, nay, no, aye as the way con­gress­men voted. What does aye mean?

Ah par­lia­men­tary pro­ce­dure. There’s no mean­ing­ful dif­fer­ence be­tween Yea and Aye, and Nay and No. They both mean “I vote in favor” or “I vote against”. The dif­fer­ence is just a mat­ter of pro­ce­dure. The Con­sti­tu­tion ac­tu­al­ly re­quires “Yea” and “Nay” for votes on the pas­sage of bills (Ar­ti­cle I Sec­tion 7), and so the House and Sen­ate both do that for those par­tic­u­lar votes.

In fact, the Sen­ate uses Yea and Nay for all votes. Good for them for keep­ing things sim­ple. It’s an­oth­er story for the House.

There are two pe­cu­liar­i­ties of the House that make the an­swer to the ques­tion not so sim­ple. First, they use Aye and No for all voice votes, where con­gress­men just shout out their vote and the chair judges who won just by lis­ten­ing. (Any­one can sub­se­quent­ly de­mand that the votes be record­ed in­di­vid­u­al­ly, in which case a record­ed vote is used. In the Sen­ate, voice votes use Yea and Nay.)

The sec­ond pe­cu­liar­i­ty of the House is that it op­er­ates in two modes of pro­ce­dure, and that de­ter­mines which kind of vote is used for record­ed votes not on the pas­sage of bills (be­cause those are al­ways Yea and Nay). These final types of votes could be for amend­ments, mo­tions, etc. The first mode is nor­mal House floor de­bate, which uses Yea and Nay for record­ed votes, so you will see Aye and No for voice votes but Yea and Nay for record­ed votes. Yea and Nay are re­served for this mode of de­bate only. The sec­ond mode is when the House op­er­ates as if it were a com­mit­tee made up of ev­ery­one, called “The Com­mit­tee of the Whole on the State of the Union,” and in this mode Aye and No are used for record­ed votes as well as voice votes.

Some more de­tails are in House Rules, if you want to pour through the de­tails. It’s in Rules of the House, Rule XX, and House Prac­tice in the sec­tion Vot­ing.

Visitor WB asks:

I understand there are different Bills passed by congress regularly. Some with “H.R.”, “S”, H. Res” and other variations. My questions is this: What are the types of Bills and what does each designations stand for? Where is each Bill valid? Who is subject to that specific Bill? Read it all..

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 (), 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 —

They’re using a service called 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

. Then I was able to easily . 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,

. They’re putting up several new posts per hour.

I’m a wonk, you’re a wonk. We like reading legislation and we’re proud of it. Strut your stuff with .

About a month ago I started a . With a $100 prize at stake, about a dozen people submitted ideas — three submitted shirt-ready images. Congrats to who stole the prize for his satirical design:

I Know What You Did Last Session

(For the older readers, this is a reference to a horror movie.)

submitted some new logo images, based on the site’s current logo. In appreciation, I decided post-hoc to add a runner-up prize of $60 for Ben. Ben’s submissions are on t-shirts and a mouse pad. Here’s the mouse pad:

GovTrack Logo Mouse Pad

Finally, submitted a cute red G with an eye inside, which I turned into a mug:

Thanks to all of the submitters!

I also added a design myself. It’s an image of a bill, the House’s health care bill, and on the back is the page with the supposed dead panels, which are clearly not mentioned on that page.

The merchandise is . It’s all created, managed, and shipped through a third-party website that does this sort of stuff — Zazzle.com. I just upload the designs.

Now, I didn’t do this to make money so all of the merchandise are available at the lowest rate that Zazzle.com will let me sell them for. But, people have asked me how to donate to GovTrack and I’ve always declined donations in the past (GovTrack is NOT an actual non-profit charitable organization), but if you want to support the site, you can also buy the same merchandise at a marked-up price. You choose.

Sara from Kentucky asks:

I don’t know if I am hearing accurate information. Some of us want bill numbers listed in newspapers so we can look them up. “America’s Healthy Future Act”  has no number and Baucus’s office says that it will not receive a number until it goes to the Senate Floor. It is not on GovTrack. Would it be on ?

HR 676 has never gone to the House floor, yet it has a number.  Why is this?

The issue that Sara raises is an important one for government transparency: where does the legislative process begin? the first step in the parliamentary procedure for a bill to become law is for the sponsor of the bill in the House or Senate to submit the bill formally to the clerk of the chamber. At that point, the clerk assigns it a number. Then the bill gets assigned (“referred”) to committees which begin the deliberations for the bill, and eventually, if it is lucky, it may come to the full chamber for a vote.

The tricky thing for us on the outside is that there’s no stopping congress from deliberating on an idea before it is submitted to the clerk and officially becomes a bill under consideration. And if it’s not an official bill, it’s not on the government website THOMAS or on GovTrack. This isn’t something you can prevent. There will always be deliberations outside of the official way things work. And I think that’s fine. It does make things difficult to follow, though.

That’s what happened with the stimulus bills a year ago. There were a number of drafts and revisions all before the bill actually became an actual bill. And that’s what’s happening in the Senate with drafting its health care bill. (The House drafted .) Until the bill gets formally submitted, it’s not “in the system”. You can only get a draft — an essentially unofficial bill — from the congressman’s or committee’s website that is working on it, if they care to share.

The Senate Committee on Finance posted a

. It’s called a Chairman’s Mark because it is the draft bill with the markups (i.e. revisions) that the chair of the committee (Max Baucus) wants to push forward. It’s what the committee voted on, and subsequently passed. I expect this to be submitted to the Senate clerk and get a bill number soon.

I would like GovTrack to start collecting draft bills where we can find them, but I haven’t had the time yet to build the infrastructure on the site for it yet.

Thanks for the question, Sara.

Hey, we need some cool GovTrack apparel, right? Design a GovTrack t-shirt or send me a funny expression related to GovTrack to put on a t-shirt, and if I get some good responses I’ll pick a winner and send back a $100 gift certificate to somewhere. Email your submissions to operations@govtrack.us.

Here’s what’s been happening with the site this summer:

• We’ve upgraded our hardware to top-of-the-line equipment so that we can keep up with the increasing number of visitors coming to GovTrack.
• I’ve hired a moderator (my first staff member!) to process the submissions to the section of the site. A long backlog of submissions awaiting approval built up while I was on vacation — hopefully never again. This also frees up my time for other things.
• We’re now recommending Twitter hashtags like #usbill and #hr3200 for bills. See . No sooner did we recommend #usbill that people started

  .

• Pages for bills now show industry supporters and opponents thanks to , and for enacted bills now show who was president and signed it. Cosponsors are now shown in bold if you are tracking them.
• Pages for cloture votes now link to which has more information on the issue of filibusters.
• You can now jump to a congressional distristrct by , and if you hover your mouse over a congressional district on the maps page it tells you which district it is above the map.
• You now don’t have to create a new account on GovTrack to store your trackers or get email updates. You can log in using your Google, OpenID, or some other existing logins you may already have.
• Various small mistakes were fixed: California is now listed as having 54 districts, not 53, on the maps page.
• The bill text pages should load  faster now for long bills.
• Pages for Members of Congress now show their latest tweets, if they are on Twitter.

GovTrack is going to be upgrading its hardware very soon now. We’ll probably be down for about a day while we get the new hardware set up. Thanks for your patience. Read it all..