Blog - Cool!

Campbell Brown at CNN endorses the Sunlight Foundation’s Read the Bill campaign, which simply asks that all non-emergency legislation be available online for 72 hours before debate.

As part of the campaign, OpenCongress put together a custom feed that automatically tracks bills in Congress for which the time of the full bill text being available to the time of the bill’s initial consideration is less than 72 hours. I just checked the list of rushed bills, and I see that it is growing.

Just last week, the House passed the bailout bonus tax bill only 11 hours after it was initially available to the public. Also recently, The Federal Aviation Administration Extension Act of 2009 (H.R.1512) was rushed to a vote in only 12 hours and the Water Quality Investment Act of 2009 (H.R.1262) was voted on 31 hours before the bill text was available.

If you haven’t already, sign the petition to tell Congress to read the bill.