Blog - Articles Tagged 'Bills'

Important blog post just published by our colleague John Wonderlich over on our partners the Sunlight Foundation: House Speaker Boehner & Majority Leader Cantor have sent a letter instructing the House Clerk to work towards "publicly releasing the House's legislative data in machine-readable formats". This is just a very first baby step towards comprehensive #opengovdata in the legislative branch and federal government in general, and is just the start of a more transparent & deliberative democratic process, and will require much public watchdogging & accountability to the #opengov community, but amounts to a solidly encouraging step.

OpenCongress is very pleased to announce that the Gannett news company is using one of our free widgets on their online Topic page for Health Care Reform. You can check out the page here, and you can grab the free widget for yourself here -- see what people across the U.S. are saying about the bill, and even customize it for all 50 states.

Like the ducks that fill McPherson Square in their trip down south for the winter, there are a number of bills that are introduced in every Congress as though they were simply part of the cyclical nature of the institution. The most famous of these is the national health care bill sponsored every Congress by Rep. John Dingell which always bears the bill number H.R. 15. A recent entrant into the perennial bill category is one introduced by Rep. Michael Conaway that would require every congressman to read the Constitution at the beginning of each Congress.