Blog - Articles Tagged 'Read the Bill'

In 2009, Congress rushed a total of 25 bills to the floor without posting them online at least 72 hours beforehand for public review. That includes a lot of major pieces of legislation, like the stimulus bill, cash for clunkers, and a bill to make the estate tax permanent.

Despite months of calling for more transparency and a slower pace with health care reform, Senate Republicans today blocked a Democratic proposal to require all amendments to the health care bill to be posted online for 72 hours before a vote.

Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) angrily shouted "you lie!" in response to President Obama's statement during his Wednesday address to Congress that claims of illegal immigrants being covered by the proposed health care reforms were "false."

Recently, we at OpenCongress have received a lot of requests to see the text of the America's Affordable Health Choices Act (HR 3200) with page numbers. There's no denying this is a complex piece of legislation with far-reaching effects on Americans and the economy, and I think there's a genuine movement by Americans to understand the bill and debate specific points.

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. ...

We have four major features to announce on OpenCongress today, and we are very excited about each one of them. Here's an overview, with more info and examples in the full post:

1. OpenCongress Wiki - for every Senator, Representative and major piece of legislation in Congress, there is now a space for people to work together to build a comprehensive overview of all the most important information.

2. Videos from Metavid, the open video archive of the U.S. Congress, and the YouTube hubs for the House and Senate. Now, for every Senator, Representative, and major bill in Congress, OpenCongress shows you embedded video footage of relevant floor speeches, official announcements, and more.

3. Inline bill text commenting, now with the ability to compare different versions of a bill. Building off our feature to comment and link to a bill's official text, paragraph-by-paragraph, now text changes are displayed in different color type for at-a-glance comparison.

4. For the Read The Bill campaign from the Sunlight Foundation and others, a new page to track bills that have been rushed through the Congressional process.

The Sunlight Foundation is asking Congress to make a common sense change to the way they operate - read the bills before they vote on them. Readthebill.org is Sunlight's petition site urging Congress to post all legislation online for at least 72 hours before it comes up for a vote. Seventy-two hours would give members of Congress time to seek changes and improvements to the laws they are making, and give the public the chance to tell their elected officials what they think about them.