On Friday, we told you about the happy ending to months of negotiations to modernize the Franking rules that govern how members of Congress can use the Internet to communicate with us about their work. The new rules just passed by the House and Senate allow members of Congress to communicate with us on sites such as Twitter, YouTube and Flickr without recrimination. (We advocated for these rules changes through our bipartisan collaborative effort, the Open House Project, and through our popular Let Our Congress Tweet campaign, the first Twitter-based petition to Congress, which hundreds of you joined.)

Before these new rules were passed, lawmakers could not officially embed a YouTube video on their official Web site, nor could they join us in political conversations around the popular virtual water cooler that Twitter has become.

To celebrate this historic precedent, we created Capitol Tweets, a widget you can embed on your site that updates you every 10 minutes with the latest tweets from members of Congress who use Twitter.

Download the widget, and while you’re watching the tweets fly, check out this effort by David All (who co-wrote the Open House Project chapter on Franking reform with Sunlight’s Paul Blumenthal) to grade them on their tweets.

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(Cross-Posted from the Open House Project)

Yesterday, after months of negotiations and proposals, the House joined the Senate in updating the arcane guidelines that govern how Members of Congress use the Internet.

In May of 2007, the Sunlight Foundation released the Open House Project report, which included an entire chapter on the issue of Franking Reform. That chapter, prepared by David All and Paul Blumental, has guided our advocacy and discussions of web use restrictions since then.

Those discussions simmered until earlier this summer, when tensions between Members of the Franking Commission briefly escalated (the part of the Committee on House Administration that handles Web restrictions). This summer’s discussion caught some media attention, and unsettled some web-savvy Representatives, and ultimately engaged both parties’ leaders in the House.

The Sunlight Foundation capitalized on the chaos, creating the first twitter-based petition in the site, Let Our Congress Tweet, which amassed twitter-based signatures, and displayed vigorous support for updated rules from online communities across the political spectrum.

While House officials maneuvered publicly, the Senate passed similar reforms with a bit less fanfare. As recently as last week, agreement looked unlikely from the House committee, with Roll Call reporting that an attempt at negotiations ended in “an emotionally charged hearing and a breakdown in negotiations.”

That’s why we were suprised and delighted to get word from the Committee on House Administration that a new agreement had been reached. This measure wasn’t just a slight rewrite, however. The new guidelines represent an enormous change, one which has new media staff from both parties glowing.

Speaker Pelosi’s statement calls the revisions a “significant step forward toward bringing the House rules into the multimedia age and allowing for members to effectively communicate with their constituents online… I also thank citizen initiatives such as the Open House Project for their thoughtful recommendations and continued efforts to encourage Members to engage their constituents through internet technologies.”

Ranking Member Vern Ehlers was similarly laudatory of the new rules, and of Chairman Brady’s leadership: “Mr. Brady recognized the need to allow enhanced constituent communication, and demonstrated outstanding leadership that enabled this Committee to adopt a long-overdue change,” Ehlers stated. “It is imperative that Members have the ability to use whichever web services they feel will best inform their constituents about the important issues facing this country.”

The new rules, as written, make a very important distinction, and one we’re delighted to see considered: Member web use will be evaluated based on the “official content,” and not the venue in which the materials are posted. This puts new media communications on similar footing to traditional media, where Op-Eds and TV interviews are proximal to commercials without causing a conflict of interest.

The revisions should cause a renaissance in official political Web-use, with eager new media staff and savvy Members now able to confidently engage with their constituents. We can’t wait to see what they come up with, and can only hope that all government reform arguments have such happy endings.

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Check out this really cool word cloud created out of the 110-page Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 that the House failed to pass on Monday. A digital media and technology enthusiast based in San Francisco, who blogs using the pseudonym Thomas Hawk, produced the graphic by pasting the bill into Wordle.

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Imagine if you could get a list of all the meetings with members and staffers of the House and Senate initiated by lobbyists for the likes of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, CitiGroup, American International Group, Washington Mutual, Wachovia and other parties with, shall we say, something more than an academic interest in the $700 billion financial bailout that the Senate just approved? Suppose you could see, for each meeting, the subject discussed. Suppose you could also get a list of the dates and amounts of campaign contributions those lobbyists had made, the expenses they’d incurred on behalf of their clients, even lists of calls to reporters and columnists and editorial writers that they’d made to sway public opinion for their clients?

For those clients, of course, you can’t — the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 doesn’t require that sort of detail. But for lobbyists representing foreign governments, political parties, organizations and individuals, there is a different disclosure regime — and Sunlight’s new FARAdb prototype let’s you search and sort a sampling of these forms to get a sense of how lobbyists work the Hill.

The forms–required by the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) — are filed twice a year by firms hired to lobby Congress and the executive branch by foreign clients. The lobbying firms disclose specific details about which government officials, including members of Congress and their staffs, were contacted by lobbyists for each client, and gives details about what specific issues were discussed. The firms must also disclose all the campaign donations made by their employees who lobby for foreign clients.

The database covers two years worth of forms — January 2006 to December 2007 — filed by lobbyists representing 15 countries; they’ve reported collecting more than $67 million in fees and expenses while pushing the agendas and bolstering the images of foreign governments and organizations in the United States.

The database allows users to search by clients, government officials contacted, lobbyists and issues, making it easy to navigate the data. Using the search function, users can quickly learn that, according to FARA reports, lobbyists for these countries contributed $97,000 to the campaign of Republican presidential nominee John McCain between the latter part of 2005 to the end of 2007. His Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama, received $11,000 from lobbyists for these countries during the same period. For more details, and more digging into the disclosures, check the Real Time Investigations blog.

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If, like many, you’re trying to follow any of the various provisions in the bailout bill as they morph through various stages of the legislative process, how do you do it? (Short version: paper BAD, version control GOOD.)

The bill has gone through many iterations: Treasury, Dodd, Frank, Thursday 9/25, Sunday AM 9/28, HR 3997, and now HR 1424. How can one possibly keep track of the differences, as the bill balloons from 3 to 110 to 451 pages?

I decided to see what it would look like to attempt this with paper, to keep track of the differences, and get a visual for how difficult it is to track the evolution of this legislation without online tools. We printed the first six versions of the legislation, and layed them out side by side, to get a sense of the scale of the problem. Here’s a youtube of the process:

And this happened before the bill got to 451 pages. (The longest in the video is 120 pages.)

My point is this: to get a comprehensive, intelligent view of the changes that legislation goes through, is VERY impractical without technology.

That’s why I’m so excited about PublicMarkup.org, and especially excited about what Josh Tauberer put together on GovTrack.us: a version tracking system for the bailout legislation.

John Wonderlich Placing Pages

Josh’s page does what I failed to effectively do with paper: get a comprehensive view of what has changed between each copy of the bill. I tried to just highlight the provisions concerning oversight, which go from one sentence in the three page Treasury version (saying basically NO OVERSIGHT!), to a complex set of provisions on reporting, an oversight council, IGs, transparency, etc.

Legislative awareness has a lot to learn from purveyors of computer code, themselves masters of the implications of minute details. (Ask a python coder about the dangers of a misplaced indentation.)

Visualizing version control is just one example of this, and one that should be considered much more often when we think about how to understand provisions that change, laws that go through iterations over time, and probably plenty of other similar applications.

John Wonderlich Placing Pages

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As the Senate moves forward today with the newest version of the bailout bill (now being referred to as the “rescue plan”), Sunlight has been feverishly parsing the text of the new proposal, as provided by the Senate Banking Committee.

We have finished the first part of the bill, Division A, which is now posted for review and commentary on PublicMarkup.org.

If Congress released the data behind the bills they consider, in real time, at the same time as bills are released, then public review and processing would be much MUCH easier. (Details on what that would take are available in this chapter of the Open House Project report.)

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An Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) patch, a mental health parity bill, a package of tax break extensions, and tax breaks and relief for victims of natural disasters, specifically Hurricane Ike. These don’t sound like they have any relation to the relief of an financial crisis, but, as of today, they will all play a major role. The new massive bailout package — sorry, “rescue” package — introduced in the Senate includes all of these measures. The inclusion of these measures could help push the underlying Emergency Economic Stabilization Act through Congress or torpedo it by injecting inter-chamber politics into an already tense political situation.

At the heart of the tacked-on legislation is a combination of an AMT patch and tax break extensions for corporations and renewable energy investments. Senate Democrats, most prominently Sen. Max Baucus, believe that the inclusion of these measures will help draw the support of House Republicans who previously voted down Monday’s bailout bill. However, this measure is already drawing the ire of House Democrats, including Blue Dogs and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.

The AMT/tax break extension package was previously passed by the Senate, but House leaders, pushed by Hoyer and the Blue Dogs, intended on shelving the proposal due to its failure to abide by pay-as-you-go rules (providing offsetting cuts to go with revenue reductions). The inclusion of the package in the bailout bill will revive the animus between the two Democratic factions. Hoyer has already stated that the inclusion of the “tax extenders” is “controversial” and was included only because “they thought that’s the only way they could get it passed.” Of course, the Blue Dogs, being prominent supporters of the bailout bill, may find themselves in a situation where this compromise is the best they can get.

Seeing as how every vote counts at this point — the bailout only needs 12 votes to pass in the House — the inclusion of the mental health parity legislation previously passed by the House could help sway one or two votes. The chief Republican cosponsor of the bill, Rep. Jim Ramstad, voted against the bailout bill on Monday. Also, one the bill’s seven cosponsors, Rep. Pete Stark, also voted against the bailout. The inclusion of the defining bill of Ramstad’s career, as he retires this year, could be enough to sway this one vote into the “yes” column.

In classic congressional fashion, the Senate has decided to use a crisis piece of legislation as a way to push through a massive package of other priorities forcing an inter-chamber factional battle to come to a head. The inclusion of this controversial legislation could also serve as a remedy to the current failure in the House.

Poison pill or appeasing antidote? We’ll wait and see.

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It looks like the Senate is moving forward today with a new bailout bill, which is available through the Senate Banking committee site.

A mirrored copy, and an embeddable version are both available below.

We’re working on parsing the legislation to get it up on PublicMarkup.org, but until Congress starts publishing bills in XML, parsing it is time consuming. Updates shortly.

Update 12:15 PM: Here’s the embedded version:

Get your own - Open publication

Update, 12:21 PM: Here’s a mirrored version of the PDF.

Update 1:05 PM: Also, for additional info, see the one page and section-by-section analysis posted to the Senate Banking Committee site here.

Update 1:52 PM: For the plan for Senate floor consideration, see the Senate Calendar here.

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The unexpected failure of the bailout proposal has given lawmakers and citizens a second chance to understand the details of this sweeping legislation.

You can join the Sunlight Foundation in renewing our call for all legislation to have at least 72 hours online before a vote. Without this minimal public exposure, how can lawmakers and their staff really understand legislation? What hope do citizens have of being truly represented if they can only read bills shortly before passage (or failure, as the case may be)?

We have refined our petition in light of this new opportunity for mindful consideration of the bailout legislation. To sign up, tweet to your friends, or read more details, check out our petition, or read our press release.

Congress responds to public pressure, and posting bills before votes is just common sense. Tell Congress to Read the Bill First! Sign our petition, and check out the latest versions of the bill at PublicMarkup.org.

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Today, the Sunlight Foundation is calling on Congress to exercise restraint, and give Members and the public sufficient time to read and respond to the proposed bailout legislation.

Citizens, irrespective of party identity, are deeply skeptical at the proposal.  If any legislation should be considered publicly, and carefully, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 should be considered with level heads and in full public view.

We’re happy to see Congress recognizing the public’s interest in this legislation, posting the text of the agreement as soon as a consensus plan was developed among congressional leadership.  Congress should take the next logical step, and hold off on floor consideration until a full 72 hours has elapsed after posting the bill.

As our just issued press release says:

But, before the bailout proposal is considered by lawmakers, it must undergo an even more important test: evaluation and assessment by Americans. That’s why we are calling on citizens to sign a petition to urge Congress to wait 72 hours between when the bill was first posted online and the actual vote. We believe all legislation should posted online for at least three days before a vote to give lawmakers and citizens sufficient time to review and debate it, and this bill is no exception. This isn’t a bill to rename a few courthouses; this bill is Congress’s biggest intervention in the economy in decades. This important legislation deserves more time for public scrutiny.

Sign the petition here, and tell Congress to read the bill first!

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