Slashdot Mirror
Congress Mulls API For Congressional Data
Amerika sends in a Wired blog post on the desire in Congress to make data on lawmaking more easily available to the public. The senator who introduced the language into an omnibus appropriations bill wants feedback on the best way to make (e.g.) the Library of Congress's Thomas data more available — an API or bulk downloads, or both. Some comments on the blog posting call for an authenticated versioning system so we can know unequivocally how any particular language made its way into a bill. "Congress has apparently listened to the public's complaints about lack of convenient access to government data. The new Omnibus Appropriations Bill includes a section, introduced by Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.), that would mark the first tangible move toward making federal legislative data available to the public in bulk, so third parties can mash it up and redistribute it in innovative and accessible ways. This would include all the data currently distributed through the Library of Congress's Thomas web site — bill status and summary information, lists of sponsors, tracking timelines, voting records, etc."
...then I'm all for it.
Clarity is a good thing in government.
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Legislation is a change to the code.
The legislative process is change control.
*It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that the "code base" of law in the US is designated by the prefix "United States Code".
Seastead this.
It'd be more useful to see laws written in something resembling plain language. There is no excuse for 1,000 page omnibus bills. If it was line-item budgets, that would be one thing.
When you can't understand the law, you can't obey the law. And since ignorance of the law is no excuse, you can basically be arrested for anything. What a world.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Not a chance. They'd never be able to use the excuse "some anonymous person slipped in this provision at the last hour and I didn't want to not vote for the bill just because of this" again...
Bills should be accessible in a form similar to patches created by diff. There should be a web service that allows you to retrieve the affected USC titles, merge them, and then apply the new bill as a patch to the federal law so that you can quickly assemble a coherent view of how the law will change.
I almost don't want to know. "Kickback" corruption spending is practiced by basically everyone in congress. Whenever an important bill comes up, everybody says they will vote against it unless there is language included to fund some boondoggle project from their major campaign contributors back home. So they all compromise and agree to add these little corruption amendments, then vote yes. They don't care about the main topic of the bill or their constituents. They just want their kickbacks.
If we have accountability, we will have a clear picture of a system which is rotten to the core. What help would it be to find a 100% corruption rate?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
As much as I like the idea of tracking the legislation progress, and getting legislation and L.O.C. data published to the public uniformly or standardized, WHAT THE HELL IS IT DOING ON AN OMNIBUS APPROPRIATIONS BILL????
These should be 2 separate pieces of legislation. If this gets tagged to the Appropriations bill, FROM THIS POINT FORWARD, it now has to be amended through appropriations, which is tantamount to battling for the last cookie in a kitchen full of sugar junkies.
THIS DOES NOT BELONG on an omnibus appropriations bill. PERIOD!