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."

Comments

Hmmph.

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

Re:Hmmph.

[DrLang21]

I used to think this until I started to realize the difficulty of writing plain language that was not ridiculously easy to technically interpret in a way that I completely did not intend. Thus I now try to avoid plain language when writing a contract. What's even scarier is that our laws are still often easy to bend in ways that were not intended. Plain language would probably make it a lot worse.

Laws are fairly easy to understand when you read them through. The problem is that they are the driest most boring pieces of literature ever written.

authenticated versioning

[BigHungryJoe]

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...