House Appropriators May Limit Public Availability of Pending Bills

Posted by samzenpus on Friday June 1, 2012 @12:04AM from the no-bill-for-you dept.

Attila Dimedici writes "The House Appropriations Committee is considering a draft report that would forbid the Library of Congress to allow bulk downloads of bills pending before Congress. The Library of Congress currently has an online database called THOMAS (for Thomas Jefferson) that allows people to look up bills pending before Congress. The problem is that THOMAS is somewhat clunky and it is difficult to extract data from it. This draft report would forbid the Library of Congress from modernizing THOMAS until a task force reports back. I am pretty sure that the majority of people on Slashdot agree that being able to better understand how the various bills being considered by Congress interact would be good for this country."

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Re:Seems like a problem that could be fixed... by buchner.johannes · 2012-06-01 00:31 · Score: 5, Interesting

THOMAS may only allow 1 bill at a time, but there are only so many bills before Congress. Download them one at a time and make an external database. Host that site yourself.
It would be nice to see a git-tree of legislations (revision history, diffs, who wrote what line when). I'm not expecting governments to do that, but it might be insightful and interesting.

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NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.