The New York Times has a story today on President Obama's 5 day bill posting pledge and how this transparency promise has both not happened as promised and evolved. Quoted in the piece is Sunlight's Executive Director Ellen Miller noting the overall lack of utility in the President's promise.

"There isn’t anybody in this town who doesn’t know that commenting after a bill has been passed is meaningless."

While I've rightly criticized (as has Jim Harper) the breaking of the promise to post bills for comment five days before signing them, the reality is that no organizing can be done in comments that would make a difference after the bill is out of Congress.

The White House is now saying that they will start the five day count before the bill has made it out of Congress, stating that this makes for a more transparent process. This is relative nonsense as the White House is a part of different branch of government and the comments they receive on an unfinished bill won't make it to the 535 lawmakers in the Legislative Branch.

What needs to happen is for Congress to require both bills and conference reports to be posted online for at least 72 hours before consideration begins. Right now there is a resolution in the House to do exactly that, H. Res. 554. If you thought that President Obama's (now-broken) promise to post bills online for five days was a good idea, this is a far superior alternative. Since bills get written in Congress, not the Executive Branch, the provision of time prior to consideration allows citizens to voice their concerns directly to their representatives, whether over the phone, the internet, fax, or direct contact, during a legislative time frame that could actually effect the final product.

You can tell your congressman to support H. Res. 554 (the "Read the Bill" bill) here and you can sign our petition to Congress telling them to pass H. Res. 554 and give us all a chance to read the bills they consider.

(Update: The New York Times is asking if you support the 72 hour rule for Congress or Obama's five day bill posting pledge. Go tell them what you think.)

Back in January I blogged here about the White House failing to fulfill a campaign promise to put bills online for public comment for five days before signing them. That promise has rarely been fulfilled according to a study conducted by Jim Harper at the Cato Institute. The main problem, "[o]f the eleven bills President Obama has signed, only six have been posted on Whitehouse.gov. None have been posted for a full five days after presentment from Congress."

Of the eleven bills, only one (The DTV Delay Act) could be somewhat considered to have fulfilled the five day pledge. This could only be somewhat considered because it was posted just prior to being presented to the President, which is a slightly minor point.

One larger issue is that the White House has placed some bills online for comment before they have been passed by Congress -- which in some ways could be better because that is when a public comment period could alter legislation. The Omnibus Appropriations would have made the cut for the five day posting period had it not been posted while under consideration. Harper makes an important argument that this does not allow the public to consider the final product, "this doesn’t give the public an opportunity to review the final legislation - especially any last minute amendments." For the bills posted while under consideration, the final version was never posted on the White House site.

Harper's study is worth reading, especially for the useful chart showing all of the bills and when they were, or weren't, posted for public comment. Also worth following, will be the continued Open House Project Google Group discussion on the utility of posting bills online for public comment after the sausage-making is over.

Yet again, the President signed a bill without providing for the 5 day public comment period he has promised in his campaign for office and since assuming the presidency. Today, the House approved the Senate version of legislation expanding the children's health program S-CHIP and President Obama signed it hours later. The White House blog linked posted a comment form on Sunday, three days ago. The CQ Politics Balance of Power blog carries a statement from the White House about the failure to follow through on their promise:

“During the campaign, the President committed to introducing more sunlight into the lawmaking process by posting non-emergency legislation online for five days before signing it. The President remains committed to bringing more transparency to government, and in this spirit the White House has posted legislation expected to come to the President’s desk online for comment.”

“We will be implementing this policy in full soon; currently we are working through implementation procedures and some initial issues with the congressional calendar. In the meantime, we will continue to post legislation on our website for comment as it moves through Congress over the next few weeks.”

Last week, we discovered that President Obama had signed his first bill without fulfilling a pledge to post all non-emergency legislation online for 5 days prior to affixing his signature. Yesterday, the White House blog announced that they have opened up their 5 day comment period for the S-CHIP expansion bill, which hasn't even passed out of Congress yet. Clearly, they are still trying to figure out how they are going to fulfill this pledge.

Jonathan Stein at Mother Jones takes a look at the new attempt at posting the S-CHIP bill up for comment and isn't exactly impressed. It's worth reading what Stein has to say, with comments from Sunlight Executive Director Ellen Miller.

At this point, I'm pretty much convinced that the White House web team must be bogged down in trying to sort through the various laws, rules, and regulations that govern their use of the web. This Webcontent.gov site provides a listing of many laws that set web use rules for executive branch agencies and departments. I'm not sure how much of it applies to the White House, but they need to hire more lawyers quickly to figure all this stuff out.