Making good on part of the House of Representative's commitment to increase congressional transparency, today the House Clerk's office launched http://docs.house.gov/, a one stop website where the public can access all House bills, amendments, resolutions for floor consideration, and conference reports in XML, as well as information on floor proceedings and more. Information will ultimately be published online in real time and archived for perpetuity.

The Clerk is hosting the site, and the information will primarily come from the leadership, the Committee on House Administration, the Rules Committee, and the Clerk's office. The project has been driven by House Republican leaders as part of an push for transparency. Important milestones include the adoption of the new House Rules in January 2011 that gave the Committee on House Administration the power to establish standards for publishing documents online, an April 2011 letter from the Speaker and Majority Leader to the Clerk calling for better public access to House information, a Committee on House Administration hearing  in June 2011 on modernizing information delivery in the House, a December 2011 public meeting on public access to congressional information, and finally the late December adoption of online publication standards.

Today's effort focuses on House documents, but there is a similar series of requirements for committee and other documents that will be addressed as the Clerk's site is further built out. Three things strike me as particularly important for what has happened today

First, the House made a commitment to do something concrete -- publish documents online in machine-friendly formats by January 2012-- and they did that. All too often, transparency promises fall by the wayside or are beaten back by bureaucracy. This is a commitment made, and one that is being kept. (We will keep a close eye on things, just in case.)

Second, the ongoing process of releasing documents online, in real-time, and in machine-readable manner is a tremendous sea change from the slow and ponderous paper publications that are often late,  fairly difficult to use, and unfriendly to computers. PDFs, by themselves, are simply insufficient for transparency purposes, and have been for a very long time, and it's important that we're moving towards making information available in such as a way as to maximize its usefulness.

Third, the House is forging ahead the best it can. It would be ideal to have the Senate joining the House in this effort, or have legislative support agencies taking the initiative, but all too often these joint efforts result in nothing happening. It's important for everyone to make the best progress they can, and that's what's happening here.

It will be fun to see when the next shoe drops.

We are starting to see the first steps for transparency from incoming Republican leaders, moving beyond the widely publicized negotiations and rules agendas. While rules changes take a committed House majority, some committee changes can happen at the sole direction of the chair.

Earlier this week, news stories confirmed that Representative David Dreier, who is line to be the next chairman of the House Rules Committee, has directed the Chief Administrator's Office to begin installing video cameras in all of the committee's hearing rooms. In a letter to the chief administrator, Dreier emphasized the need for "genuine openness and transparency."

Currently, the Rules Committee hearing room is one of only three without cameras — the others being the ethics and Intelligence committee rooms.

The Rules committee is a perennial seat of process criticism, as the majority wields it power there, and the minority rails against it. Having dedicated cameras wired into the room for every public Rules Committee hearing will be a step forward for the committee, and one that is overdue.

Dreier's request is the first concrete step taken by Republicans to enact an election-year promise. As we've mentioned recently, Sunlight has been tracking leadership's transparency promises and positions, and we will work vigorously to see important reforms through to enactment.

There is currently some wacky legislative maneuvering going on with H.R. 2454, the cap and trade energy bill, that puts a serious spotlight on the failure of Congress to make bills properly available. According to the New York Times:

House Democratic leaders late last night released a revamped, 1,201-page energy and global warming bill (pdf), clearing the way for floor debate Friday even though it remains uncertain if they will have the votes to pass it.

The House bill posted on the Rules Committee Web site has grown from the 946-page version adopted last month in the Energy and Commerce Committee. Sources on and off Capitol Hill said the bulk of the changes largely reflect requests from the eight other committees that also had jurisdiction over the bill, including the Ways and Means Committee and Science and Technology Committee.

The bill is only available online at the House Rules Committee and is reported as "text of the bill to be introduced." Despite having a bill, H.R. 2454, that has been reported out of the Energy & Commerce Committee and discharged by eight other committees, there is now, suddenly, a new bill that is almost 300-pages longer -- but it's still being considered as H.R. 2454. Stay with me here.

Here's the timeline:

Introduced - 5/15/09

Reported with amendments out of Energy & Commerce - 6/5/09

Discharged by Education & Labor and Foreign Affairs Committees - 6/5/09

Discharged by Financial Services, Science & Technology, Transportation, Natural Resources, Agriculture, and Ways & Means Committees - 6/19/09

Placed on the Union Calendar, Calendar No. 90 - 6/19/09 (This version is 946 pages)

Submitted to House Rules Committee - 6/22/09, 4:22pm (This version is 1,201 pages)

So, where along the line does the bill suddenly expand by 300 pages? According to the New York Times, the various committee chairs held behind the scenes meetings and hashed out a compromise with no allowance for public input. (What lobbyists were involved in those meetings?) And now we are expecting a Friday vote on a bill that has had no public hearing in a committee with jurisdiction over it and that is not yet available in the main engine of public disclosure, THOMAS.

This raises serious questions about how we expect Congress to disclose their activities to the public. Is a bill posted to the House Rules Committee and not THOMAS truly publicly available? While the bill may be available for 72 hours prior to consideration, the public does not have reasonable access to it. Nor does the public know how the final details were reached.

And that isn't even the worst part. This, apparently, isn't even the final bill. The final bill will be a manager's amendment that will be drafted later this week! From a posting on the House Rules Committee, we know that the deadline to submit amendments is Thursday at 9:30am. And there is talk that this will be voted on on Friday. Thus, the final version of this bill will likely only be available for less than 24 hours.

Sunlight has been advocating for all bills to be posted online for 72 hours prior to consideration. It doesn't look like that is going to happen here. If you think that Congress should read the bills they vote on, you can tell your congressman to both support the Read the Bill resolution, H. Res. 554, and to give the public enough time to read the final version of the cap and trade bill, whenever that is made available.

As Open Left's Chris Bowers says about this process:

[Y]ou don't get to know what is in the bill until it is too late. Further, you get no chances to improve the bill.

This is an unacceptable process and it needs to change.