The healthcare industry is dominating lobbying activity before the Super Committee, according to third quarter lobbying reports. Almost 30 percent of the organizations that reported lobbying the Super Committee represent healthcare companies or associations. Together, the 61 healthcare companies and associations have spent more than $10 million on lobbying. Add in single-issue healthcare groups (such as the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association and the National Kidney Foundation), and a total of 74 groups (more than a third of the total) lobbying the committee work on health issues.

Other leading industries flexing their lobbying muscle are the communications/electronics industry (20 filings and $7.1 million in lobbying spending between them) and the finance/insurance/real estate industry (18 filings and $5.5 million in lobbying spending). Taken together, the three industries mentioned represent almost half of the organizations and more than half of the lobbying muscle aimed at shaping the decisions of the super committee.

Other ideological groups filed 15 relevant reports and disclosed spending $3.9 million on these issues and others. This includes such groups as AARP (which spent $2.75 million), Planned Parenthood, the National Taxpayers Unions and the American Civil Liberties Union.

What’s also telling is who’s not putting effort into lobbying the committee. Only four filings represent the defense sector, despite the major cuts to defense spending looming if the super committee cannot reach an agreement by the Thanksgiving deadline. Additionally, only four filings represent agribusiness, despite threatened cuts to agricultural spending programs.

Anupama Narayanswamy with the Sunlight Foundation’s Reporting Group wrote about the entities that disclosed lobbying the super committee last week. Her article provides a link to all the organizations filing lobbying reports linked to the super committee.

CapitolWords.org is a Sunlight Foundation site that "visualizes the most frequently used words in the Congressional Record, giving you an at-a-glance view of which issues lawmakers address on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis." As 2009 began winding down, I started poking around at the data for the year to see if I could come up with an interesting way to visually summarize the year in Congress. With a total of 58 unique words commanding the top slots over the course of the year, I thought it might be interesting to color code and present them as a sort of "at a glance" Congressional calendar. As you can see below, the word Health pretty much dominated the latter half of the year, while the first half of 2009 was dedicated to a variety of topics including Land, Energy and Credit. It is also easy to see when Congress does a lot of its work on the floor and when they tend to take breaks throughout the year (April and August, apparently).

If we look a little deeper, for example using the word "Credit", we can see that there was a lot of use of the word in May '09, which happens to correlate nicely with the signing of the Credit CARD Act of 2009. Of course, not all of the top words are directly related to a particular bill, and that's part of the fun of Capitol Words. Hover over the various boxes/days and see if you can find any interesting correlations, or just marvel at the year that was 2009.

Some notes:

• I didn't set a threshold for inclusion, choosing to use the exact data that Capitol Words provides in the API, so you'll see that some days the top word was only spoken a handful of times. Such is the nature of the Congressional Record and CapitolWords.org.
• The "calendar" was generated using Processing and uses jquery QTip to show the metadata for the day.
• Aside from assigning "Health" a blue value, the other 57 words were randomly assigned colors from a palette generated using ColorSchemeDesigner.
• visually/conceptually inspired by colorjack.