A bipartisan assembly of groups representing a variety of interests—from a conservative government watchdog to a supporter of women’s rights to social security advocates—today sent a letter to the twelve members of the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction asking them to post their recommendations for trimming at least $1.2 trillion from the federal budget online for 72 hours prior to a committee vote.

The breadth of groups that joined the letter demonstrates that Super Committee transparency is an issue that matters to every American. Anyone with an interest in any federal program should have the opportunity to read the bill and determine its impact on the programs they care about. Likewise, the members of Congress who will be called on to vote on the Super Committee’s recommendations without amendment should have more than hours or minutes to determine how to cast their vote. They should, too, have a chance to weigh in with Super Committee members before the bill is finalized, if their constituents feel strongly that the bill should be changed.

Yes, time is running out. But that is no excuse for the Super Committee to claim they can’t allow the public to read the bill. They have known since August that the public and members of Congress have been calling for the committee’s recommendations to be made public before a committee vote. They can’t be surprised if there is outrage should they decide to ram a bill through at the 11th hour. Members of Congress are procrastinators. They will wait until a deadline to come to any conclusion. It won’t matter if the deadline is 72-hours earlier than they had hoped.

We strongly urge the Super Committee to heed the call of those urging them to complete their work and post the bill online 72 hours before they vote. In what has been an entirely secretive and undemocratic process so far, it is the least that can be done to attempt to restore the public’s faith in the deficit cutting process.

72 Hour Sign on Super Committee Letter

The Super Committee has 10 days to reach a deal to reduce the debt by at least $1.2 trillion. They should do it in 7. Here’s why. From the beginning, negotiations and lobbying on the committee’s efforts to reshape the federal budget have been handled in secret. If the Super Committee does come to an agreement, the public must have the option to see for themselves which programs will be cut, which will be spared, and why. The 523 members of Congress who are not on the super powerful, super secret committee should likewise have time to digest and weigh in on proposed changes before it is too late for the bill to be modified. In an affront to our democratic traditions, no member of Congress will be able to amend the bill when it goes to the floor of the House or the Senate. The only chance an elected official will have to voice the concerns of his or her constituents is if he or she is given the opportunity to read the bill before the Super Committee votes.

We can hear the excuses already: Super Committee members need every last minute to hammer out a deal; It’s not fair to shave 3 days off of the time they need to negotiate; The deal is too important to risk it failing for lack of time. We’re not buying it. In August, well before the Super Committee began hiding behind closed doors to attempt to negotiate a solution, Sunlight and many others publicly called for the committee’s recommendation to be made public before a committee vote. Legislation has also been offered to mandate online disclosure of the bill before a vote. Members can’t now feign shock that people are demanding to read the bill. Nor can they complain that they need those extra three days. We have seen time and time again that members of Congress are procrastinators. They will wait until a deadline to come to any conclusion. It won’t matter if the deadline is 72-hours earlier than they hoped. If there is any chance they will come to an agreement (and Super Committee co-chair Jeb Hensarling says he hasn’t “given up hope”) and if they believe transparency is at all important, they will find a way to arrive at an agreement in time for the details to be made public, online, before a final committee vote.

Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle regularly voice concern about one party or the other “ramming through” legislation at the 11th hour. Now is the time for the bipartisan super committee to recognize that before they make decisions that will impact every American—whether by restructuring social services, modifying the tax code, or altering the defense budget—we have the right to read the bill.

From the stream of news coming from Congress about the budget, one might think that committee meetings and legislation on federal spending would be easily accessible online. That's often not true.

For example, the legislative text for four major appropriations bills are not yet online despite their apparent approval by both the full Senate Appropriations Committee yesterday and the relevant subcommittees prior to that. The four missing Senate bills are: Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2012; Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2012; Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act, 2012; and Legislative Branch Appropriations Act, 2012. The public's only chance to see the legislation is after all the important decisions have been made. By comparison, the House generally makes legislation considered by committees available to the public prior to votes.

None of the Senate committee reports for these bills are available online, either, except for the Legislative Branch Appropriations Act, which is on THOMAS. The reports explain the decisions by appropriators and often provide significant guidance on how money will be spent.

Senate Appropriators do release streaming audio of subcommittee markups, although the audio feed isn't always reliable. The House, by contrast, will live stream video of its markups, but only when the committee finds it convenient; it often does not broadcast meetings at all. This goes against the spirit -- and likely the letter -- of the new House Rules passed by the 112th Congress.

Unfortunately, the best way to look at the legislation and reports in a timely way is often by using expensive private news services. Congress owes the public a better explanation of what it's doing.

This week marks the fifth anniversary of the Sunlight Foundation. It is exciting to reflect on how far we've come, the great people who helped us along the way and where we plan to go. With your help, we've grown from a small organization with big ideas to a connected community whose call for greater government openness and transparency is heard throughout the country.

We began with the nonpartisan goal of using the revolutionary power of the Internet and new technology to open government information. When we started, this modern interpretation of transparency was almost a completely foreign idea in Washington - a place where corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff dominated the headlines and sifting through reams of paper in order to get at the truth of what was going on was the status quo. While ordinary citizens were embracing new media tools and websites that gave them a readily available stream of information at their fingertips, government showed little interest in keeping up with the times.

Right out of the gate, we took on these age-old issues with a fresh arsenal of online tools and empowered citizens to engage in new forms of direct oversight. We believed then, as we still do, that none of us are as smart as all of us and that we have a stronger democracy when open information gives people the ammunition they need so they can speak truth to power. Sunlight developed all kinds of new tools and websites to achieve these goals and get the public involved in the political process.

We encouraged lawmakers to post their schedules online and launched the Open House Project to engage policy experts, citizens and lawmakers in a conversation on all the ways the House of Representatives could update how it shares information with the public. We initiated and funded dozens of projects to create online databases of government information. Everything from earmarks to congressional fundraiser invitations to foreign lobbying disclosures to House expenditures. We created mobile applications to put Congress into the hands of the people and fostered a community of thousands of 'civic hackers' to build better tools. We updated legislative rules and collaboratively wrote new policy to open government to the Internet age. We've trained thousands of journalists and citizens in using data and in using the web to watchdog Washington. We modeled government websites to show what is possible and followed the money, lobbying and the influence industry with ongoing reporting projects.

Through it all we are most inspired and proud of the people who take action and participate in the process to improve our democracy. Thank you to the countless people and organizations who have worked with us, used our tools, dug deep into our websites through our first five years. The Sunlight Foundation will continue to work with you explore how to enhance our democracy and citizen engagement with our public officials using online tools. Sure, there's a lot more to be done. As a wise person once said, if this was easy, it would have been done already. And we promise you - the best is yet to come!

Please continue to support our work to keep the light shining on government.

Two weeks ago the House of Representatives violated a pledge made by Speaker John Boehner to provide a 72 hour window for all legislation to be viewed by the public before it is brought to the floor for debate by voting on a bill to defund National Public Radio. Today, the House majority is again violating that pledge by voting on the Government Shutdown Prevention Act.

The Government Shutdown Prevention Act, a bill that deems the budget cutting bill passed by the House earlier this year to have passed Congress without the Senate's assent, was introduced on March 30 at 1:13 pm. At the present moment, this bill has not been available for even 48 hours.

The House majority sent the bill to be approved for floor debate by the House Rules Committee under emergency rules. The NPR defunding bill was also considered by the House Rules Committee in an emergency session.

In a post detailing the 72 hour pledge breaking promise on the NPR vote I noted how the Republican majority circumvented their pledge by following a "Read the Bill" rule that they instituted at the opening of this Congress:

Earlier this year the House Republicans changed the House Rules to implement a Read the Bill rule that stating that bills must be available on three calendar days prior to consideration. Sunlight was very pleased to see the new House Rules incorporate language that strengthens the public's ability to see legislation online before votes. We've also recognized that this rule might be artfully evaded through a variety of means, one of which is the "calendar day" definition.

...

This "calendar day" issue was previously pointed out by Sunlight's Lisa Rosenberg, "the “third calendar day” yardstick for determining whether a bill is ripe for consideration could result in a bill being available for less than 72 hours. Sunlight has advocated using a “72 hour” time frame instead of three calendar days to prevent possible gamesmanship."

There still remain many other potential ways in which the current Rule and previous pledges could be subverted. Sunlight Policy Director John Wonderlich pointed these out in a post earlier this year.

This rule is clearly meant to fudge the previous promise by Speaker Boehner to provide 72 hours of public, online exposure for each bill before it is debated. In case you are wondering if Boehner made a 3 day, as opposed to a 72 hours, pledge, please watch below: There's more video here.

It's worrying that the majority would repeatedly evade a pledge that they made to the American people to make the House a more transparent body. It is especially worrying that the majority would do this on two votes that are clearly not emergencies.

How was the defunding of National Public Radio an emergency requiring the circumvention of normal Rules Committee procedures and the 72 hour pledge? The current Continuing Resolution to fund the government expires on April 8. Why can't the majority wait until Monday to vote on this bill?

The 72 hour rule is needed to give the public not only a chance to read the bills, but a chance to voice their opinion. This is especially important when bills are crafted and pushed forwards for political purposes. The public needs to be involved, but the majority is blocking that involvement for nothing other than the pursuit of quick political wins and message control. This is very disturbing.

Here is the original bill copy with time stamp in the lower left hand corner: XML_362-POST_xml

In the post below I noted that it's a bit surprising that the Read the Bill pledge was subverted by the majority not providing 72 hours of online, public review of the NPR defunding bill because of Speaker John Boehner's many public pledges that specify that 72 hour time frame.

Here's a selection of the many, many times that Speaker Boehner pledged 72 hours of public review for all bills.

Why not wait the extra 20 hours?

Yesterday the House Republicans voted on a bill to defund National Public Radio without providing 72 hours for the public to review the bill. This violates a pledge that Speaker John Boehner made repeatedly that he would require every bill to be made available for at least 72 hours online and in public.

I explained this in a post yesterday:

Earlier this year the House Republicans changed the House Rules to implement a Read the Bill rule that stating that bills must be available on three calendar days prior to consideration. Sunlight was very pleased to see the new House Rules incorporate language that strengthens the public's ability to see legislation online before votes. We've also recognized that this rule might be artfully evaded through a variety of means, one of which is the "calendar day" definition.

In the case of today's vote, the bill technically meets the House Rules as passed in January, but could, if voted on prior to a 72 hour period expiring (approximately 8 AM on Friday), violate the numerous pledges made by Speaker Boehner and other Republican leaders to provide a public, 72 hour window for all legislation.

The bill was voted on yesterday afternoon and, thus, violated Boehner's pledge. To be more accurate, the pledge was violated even before the vote as the 72 hours of public review should end at the beginning of debate, which, on the NPR defunding bill, began yesterday morning.

Sunlight has previously stated our concerns about ways that the majority could circumvent this pledge and the rule, which does not mirror the pledge, implemented earlier this year. It is a bit surprising that the pledge was initially broken in this unnecessary manner, especially after Boehner being so emphatic and specific about the 72 hour time frame.

The House is set to vote today for a bill that would forbid funding for National Public Radio. The bill, while posted to the Internet on Tuesday morning, has not been available for 72 hours or more, which would appear to violate a pledge by Speaker John Boehner to afford the public this amount of time to read bills prior to consideration.

Earlier this year the House Republicans changed the House Rules to implement a Read the Bill rule that stating that bills must be available on three calendar days prior to consideration. Sunlight was very pleased to see the new House Rules incorporate language that strengthens the public's ability to see legislation online before votes. We've also recognized that this rule might be artfully evaded through a variety of means, one of which is the "calendar day" definition.

In the case of today's vote, the bill technically meets the House Rules as passed in January, but could, if voted on prior to a 72 hour period expiring (approximately 8 AM on Friday), violate the numerous pledges made by Speaker Boehner and other Republican leaders to provide a public, 72 hour window for all legislation. (Update: Sunlight's previous call for 72 hours of online bill availability required 72 hours prior to consideration, not prior to a vote. Under that rule, the consideration of this bill has already violated that pledge.)

Here is Speaker Boehner at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference earlier this year: This "calendar day" issue was previously pointed out by Sunlight's Lisa Rosenberg, "the “third calendar day” yardstick for determining whether a bill is ripe for consideration could result in a bill being available for less than 72 hours. Sunlight has advocated using a “72 hour” time frame instead of three calendar days to prevent possible gamesmanship."

There still remain many other potential ways in which the current Rule and previous pledges could be subverted. Sunlight Policy Director John Wonderlich pointed these out in a post earlier this year.

Sunlight hopes that the House decides to go with previous pledges of requiring bills to be online for at least 72 hours prior to a vote in the future.

UPDATE: Rep. Anthony Weiner just pointed out the failure of the majority to provide 72 hours prior to consideration of this bill. The presiding congressman gaveled out a parliamentary inquiry from Weiner after declaring his question of whether the bill had been online for 72 hours to be "hypothetical." I'm not sure what is hypothetical about that inquiry.

UPDATE 2: Here is the video of Weiner making a point of order on the 72 hour rule.

UPDATE 3: Below is the original draft of the bill as submitted to the House Rules Committee. This is the earliest available draft of the bill. You can see the time stamp in the lower left-hand corner on each page. It reads March 15, 2011 8:21 am: House Resolution to Defund NPR

People have become increasingly aware that their elected representatives often do not read the legislation they vote upon. Sometimes there’s not enough time between the introduction and adoption of legislation for anyone but the bill’s sponsor to grasp the contents. Other times so many amendments are added that few people -- if any -- fully understand the final document. In the haste to build support and pass bills, provisions are inserted unnoticed that contain unrecognized flaws and political pay-offs. The public and legislators alike are disconnected from the legislative process intended to serve their needs

Congress and the general public need tools to access and analyze legislation. They need Read the Bill 2.0.

Many politicians and politically-aware citizens seek to reconnect the legislative process through their support of the "read the bill" reform. Its central premise is the idea that legislators and members of the public should have enough time to read legislation before it is voted upon. The Sunlight Foundation, one of the primary advocates of this idea, has long recommended that non-emergency legislation and conference reports be posted on the Internet for 72 hours before final consideration.

In the expiring Congress, this idea gained enough political currency that some of its major legislation -- including health care and financial reform -- was available online 3 days prior to final consideration per  Speaker Pelosi’s promise to do so.  However, no legislative rule imposed this requirement, it was not always imposed uniformly, and often times you had to (1) know where to look to find the bill and (2) be willing to thumb through PDFs containing up to 1,000 pages. Even so, it was a commendable step forward.

Reps. Baird and Culberson introduced legislation (H. Res 554) that would have gone one step further and formalized the “read the bill” requirement by amending the House rules; it garnered 217 co-sponsors. Presumptive-Speaker John Boehner has pledged to impose a “read the bill” requirement for all legislation, but it is not yet clear whether he will update the House rules to do so. We think he should.

Anyone who has tried to read legislation soon realizes that doing so can be complicated and difficult. The text is often written in a shorthand that can be unlocked only with patience and frequent reference to the U.S. Code and Statutes at Large. It's difficult to see how draft language changes over time because there is no redlined version of the legislation, and sometimes you need to compare two lengthy PDFs against one another. The bills themselves don't always show up on THOMAS, the official online legislative database, in a timely manner, and they are difficult to find when published elsewhere.

Congress and the general public need tools to access and analyze legislation. They need Read the Bill 2.0. There are three main technological obstacles.

Legislation should be available online in real time, in machine-readable format, and accessible in bulk.

First, legislation that’s supposed to be available on THOMAS isn’t always there on time. The Senate version of the DISCLOSE Act, for example, took more than 4 days to appear on THOMAS after it was introduced. When legislators bypass THOMAS and directly publish legislation online to satisfy the 72-hour rule, it’s often difficult to find. THOMAS must be comprehensive and timely.

Second, all legislation should be published in a machine-readable format. PDFs aren’t good enough. Unless the data is in a machine-readable format, you cannot easily perform a redline comparison between two bills, like I did here, which showed how the DISCLOSE Act changed over time. Fortunately, 97% of the legislation published on THOMAS this past Congress is available in XML, which is an incredibly useful machine-readable format that provides a helpful structure to the data. But 3% of bills are available in PDF format only, and those bills are usually the ones that are most important, lengthy, and time-sensitive.

Third, the THOMAS database should be available to the public “in bulk,” which would allow users to download large amounts of information at one time. Currently, third parties write programs that extract human-readable information from THOMAS in a time-consuming and error-prone process known as scraping. They then use this information to build citizen-empowering tools like OpenCongress and GovTrack. This kind of innovation -- allowing people to use congressional information to better understand what Congress does -- should be encouraged.

Indeed, in 2009 the Library of Congress and GPO were directed to form a task force to report on the feasibility of bulk access to THOMAS, but no report has materialized. Rep. Foster recently introduced legislation (HR 6289) to partially implement bulk access to THOMAS data and jump-start the report. The incoming Congress should clear the pipes and let public legislative data flow to the public.

Real-time redlining of the US Code become possible once you combine bulk access to information with publishing legislation in a machine-readable structured-data format. Wouldn’t it be great if you can see at a glance how a bill would change the law? Or how an amendment would change the text of a bill? Congress could build this tool, and others, or could require that the legislative text be structured so that outside parties could do so. It could also take steps to improve THOMAS generally. Regardless, nothing will likely happen without congressional action.

The goal isn’t merely to allow legislators and citizens to be able to read the bills, but to understand them as well.

For “read the bill” to have bite, people need better tools to make use of legislative information. Publishing PDFs of bills online 3 days prior to a final vote is necessary, but insufficient, for legislative transparency. The kinds of tools we need can only arise with faster, better access to raw legislative information. We need Read the Bill 2.0. After all, the goal isn’t merely to allow legislators and citizens to be able to read the bills, but to understand them as well.

Each new Congress begins with its own unique face. The ascendant Newt Gingrich in 1994, the first woman Speaker of the House surrounded by children in 2006 and a teary-eyed John Boehner in 2010. As we await the future for presumptive Speaker Boehner's policies, we know that those of Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi differed greatly. That is save for one area: transparency. A new Congress, with fresh blood, offers a singular moment to advance transparency causes, whether in the legislative field or elsewhere.

Of course, the decisions on where to move on transparency has largely been influenced by the idiosyncrasies of the Speaker or the new congressional class or the prevailing winds of the time.

In January of 1995 Speaker Gingrich unveiled the first online database of legislation known as THOMAS. THOMAS was a breakthrough at the time even though it did not include anywhere close to the amount of information that it does today. Gingrich, a fan of the futurist Alvin Toffler, was incredibly interested in computers and found it important to make legislation available to the public over the new Internet technology.

The House of Representatives, under the Democratic majority prior to the 1994 election, had put a lot of work into wiring offices for Internet access and posting legislative information through the House Information Services (HIS) and the Government Printing Office (GPO). The new Republican majority, particularly Gingrich and incoming House Administration Committee chairman Bill Thomas, thought that HIS was a pet project of the Democrats and that GPO was inept. This led them to centralize control over the online legislative database in the Library of Congress, where THOMAS still lives today.

In 2006 Pelosi and the Democrats were elevated to office, in part, due to a string of corruption scandals tainting the Republicans. The Jack Abramoff scandal exposed both the casual and explicit corruption in Washington. Associational biases led to corrupt decisions as staffers accepted sports and concert tickets and wound up doing favors for lobbyists. Travel to exotic locales, for educational purposes, of course, were prized lobbyist tricks to win support from congressmen for their clients. Meals could be used as bargaining chips. And in the case of Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, earmarks were sold to defense contractors for yachts, prostitutes, antique furniture and, in one case, a house.

The Democrats moved quickly once the new Congress began. A bill was drafted that included dramatically increased transparency on lobbyists and lobbyist gifts to members of Congress, restrictions on private travel and the receipt of gifts from lobbyists and increased transparency around earmarks and other legislative activities including committee hearings and conference committees. This was a landmark bill that has made following Congress and influence much easier in the Internet age.

This phenomenon is not new either. The increase in new congressmen, largely in the Democratic Party, from 1970 to 1974, produced a series of lasting transparency policies in campaign finance, committee operations, executive branch operations and congressional activity.

So what does this mean for the Republicans in their 2010 form under a Speaker Boehner? That appears to be a big unknown at the moment. Boehner does not appear to have the zest for technology that Gingrich did, nor does the moment portend a need for action as the corruption scandals of 2006 pushed Pelosi to act. There are, however, some areas that both Boehner and Majority Leader-to-be Eric Cantor have noted that could provide some clues as to where transparency could be advanced in the House.

The Republican leadership has stated that they are going to devolve some power back to committee chairmen after a decades-long centralization of power in leadership offices. This provides a moment to codify rules and increase transparency in committee rooms.

The Sunlight Foundation released a list of rules changes for the new Congress to adopt, which includes a series of important changes to committee openness. These include posting recorded votes online in a structured format, post official transcripts, disclose financial statements filed by witnesses and post all committee documents online. (More suggestions can be found here.)

Giving the public time to read bills before they come to the floor for debate is another area that appears ripe for action. This was a hallmark criticism that Republicans made of the legislative process in the 111th Congress and they should codify a rule requiring bills be posted online for 72 hours prior to consideration.

John Boehner has consistently stated his support for transparency in the legislative process during his term as Minority Leader. As he ascends to the Speaker's chair, many will watch to see how his criticisms of opacity translate into policies of openness.