While the country remains divided over major issues, there is one issue that the public can agree on: transparency. A new Rasmussen poll shows that 83% of the public says that bills should be posted online prior to consideration. There is little partisan breakdown in the poll:

Among voters, there is no partisan disagreement on the issue. Eighty-five percent (85%) of Republicans, 76% of Democrats and 92% of voters not affiliated with either party favor posting non-emergency bills online for the public to read before they are voted on by Congress.

You can help push Congress to pass the Read the Bill bill here.

In response to the growing support for a discharge petition to force a vote on the Read the Bill bill, Rep. Tim Walz is circulating a "Dear Colleague" letter asking Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer to enforce the already existing 72 hour rule.

The House Rules require that all bills be publicly available for 72 hours prior to consideration. This is rule is frequently waived by the Rules Committee at the behest of leadership and has been for many years. There is no requirement in the "Dear Colleague" letter that Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Hoyer enforce the rule, simply a suggestion. This is one reason to support the passing the Read the Bill bill over this "Dear Colleague" letter. The 72 hour rule should be written into the Rules, not left to the whim of the leadership.

Another reason to support the Read the Bill bill is that the current, oft-waived 72 hour rule simply states that bills be made publicly available. There is no specification as to what defines "publicly available." It has always been Sunlight's belief that public equals online. To ensure that Congress defines public as online Rules need to be altered to specify where bills will be made publicly available. The Read the Bill bill does this by requiring online posting of bills for 72 hours before consideration.

Help us support the 72 hour rule by getting your congressman to support the Read the Bill bill.

The health care debate is raging on, and a big part of it includes having versions of the bill available so people can Read the Bill.   The great thing about having the bill online for everyone to see is that citizens will start looking for the  substantive details of the legislation themselves and add value to the debate.

Citizens of Montana, the home state of Sen. Max Baucus, have been busy reading their senator's proposed bill.  Left in the West has been looking into the bill and comparing what people are saying about what the bill contains.

Frankly, the more I look at this thing, the more it's obvious we need both a public option and to open the health insurance exchange to everyone. If you want a better analysis of this bill, got to Jay Rockefeller, who says this is what's wrong with the bill: - CHIP is put into the exchange. - No public option. - Already existing policies from big companies not affected by new regulations. You read that right! Almost half of the nation's consumers will have no protection from pre-existing condition clauses or lifetime caps! - Affordability. See, that's the thing. If you have crappy, employer-provided insurance, you have to keep it. As Baucus' bill is written now, you can't ditch it for something better in the exchange. That's unacceptable. Anyway. Still reading this thing.

Also in Utah, The Side Track has taken up the task of answering state Sen. Chris Buttars' questions about the health care bill by actually reading the bill.  See their answers here, here, here, and here.

For those of you who missed it, Sen. Chris Buttars has questions. ... I'll be honest, I thought we were taking on quite a challenge. 1,000 plus pages really isn't that large for a piece of legislation (Bush's final budget was over 1,300 pages long... and speaking of which, did Buttars print that one out on the tax payer's dime too?), but it is a challenge for several bloggers with many other obligations. We assumed. We assumed wrong. In fact, it's been embarrassingly easy, and a bit of a bore, as research challenges go.

No matter where you stand, the debate is always better when you take actual details from the bill, instead of hearsay.  This is why every bill should be available for 72 hours. Call your congressman today and ask them to sign the discharge petition for H. Res 554.

Yesterday, Lisa Rosenberg wrote about the discharge petition for H. Res. 554, the Read the Bill Bill. Already the petition has had an effect. Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that she would not bring the health care reform bill to the floor until it had been online for 72 hours. The discharge petition would allow the bill to be brought to a vote without committee consideration. This could be the only way to get a vote on the bill this year. Currently, there are 173 signers of the discharge petition -- all of those signatures came in two days! The petition needs 218 signatures to force the bill to the floor.

At this moment there are only three Democrats who have signed onto the petition. They are Reps. Brian Baird, Walt Minnick and Parker Griffith. There are 32 Democratic cosponsors of H. Res. 554 who have yet to sign the petition. If you care to call them and let them know that they should sign the petition, please do. You can see the list below and find their contact information at Open Congress.

1. Michael Arcuri (NY-24)
2. Dan Boren (OK-02)
3. Leonard Boswell (IA-03)
4. Bobby Bright (AL-02)
5. Chris Carney (PA-10)
6. Ben Chandler (KY-06)
7. Steve Cohen (TN-09)
8. Jim Costa (CA-20)
9. Kathy Dahlkemper (PA-03)
10. Lincoln Davis (TN-04)
11. Peter DeFazio (OR-04)
12. Chet Edwards (TX-17)
13. Gene Green (TX-29)
14. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (IL-02)
15. Marcy Kaptur (OH-09)
16. Frank Kratovil (MD-01)
17. Daniel Lipinski (IL-03)
18. Dave Loebsack (IA-02)
19. Dan Maffei (NY-25)
20. Carolyn Maloney (NY-14)
21. Jim Marshall (GA-08)
22. Kendrick Meek (FL-17)
23. Charlie Melancon (LA-03)
24. Mike Michaud (ME-02)
25. Dennis Moore (KS-03)
26. Mike Quigley (IL-05)
27. Mike Ross (AR-04)
28. Mark Schauer (MI-07)
29. Heath Shuler (NC-11)
30. Adam Smith (WA-09)
31. Jackie Speier (CA-12)
32. Gene Taylor (MS-04)

The Read the Bill bill (H. Res. 554) continues to gain support in Congress and has nearly reached 100 cosponsors in the House. The cosponsors in the House fall across all ideological lines from liberal Democrat to conservative Republican. The cross-partisan support for this bill demonstrates the wide appeal that legislative transparency is garnering. When you can have Jeff Flake and Jesse Jackson, Jr. support the same bill, you know you're doing something right.

You can help increase the number of cosponsors for the bill by going to ReadTheBill.org and calling your congressman to tell them to support the bill.

The missing piece in the health care reform puzzle was dropped in Congress today. After months of negotiations with Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee, Chairman Max Baucus released a copy of his bill. Baucus' Finance Committee was the last committee to introduce legislation on health care reform. As Ezra Klein notes at the Washington Post, "the Finance Committee's Chairman's Mark (the first draft of the bill) is written in plain English, rather than legislative-speak, so it's actually comprehensible to the interested layman." If you never understood the legal language of legislation, now's your chance to read a bill that you can actually understand. Mark-up on the bill will begin on September 22.

"I don't have to read it, or know what's in it. I'm going to oppose it anyways." That's Sen. Jim Inhofe explaining why he doesn't need to read the health care bill.

There has been a lot of pressure on lawmakers this summer to prove that they have read the health care bill (of which there are numerous versions) and understand its contents. The Sunlight Foundation has been supporting a bipartisan resolution in the House to require all bills be posted online for at least 72 hours for lawmakers and the public to read. Hopefully, there are more considerate lawmakers who would like to take the time to read and understand what they are voting on.

Luckily, and thanks to much public pressure, all announced versions of the health care bill are currently available to read. I'll post them below just in case Sen. Inhofe changes his mind.

House Energy & Commerce Committee Draft House Education & Labor Committee Draft House Ways & Means Committee Draft Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee Draft

If you want your lawmakers to read the bill go to our Read the Bill site and let them know how you feel.

Two of the key House committees that have passed health care reform legislation are disclosing significant information from the committee markups on their web sites. The Energy & Commerce Committee and the Education & Labor Committee both provide links to all amendments offered and all recorded votes taken during the markup hearings.

This is a regular practice of both committees, but not in most other congressional committees. The Energy & Commerce and Education & Labor Committees are two of five committees in the House of Representatives that regularly post links to both amendments offered in markups and the recorded votes on each individual amendment. The other three committees are Agriculture, Financial Services and Judiciary.

We, at the Sunlight Foundation, have been advocating for a rule requiring all bills be posted online for 72 hours prior to consideration. We also care about the transparency in other areas of the legislative process, particularly at the committee level where a lot the actual work takes place. The advancement in committee web site disclosure over the past couple of years has been both phenomenal and frustrating. The level of transparency offered by these five committees is emblematic of what committee transparency should look like -- even if we feel that it could be even better -- and did not exist just a few years ago. There is no reason, however, that the other thirteen committees with regular legislative activities (this excludes Rules, Standards of Official Conduct and other joint or special committees with no role in reporting legislation) could not provide the same level of transparency.

Some of these other committees do provide some level of disclosure in the markup process. The Natural Resources Committee posts links to the votes on amendments, but not the amendments themselves. The Science & Technology Committee only posts amendments that have been accepted by the committee and does not include vote information. On the Transportation & Infrastructure Committee site, I noticed only one linked amendment and no vote information.

Those following the health care debate should be thankful that two of the three committees that marked up the bill in the House are exceeding their peers in online disclosure. The ability to have all the information on the legislative path of such important legislation is vital and it's great to see the efforts of a few years of advocating for better committee transparency pay off.

It appears that the demand for information about today's deal between Energy and Commerce Chair Henry Waxman and committee Blue Dogs has led to the committee's web site crashing. Congress often has bandwidth problems and pages regularly crash. If I remember correctly, it was near impossible to access a congressional web page during the stimulus debate. What's interesting in this instance is that the committee has posted a short disclaimer along with links to the health care bill text and a summary. Just another example of Congress coming around to understand that people want to read the bills and are using the web to find legislative information. Very cool.

Here's a screencap of the currently downed Energy and Commerce Committee site, in case it's back to normal:

In light of Rep. John Conyers' statement that I posted about yesterday, I'm glad to see that other lawmakers are actually reading the bill and studying its various sections:

They were all House Democrats, boning up on the historic and controversial health-care reform legislation that's gradually emerging from their chamber. The rough draft of the bill ("America's Health Choices Act") runs more than 1,000 pages, with amendments yet to come. Last week the Democrats decided that they needed to know more about the legislation before they go back to their constituents for the August recess. Hence the teach-in, an unusual basement seminar that lasted five hours with one break for procedural votes on the House floor. Staffers led the members through the bill section by section -- from Division A, Title I, Subtitle A, Section 101 all the way through Division C, Title V, Subtitle D, Section 2531. "No one's going to say we haven't read the bill," said Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, a Maryland Democrat, as he took a break from the closed-door gathering.

Now, we just to need to make sure that the final version is available for everyone else to read in time. Go to ReadTheBill.org to show your support.