I'll be joining Nancy Watzman in posting stories about bills that were rushed to debate with little time for Congress to read the bill. These stories are part of Sunlight's efforts to require bills to be made publicly available for 72 hours before Congress brings them up for debate. This installment focuses on the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which was only made available 17 hours prior to consideration. You can join our efforts at ReadTheBill.org and tweet about it with the #readthebill hashtag.

For the better part of 2008, Congress was engaged in a bitter debate over a warrantless wiretapping program initiated by the Bush administration and how to make it fit into a legal framework. In the summer of 2007, two years after the wiretapping program was uncovered by the New York Times, President George W. Bush announced that he would seek a temporary amendment to bring the wiretapping under the umbrella of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court. That bill, the Protect America Act of 2007, was highly controversial and in 2008 Congress sought to make permanent an amendment to create a legal structure for judicial review of wiretaps. That permanent fix became known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act.

The permanent fix Congress sought was loaded with controversy and negotiations between the House and Senate leadership went on for months. Once they reached a compromise, however, they did did not release the details of the final bill until the day before the House of Representatives began consideration. The legislation contained numerous provisions amending the 30-year-old law governing surveillance including permitting the government to: target individuals for surveillance without a warrant for up to 7 days, not keep records of searches, not include detailed descriptions of the nature of the information or property targeted, and eavesdrop in emergencies without court approval, so long as papers are filed within 7 days.

Sparking much of the controversy was a provision providing immunity from lawsuits for all telecommunications companies complicit in the wiretapping. Liberal bloggers, libertarians, and civil liberty groups were livid over the inclusion of this retroactive immunity. The ACLU, MoveOn, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) launched a campaign to stop the passage of the bill.

On June 20, 2008, after two hours of debate, the bill passed the House by a 293-129 vote. After the bill’s passage by the House, the EFF denounced the House Leadership after they “rushed to the floor today” to pass the bill “after its introduction yesterday.”

The Senate took a slower approach to the bill as some lawmakers, led by Sens. Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold, sought to filibuster. The Senate passed the legislation in July and the President subsequently signed it into law.

It's not much to ask Congress, as we do, to make available legislation for public perusal for 72 hours before they take it up for consideration. It's not just members of Congress who should take a deep breath, step back, and read the bill (#ReadtheBill)--the public should have the opportunity to review legislation as well. Yet time after time in recent years, Congress has been in a terrible rush to vote on controversial bills.

Over the next several days, we are beginning a series of blog posts that will profile examples of bills Congress hurried to pass without providing ample time for discussion.

First and foremost on our list is the recent $789 billion, 1,100-page stimulus bill approved by Congress. This behemoth was available for just about 13 hours before Congress took it up--and most of those ticked by overnight, when most people were sleeping.

Here's how it happened. After President Barack Obama took his oath of office in January 2009, his first order of business with Congress was H.R. 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The legislation zipped through the review process, passing both the House and the Senate by easy, largely party line, margins by early February. Then came time for the House and Senate to confer and come up with a final bill.

There was plenty to negotiate about in the two versions of the complex legislation, which dictated tens of billions of dollars in spending for state governments, transportation, broadband development, school construction, tax breaks and a host of other programs. The Republicans objected to much of the direct spending in the bills, instead favoring beefed up tax cuts. To gain the support of a few Republican senators, the Obama administration agreed to cut spending in the bill.

On February 10, the House had approved by voice vote an amendment sponsored by Rep. David Dreier to instruct conferees to not record their approval of the final conference agreement unless the text had been available for at least 48 hours.  "As the House and Senate prepare to conference separate versions of the stimulus package, it is absolutely essential that House Members and Senators know exactly what is included in the final conference agreement. It is for this reason that I am making this motion to instruct House conferees not to sign the final conference agreement unless the text of such agreement has been available to the conferees in an electronic, searchable, and downloadable form at least 48 hours prior to their approval," said Dreier.

When the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced a deal on February 11, he said, "Like any negotiation, this involved give-and-take-and if you don't mind my saying so, that's an understatement. But the agreement we've reached stays faithful to the principles."

The problem was many members of Congress had no idea what was in that deal. The day after Reid's announcement, a copy was still not available for them-or for the public. Talking Points Memo reported, "Reporters who asked for a summary of the agreed-upon deal last night were told to wait, because "policy staff ... are drafting final bill language tonight," according to a House Democratic memo. Aside from a top-line number of $789 billion and a battle over school construction, the nitty-gritty details of the stimulus were publicly unavailable."

The bill language was finally made available  at around 10:45 p.m. the night of February 12. The next morning, at 11:15 a.m., the House waived a rule requiring that conference report be made publicly available for 48 hours before consideration. A few minutes later, the conference report was brought up for consideration, about 13 hours after it had been made available online.

Republicans were furious. Dreier said, "we do have a thousand pages here. This was put online after midnight. We all voted in favor of 48 hours-you voted in favor of 48 hours-to allow the American people and our colleagues to see this. We all understand the urgency of this matter. Has my colleague read this? Many of us have been trying to go through it since after midnight in the Rules Committee."

At one point, House Minority Leader John Boehner dropped the 1,100-page bill on the floor with a thud, saying, "here we are with 1,100 pages-1,100 pages-not one Member of this body has read. Not one. There may be some staffer over in the Appropriations Committee that read all of this last night-I don't know how you could read 1,100 pages between midnight and now. Not one Member has read this."

Despite the complaints, the House voted that same day largely along party lines to approve the bill, 246 to 183.  The Senate followed the same day, passing the legislation by a vote of 60 to 38.  President Barack Obama signed the legislation on February 17.

According to various sources, the final stimulus bill (in the form of the conference report) was made publicly availabe last night around 10:45 pm through the web sites of the House Appropriations Committee and the House Rules Committee. The House just passed the conference report less than an hour ago.

ProPublica has some of the best resources for the stimulus bill including this page where you can download all the parts of the final 1000+ page bill. Also good from ProPublica is their detailed chart of spending provisions in the final bill.

Rep. Gary Alexander, a Republican legislator from Washington state, thinks that folks in the legislature there should actually have time to read a budget bill before voting on it. He's the sponsor of a bill, the Budget Sunshine Act, that would require a five-day waiting period before the House or Senate could vote on the operating, capital, or transportation budgets.

Alexander told the Olympian newspaper that bringing sunlight to the budget process would make the legislators more accountable to the public:

For the most part, the actual budget never sees the light of day before it is brought to the floor for a full vote. The paper is still hot, the ink is still wet and we're supposed to make a decision on the state's most important issue? My legislation would allow the public enough time to weigh in with an opinion, and it would allow lawmakers to have more confidence in what they're voting for or against. While this legislation won't necessarily help get us out of the current $6 billion budget hole, it would help us shed light on the upcoming budget proposals and the impacts of our decisions. It will help avoid a similar repeat of the problem in future years.

The Olympian editorial thinks Alexander is right and so do we—although why stop at budget bills? The Sunlight Foundation advocates that all legislation should be available for public persual at least 72 hours before consideration by Congress. In the last Congress, another lawmaker from Washington state, Democrat Rep. Brian Baird, introduced legislation that would do exactly that. In the past, Congress has voted on major bills with ride ranging effects without giving adequate time for a public airing, such as legislation granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies. Especially now, with the economy imploding and Congress considering bills with higher price tags than we've ever seen before, it's paramount that the process be as open as possible. Three days to read a bill--it's not that much to ask.

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.

In a blog post announcing the President's signing of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the first piece of legislation he has signed, we are informed that the bill has been posted on the White House web site and is now open for comment... after the President signed it.

For quite some time President Obama has promised that all non-emergency legislation will be open for public comment on Whitehouse.gov for 5 days before the President signs it. I am not sure what constitutes "emergency" legislation; providing emergency appropriations in response to a disaster or attack would apply. This was supposed to be a major element to the President's transparency efforts, even though the effect of it can be disputed (the bill has already passed and can't be changed). A blog post from the White House on January 20th say this:

One significant addition to WhiteHouse.gov reflects a campaign promise from the President: we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.

It is too bad they let this transparency promise slip on the very first piece of legislation that hit the President's desk. After a few transparency wins for the administration, it looks like they've hit their first fail.

Earlier today, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer stated that, prior to consideration, the economic stimulus bill would be made available online for 4 days. This is clearly a lesson learned from the outrage that surrounded the cramming-down-the-throat strategy for the TARP bailout bill. Here's Hoyer (the text was received from my colleague John Wonderlich via the Open House Project Google Group):

[I]t is my hope that the committee markups will be completed tonight. maybe early this morning. as you know the appropriations committee marked up yesterday. had a full markup. adopted six republican amendments and a number of democratic amendments. i don't know whether -- i don't know what the amendment status is in energy and commerce or ways and means, but i expect all those markups to be completed either late tonight. i hope, it is my hope that once those markups are complete that by tomorrow night we will post the results on the web and that they will be available not 48 hours, but either tonight or saturday -- friday night or saturday, so that we'll have four days to review those items. i want to reiterate my hope and my expectation to state it even more strongly that you and the minority members, country, majority members will have 48 hours to review the product that is reported out of the committee after their markups. i yield back.

This is a great step for Congress, however they should mandate that bills are available online for at least 72 hours prior to consideration.

President Obama has promised to post all non-emergency legislation on WhiteHouse.gov for five days for the public to comment. Unfortunately, this would occur after the bill is unable to be modified, thus the comments could only lead the President to sign or veto the bill. Congress should allow for each bill to be placed online for 72 hours so that the public can have a voice, and lawmakers can read the bills. Hoyer is pointing in the right direction and hopefully this is one that they will continue to follow.

Sunlight's Bill Allison was on Brian Lehrer Live discussing efforts to put the proposed stimulus bill online and in a searchable format. Watch the video: Republicans Favoring Increased Transparency for Obama Spending Bill from Brian Lehrer Live on Vimeo.

People have been clamoring for more transparency in the presentation of bills since the TARP recovery program was shoved through Congress with little time for the public to have a say. And most people, while perhaps supportive of the recovery program and many of the bailouts, are not happy with the way the legislation was passed. That's why this tune from the incoming Obama Administration and Congress regarding the stimulus package is refreshing. According to ABC News:

Democratic and Republican sources tell ABC News that President-elect Obama's meeting with the bipartisan congressional leadership of the House and Senate went well with some quick agreement on the need for expeditious action as well as oversight and transparency for the pending, yet-to-be-drafted multibillion dollar stimulus package. House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, argued that public dissatisfaction with the Troubled Asset Relief Program money to help stabilize the nation's financial systems and the way it was rammed through the Congress demands more transparency and accountability with the stimulus bill. "I agree with you," the President-elect said, adding later that he would "demand complete transparency and accountability in doing it." · House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R-Vir., suggested said the bill should be put on the Internet a week before Congress votes on it. Mr. Obama smiled and said something along the lines of, "maybe if I was better at faking it , I'd say, 'Great idea -- we'll take you up on that.' But we've actually talked about this idea." Obama turned it over to incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel who essentially said they would do the Republicans one better. They're planning a Google-like search function to show every program funded by the stimulus package, whether it comes in under or over-budget, whether it is meeting its intended purpose, and how many jobs it is creating.

Far too often do people hear about the bills passed by Congress, but they have little ability to see the success and progress of programs created. Adding transparency and accountability to legislation like this is a terrific step forward (if it happens, of course) and in direct opposition to the course taken by the Fed and Treasury in handling the bailout money.

(Hat tip to Jason Mercier at the Washington Policy Center's Blog)