On the 5-Day Bill Posting Pledge

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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.