Cybersense—Congress Should Open Itself to Greater Web Scrutiny

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In an age when some people share every detail of their private lives online, it’s surprising to see that Congress is still playing hard to get with the Net.

Nobody’s demanding access to senators’ diaries or calling for Web cams in congressional toilets. But it shouldn’t be too much to ask that our elected officials share information that might help us understand what they’re doing with the salaries we pay them.

For example, most government watchers know you can read copies of bills and track their progress on Thomas (thomas.loc.gov), the site posted by the Library of Congress. But the text you’ll find there is the original, unmarked version of bills, and they rarely pass in such pristine form.

By the time a committee actually votes on a measure, it has been modified and recast as a “working draft.” And while lobbyists usually have copies of these, they aren’t made available online for mere citizens. Thomas eventually catches up to the official versions when they pass, but that’s too late for anyone who might want to comment before that happens.

It’s possible to follow the progress of bills by reading transcripts of committee hearings. But these, too, are missing from most committee Web sites. Hearingroom.com, a private for-profit site, uses voice recognition software to deliver streaming audio and text transcripts of selected committee hearings. But a subscription to the service can cost up to $15,000 a year, so it’s not exactly public interest programming.

Congress can’t hope to match that level of service, since official transcripts would take at least several days to prepare. But it wouldn’t be much trouble to make audio and perhaps even video feeds available online to anyone with the patience to watch them.

Working drafts of bills, meanwhile, can change several times a day if the legislation is in play. It would take considerable effort to keep the online versions up to date.

But Congress has no such excuse for failing to post copies of more permanent public records, including lobbyist registration forms and the personal financial disclosures filed by members themselves. Some of this information is posted months after it becomes available by watchdog groups like the Center for Responsive Politics (www.opensecrets.org). But it shouldn’t take an act of Congress to make lawmakers do their own dirty work.


Measure introduced

Then again, it just might. Sens. John McCain and Patrick Leahy have introduced a measure that would force Congress to make lobbyist disclosures available online. But the bill’s principal goal is to secure public access to perhaps the most valuable information Congress is hiding from the Net: the reports prepared by its Congressional Research Service.

The CRS has prepared thousands of detailed studies at the request of members on a wide variety of subjects, from global warming to breast cancer. These nonpartisan reports are used to provide background for legislation, and they would be equally useful to researchers, teachers and students. And as it happens, they’re already available in electronic form on the congressional intranet.


Congressional service resists

But the CRS has resisted calls to make its reports available online, partly because the information might prove too useful. CRS officials have said that if the public had easy access to the agency’s reports, they would ask their representatives to request all sorts of research that would add to their workload. They also worry that distributing reports to the public might open them up to libel lawsuits.

But those excuses sound pretty thin when you consider the people they’re hiding these reports from are the ones who end up paying for them. The CRS was given more than $73 million of the taxpayers’ money to prepare its reports this year, and it wouldn’t take more than a few minutes’ worth of that annual budget to make them available online.

This isn’t to say Congress hasn’t made progress toward opening itself up to the Net. If our founding fathers thought mere citizens would be able to read bills as they’re introduced and send their representatives messages in seconds, they would have scrapped plans for the indirect election of senators and endorsed Internet voting.

But they also would have demanded that Congress make its every scrap of paper available online as soon as possible right before they finished off the Constitution with a digital signature.

To contact syndicated columnist Joe Salkowski, you can e-mail him at [email protected] or write to him c/o Tribune Media Services, Inc., 435 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 1400, Chicago, IL 60611.

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