UPDATE: 12/07/2010 8:50 AM – The bill text is up on THOMAS now.
On December 2, Senators John Ensign (R-NV) Joe Lieberman (ID-CT) and Scott Brown (R-MA), introduced a bill designed to address recent Wikileaks activity. (In Congress-speak, they “dropped” the bill.)
You can read more about the ‘‘Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination Act” (SHIELD Act) in this press release from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs or view an unofficial version of the legislative language on Scribd.com.
You can now take action on the bill on POPVOX, but we do not have a link to the official language because it has not yet been posted on the Library of Congress’ website for legislative information: www.Thomas.gov . We thought this was a good opportunity to explain why that takes a while.
Unfortunately, the system for introducing a bill in Congress still includes a lot of paper and the system for making that information available to the public is not exactly real-time. Lots of people are working to make the system better, but for now, this is how it works when a Member (like Senators Ensign, Lieberman, and Brown) decides to introduce a bill:
- The bill language is printed and signed by its sponsor(s). There are few formatting requirements for these written bills – it is not uncommon for them to have handwritten corrections, strikethroughs or additions in the margins. Usually, the bill is drafted by Legislative Counsel and follows the standard format, but leaves a space for an official number to be added (as in the SHIELD version on scribd.com.) The only hard rule is that the bill must be signed by its sponsors.
- In the House, the printed bill language is placed in the Hopper . In the Senate, it is handed to the Bill Clerk at the front of the Chamber.
- The House or Senate Clerk assigns a number to the bill in order of receipt.
- The Parliamentarian of the House or Senate then refers the bill to the appropriate committee(s) and then sends it to the Government Printing Office for printing.
- The House or Senate Clerk sends information about the like bill title and number, status and actions directly to THOMAS , the official government site for bill information, hosted by the Library of Congress. Bill language is not available until it is released by GPO.
- Information on THOMAS is not very easy to work with for developers and others trying to parse bill information, so our CTO, Josh Tauberer created GovTrack six years ago to scrape THOMAS every day to search for new bills or changes in the status of bills. GovTrack is open source and makes all of this information available in an API. This GovTrack API is the basis for sites like OpenCongress and MapLight, among many others.
- POPVOX receives available bill information from the GovTrack API, adds the functionality for organizations to endorse/oppose and for you to comment and share; then we put all of that information in one place so that staffers, media and members of the public looking for information on these bills can see what people have to say.
- As for the bill language, GPO prints and disseminates copies, which takes a couple of days. All sponsoring Members receive printed copies. ( I always found this to be a colossal waste of paper. ) The GPO forwards the bill information to the Library of Congress, which makes it available on THOMAS .
Regarding t he SHIELD Act , as of December 7, we have a page for it and the ability to weigh in on POPVOX . However, since the official bill language is not yet publicly available, we strongly urge you to wait to see the actual language before weighing in, even though a version is available. The version on Scribd.com may be an earlier version that later changed. (Remember, even handwritten notes on the introduced bill make it into the official language.)
We know this system is not seamless, but we’re working with what is currently available and want to keep you informed about what that means.
