Using the Internet to help Regular People Influence Bills in the U.S. Congress

Read the brief article by Zachary A. Goldfarb in The Washington Post. (March 1, 2006)

Representative government should work better when the citizens have knowledge and understanding of the legislation that is being debated, have the opportunity to inform their legislative representatives of their preferences, and can track the way their representatives vote. I have been surprised by how few in the United States have and use this information. In part, this is natural, in that we elect representatives to do the heavy intellectual lifting for us, and provide them with staffs to help in the work. But in part it is due to the difficulty of getting the information.

Years ago, I got a friend to let me into the morgue of our local newspaper to read the files on our Congressional Representative. I discovered, much to my amusement, that he annually introduced legislation to repeal the income tax, and had made a speech on the floor of Congress compaining that the United States was being invaded by spear carrying African natives and that no one seemed to know about it, nor care. I also discovered that, fortunately I guess, year after year he was judged by the press corps to rank 435th of 435 Congressmen in terms of effectiveness .

Anecdotes aside, citizens need more information. We number in the hundreds of millions. If one in a hundred gets interested in an issue, and one in a hundred of those writes a letter, many thousands of letters flood the Congress.

Earmarks are of special concern. U.S. lawmakers have increasingly added funding earmarks and other elements to bills in Conference. While the Library of Congress has made legislative language available since 1995 on THOMAS, it does not make these late additions done in the conference process available in advance. Consequently, the public has had no way to know about nor make its opinions known to its legislators before bills come to a floor vote containing these provisions.

Bill Moyers Now provides some useful instructions on how to use THOMAS, and extends the information on how to use the Congressional website itself.

Ben's Guide to the U.S. Government for Kids has a section on "How Laws Are Made" that provides teenagers with age specific guidance on tracking legislation.

New websites are being created to complement THOMAS.

GovTrack.us provides the text of legislation, House and Senate voting records, and campaign finance data online. Govtrack will e-mail registered users when specific lawmakers vote or make speeches, or when there is legislative activity on a bill related to a specific issue.

Washingtonpost.com offers a database with information about every vote in Congress since 1991.

ReadtheBill.org Civic Action is a 501(c)(4) organization that is leading an effort to persuade the U.S. Congress to establish the "72 Hours of Online Sunshine Rule" and post proposed legislation online for 72 hours before it comes to the floor.

There are simply too many efforts to utilize email and websites to inform the public about individual issues before the Congress to begin to describe.

I will point out, however, that increasingly such website contain pages that allow citizens to easily send emails to their representatives. These might include forms in which the sender can fill in his/her name and address, draft messages (that the sender can modify at will), and even engines that will identify the appropriate legislative representative from the citizens mailing address.

I tend to get form letters of response when I write my legislative representative, although I am sometimes pleasantly surprised by a personalized letter. But when I worked in the White House, in the week before Thanksgiving 5,000 letters were received from a mailing campaign, asking the President to do something about world hunger. People noticed, and the campaign stimulated and supported our work!