OpenCRS.com has the following two reports, for all your nomination questions:

http://opencrs.com/getfile.php?rid=60153

RL31989
Supreme Court Appointment Process: Roles of the President, Judiciary Committee, and Senate
June 25, 2007

http://opencrs.com/document/RL33225/

RL33225
Supreme Court Nominations, 1789 - 2006
September 15, 2006

Many people remember from middle school the movie on how a bill becomes a law, but few civics courses teach about what happens afterward. On Monday, John, Josh, and I sat down with members of the Office of the Law Revision Counsel. Their job, in short, is to consolidate and codify laws passed by Congress based upon their subject matter — without making any substantive changes to the law — and to prepare the revised code for enactment into “positive law.”

U.S. statutory law is organized into 50 books, known as titles. Each title should contain only those laws that have to do with a discrete subject area. In addition, it should only contain general and permanent laws — excluding provisions that apply only for a limited time (e.g., an annual appropriations law) or to a small number of people (e.g., a private law). For example, Title 7 should only contain permanent laws having to do with agriculture. Title 28 should only concern the judiciary and judicial procedure.

However, the last time that all law was organized in this way (or “codified”) was in 1926. Since then, entirely new areas of law have emerged that weren’t part of the original structure. Those laws have been placed into the code wherever was convenient, without Congress necessarily considering where would make the most sense.

Over time, this has created a mess. Laws that are related to one another often are placed in completely different places. Occasionally, Congress enacts laws that contain technical errors. And, the passage of time and future legislation render certain provisions obsolete.

In response to these issues, the Office of Law Revision Counsel recodifies the laws: it reorganizes and rewords them. However, without legislative action, the office’s recodification does not have full legal force. In those instances, to see the actual text of the law, you have to look up the original bill passed by Congress and compare it against any additional laws that modify that original law.

Unless Congress enacts and the president signs the OLRC’s suggested revisions into law, the recodified text serves as a guide to how the law should be organized; it is prima facie (i.e., facial) evidence of what the law is. When Congress enacts the OLRC’s codification, it transforms the code into “positive law,” and repeals the statutes that originally created the laws. The only statutory law left is that newly-passed U.S. Code title.

As things currently stand, 24 titles have been revised and enacted into law. The other titles remain only prima facie evidence of the law.

The process of turning proposed codifications of the law into positive law can take a lot of time. After the OLRC proposes revisions to the code, it invites comments from federal agencies and non-governmental stakeholders in a process that can take more than a year. Currently, the OLRC has proposed six revisions to U.S. law, including the addition of four new titles to the code.

Congress, however, isn’t always so quick to act. For example, legislation to codify Title 41, concerning public contracts, was first introduced in the House of Representatives in May 2004. It has been reintroduced each subsequent Congress since then, and was finally passed by the House of Representatives on May 6, 2009. The ball is now in the Senate’s court.

The OLRC has been taking steps to update its services. It recently started a twitter feed, and it is interesting to watch as the OLRC announces where newly enacted legislation should be classified. In addition, OLRC recently updated its “popular name tool,” which allows users to find legislation by its popularly known name. Another useful resource from the office is its online search engine, which returns the most recently published version of the code plus a page containing any subsequent amendments or notes, and Public Law citation information. I can’t wait to see what other improvements the office will make to their web site.

The campaign to publicly release government reports that provide policy and legal guidance to Congress were the focus of a recent New York Times article by Stephanie Strom. She writes that the Center for Democracy and Technology is spearheading efforts to give the public access to non-confidential Congressional Research Service reports. CRS is Congress’s “think tank.”

CRS reports cover a wide variety of issues and shape legislation and policy. They are written for consumption by members of Congress and their staff and usually cover a discrete issue area. (This contrasts with CRS memoranda, which are usually written at the request of a particular member or staffer and respond to a specific question.) Each year, Congress spends more than $100 million on CRS.

Sunlight Foundation Executive Director Ellen Miller praised newly reintroduced legislation that would make available non-confidential CRS reports as an “easy transparency reform.” The legislation, introduced by Senator Lieberman, would require all non-confidential reports be made available online.

As matters current stand, congressional offices release individual CRS reports to constituents upon request, and an incomplete archive of “leaked” reports is available online at opencrs.org, courtesy of CDT. In addition, a number of federal agencies, including the Department of Justice and the State Department, maintain an online repository.

A spokesperson for CRS told the New York Times that it’s “Congress’s call” to release the reports. The agency’s advice to Congress on the matter has historically been less reserved. This 1998 CRS memo advised Congress that proposals to “disseminate CRS products directly to the public would fundamentally change this longstanding congressional policy [of distributing CRS products to non-congressional users through congressional offices on a selective basis], with potentially significant institutional and legal consequences for CRS and current congressional operations and practices.” (emphasis added)

In a lengthy analysis, former General Counsel to the House of Representatives Stan Brand disagreed with CRS’s conclusions. He wrote “the concerns expressed in the CRS memorandum are either overstated, or the extent they are not, provide no basis for arguing that protection of CRS works will be weakened by your bill.” Brand refers to legislation introduced by Senator McCain in 1998 to make CRS reports publicly available. (The current legislation introduced by Senator Lieberman is co-sponsored by Senator McCain, and is substantially similar to the 1998 legislation). CRS needs to grapple with Mr. Brand’s critiques.

The public has a right to know the non-confidential advice that CRS provides to Congress. Arguing that CRS reports should remain secret is a non-starter, considering that many of them are already public. Their widespread use demonstrates their value, and Brand’s memo more than addresses many of CRS’s long standing institutional concerns. It is time to shine some sunlight on CRS.

Disclosures: I worked as a legislative attorney for the Congressional Research Service from 2006-2007. I also briefly interned for Senator Lieberman in September-October 2001. Sunlight Foundation has provided funding to CDT to make CRS reports publicly available. The Project on Government Oversight has additional resources on efforts to make CRS reports publicly available. Sunlight Foundation released recommendations regarding CRS as part of its Open House Project.

Aneesh Chopra, recently named as the nation’s first CTO, gave a talk organized by Jon Henke at New Media Strategies in May 2008.

I wrote up my reactions to the original talk here, and you can view the whole talk below (the first video of 8 parts).

One of the Open House Project’s recommendations was that Congress share its legislative data with the public in bulk and I’ve had a long history of posts on the subject. Over at the Free Gov info blog (link), Bob Tapella, Public Printer at the Government Printing Office, tells us that they are responding to this recommendation. He writes in a comment (presumably it is really him):

We have recently been called upon by Congress in the joint explanatory statement on the H.R. 1105, to work with the Library of Congress, including the Congressional Research Service, and the Law Library of Congress, to discuss access to bulk data. Specifically, the language is as follows:

[JT: omitted --- I've posted it before here]

To address this request, a Legislative branch task force has been assembled consisting of representatives from the offices of the Secretary of the Senate, the Clerk of the House, the Library of Congress, Congressional Research Service, the Law Library of Congress, and GPO. This task force has already met and is working to develop a position on access to bulk data. We will look to this work and the review by Congress to help guide our work on making bulk data accessible.

Grin.

Two recommendations of our report have been moved forward in the FY09 omnibus appropriations bill (H.R. 1105) which cleared the Senate yesterday and the House last month. The first recommendation in our chapter on legislative databases was that the Library of Congress make its bill status database directly available to the public and that the GPO not sell legislative documents to the public. These have been the two issues I’ve had my sights on over the last three years (probably starting here). The second recommendation was about coordinating web standards across Congress. These recommendations are addressed in two paragraphs the House statement accompanying the bill for Division G - Legislative Branch, which is almost like being law itself.

The two paragraphs were added by Congressman Mike Honda of California, one of our champions of the use of technology to further transparency and civic engagement. John Wonderlich of Sunlight Foundation, Rob Pierson in Honda’s office, and I collaborated on this over a long period of time. Honda got involved in 2007 asking the Library to look into this and then in 2008 getting the paragraphs added to the bill markup.

Keep reading →

(source)

Here’s an attempt to embed the video from C-SPAN of Hoyer and Cantor discussing congressional transparency.

It came up on January 15th, provoking discussion on our public google group here.

There is a nice article about computational journalism in the current issue of Miller-McCune. It mentions lots of good use of government data and Sunlight in particular.

Deep Throat Meets Data Mining by John Mecklin. Miller-McCune (January/February 2009)

(email from our google group)

Clay Johnson, Sunlight’s Labs Director, has put together an introductory post and wiki page on how anyone can help participate in the labs work.

In that same spirit, I’ve got three rather simple things that anyone could do to help open the House and Senate.  If editing a wiki is a challenge, don’t worry!  Still-preliminary formatting is among the best of all problems to have, and the editors of Congresspedia are always happy to help, too.

Assemble a clear view of what’s available.  When we first started the Open House Project, I did an inventory of the information House information I could find from official sources.  That wiki page has been cleaned up, and is now available on Congresspedia here.  I started a Senate version, too.  These two pages will help enormously, since we can’t advocate for more openness without fully understanding what’s available.  If anything is missing, please feel free to add it!  The Senate version of the page will have many of the same resources as the House version, but they haven’t been added yet.  We should also consider adding such an information ecology for executive branch data, although I think this work may have been started elsewhere already.  Has it?  Should we start a third (executive) page, and link it to the other two?

Share Events.  If you know of any upcoming events related to transparency in government, add them to our wiki page.  No single news source does a comprehensive job collecting events resources, despite exhorbitant costs, so that’s something that issue advocates should probably take upon themselves to collect.

Share Reform Ideas.  As the Open House Project moves along, and as the Open Senate Project catches up, we’ve got a ton of issues to address.  If something strikes you as under-addressed, or you’ve got a question about how to find some piece of information or data, please ask.  I prefer that we err on the side of too much (relevant) email, rather than not enough.

thanks!

John

If you’re like me, you’ll watch this straight through.  Start with “NEW Behind the Scenes Video”, and see if you agree — this is compelling stuff.

I don’t know what it is that makes this so, but even though I’m not a resident of Representative Buck McKeon’s California House District, I can’t look away.

In the video, the Congressman wanders through his office, conducting impromptu unscripted interviews with his staff, soliciting messages for his constituents back home from unprepared staffers, who manage such awkard replies as “uh, Hi!”, or “There’s my desk.”

But that’s what makes this video a sleeper hit in the world of congressional office video.  One might expect to be put off by the video’s awkward moments, where the boss shows up with a new video device and asks for messages for “the folks back home,” but that awkwardness turns out to be a big asset.

As Rep. McKeon and his new media staffer (whose desk we get to see) wander the cubicled workspaces of their coworkers, they manage to portray their office as entirely normal, approachable, and welcoming, in exactly the way that most offices are, whether there’s a view of the US Capitol looming there or not.

If I were one of his constituents, I’d feel quite welcome calling or stopping by the district office.