In our search for consensus on attainable reforms for the House, few topics will be as straightforward as requesting timely publication of committee transcripts.
We have a model for similar reform in the S.1, the Senate Ethics reform bill, which was passed in the Senate on January 18th. That bill–specifically Senator Salazar’s Amendment–addresses a simple […]

A few years ago I launched GovTrack.us. I didn’t think of it this way at the time, but these days you might call it a mash-up of data about the U.S. Congress. At the time what I was thinking was just collecting information about Congress from various sources (THOMAS, the Senate website, and the House […]

Having spent a handful of years toiling away in the House, I thought I had taken the full measure of how confusing Congress can be. But it was when I left the Hill that I began to really appreciate how the way Capitol Hill works can seem from the outside to be designed to, well, […]

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“We pledge to make this the most honest, ethical, and open Congress in history.” Nancy Pelosi, November 14, 2006
The last time the House rules were seriously reconsidered was 1995, when the Republicans took over Congress. Since then, the internet has changed the way that Americans communicate with each other. With a new Congressional mandate to […]