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Published Monday, November 02, 2009 in Opinion

The bill is political, but it could bring transparency to the legislative process

Editorial

Editor's note: Today's guest editorial is from the Athens Banner-Herald.

The fact that its sponsor and his 26 co-sponsors -- including Georgia Sens. Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson -- are all Republicans is all you need to know to understand that Senate Bill 1772 is a wholly political maneuver.

That doesn't mean, though, that the proposal is a bad idea.

As currently written, the bill would require that all legislative matters be available to the public, and fully "scored" by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, 72 hours before being considered in a Senate subcommittee, committee or on the Senate floor. CBO scoring is an estimate of the cost of a piece of pending legislation.

More specifically, Kentucky Sen. Jim Bunning's bill would require legislative materials to be posted on the Internet, in searchable form, 72 hours before all or part of the Senate could proceed on it. Senate Bill 1772 would mandate that legislative matters be posted on the involved committee's website, and that the CBO scoring be posted on that office's website in compliance with the 72-hour deadline. The bill also would make it out of order for the full Senate to proceed on a matter that hadn't been posted as required by the proposed legislation.

But it's also important to note that the bill gives Senate committees and subcommittees an out. If two-thirds of the members of a committee or subcommittee agree, the requirement for 72-hour notice on legislative matters could be waived.

Still, politically motivated though it may be -- as the Democrat-dominated Congress moves forward with health care reform legislation, and as the White House has repeatedly failed to honor a promise to post legislation on its Web site for five days before the president signs it into law -- the Republican-backed effort on Senate Bill 1772 would serve to bring more transparency to the legislative process.

It would ensure that the public would at least have access to information on the plans that Congress is making for the country -- and the potential cost of those plans -- in time to react and let their views be known to their member of Congress.

Of course, in the currently polarized environment of civic discourse, the 72-hour rule proposed in Senate Bill 1772 would provide plenty of time for radio talk-show hosts and cable TV pundits on the right and on the left to engage in their usual obfuscation, but that might be a price worth paying, if the public would take advantage of the rule to inform itself on the issue at hand.

And that, in the end, will be the key to any benefit that Senate Bill 1772 -- if it should become law -- might bring to the country.

It's one thing to make information on legislative matters available to the public in a timely manner, but it's quite another to hope that the public -- individual citizens, all across the country -- might become engaged enough with the issues to take advantage of the opportunity to review, and provide feedback to their representatives about, those legislative matters.

The bill would be a good tool, but only if it would be used by the public.

As a footnote, it should be noted volumes of information about what's going on in Congress, from the text and the status of individual bills, to calendars for the House and Senate, already are available online at thomas.loc.gov, operated by the Library of Congress. The site was launched in 1995, at the direction of Congress.

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