Maxine Waters (D-CA), in reply to a hectoring interview from Nora O’Donnell of MSNBC, related to the AIG bonus fiasco, spoke her version of the truth about how the sausage is finished in the US House of Representatives. Rep. Waters made it clear that no representative can read, or does read, all of a major Bill these days, and that what they do instead is to have their staffs break down a Bill and report to them about matters that, in the view of staff, would be of interest to the Representative or Senator. Rep. Waters, of course, implied that this process is imperfect, that staff do the best they can, but that mistakes of omission, if not commission, are inevitable and lead to nasty surprises about what is in the final version of a Bill.
Now this one makes me wonder. I know that important bills must frequently be approved without adequate time for the final versions approved by a Senate-House Conference committee to be read once again by individual representatives. This is regrettable, and also avoidable, if members of Congress have the wherewithal to insist on reasonable prerogatives, such as adequate time to read final version of bills. However, given their lack of willingness to defend their institution in this way, members of both the House and the Senate can substitute technology for courage, and still prevent the ignorance of what is in a Bill that leads to the stunned surprise of Representatives, once they find out what is really in it, from the rude Press, who, after its passage, gets hold of it and then digests it.
What Congress can do, in short, is to update its search technology, so that Congressional Staff can easily track changes from version to version of a Bill in subject matters of interest. This is not rocket science these days. All one has to do is make sure that Bills are marked up in the context of a system that tracks versions and that provides for versions to be searched for references to major areas of interest. Subject matter key words or phrases can be updated for each major bill so that there are current “tag clouds” representing “folksonomies” for each Bill, which people can easily search on. When staff is given access to the final version of a Bill, all it has to do is use its knowledge of the Interests of a Congressperson to decide which tags to search on, and results of interest would be instantly retrieved. In the case of the AIG bonuses, searching on “Executive Compensation” in the final version of the Stimulus Bill would have quickly and certainly revealed that Chris Dodd had changed the original language of the Bill. With this fairly rudimentary knowledge management capability there would be no more excuses about one not knowing what was in a Bill one had voted for.