More on Eric Cantor and “Read the Bill”

Flickr/<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffanddayna/4263850948/sizes/z/in/photostream/">jeff_golden</a> (<a href="http://www.creativecommons.org">Creative Commons</a>).

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On Monday, I wrote about future House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s pledge to adhere to the “three day rule,” which requires legislation be posted online three days before the House votes on it. Here’s why I think just reading the bill isn’t enough:

Better ‘read the bill’ reform would start, I think, with extending to all of Congress the Senate Finance Committee’s tradition of debating and voting on bills written in ‘conceptual language’—otherwise known as plain English. If that was the standard for what was being voted on and discussed and posted on the web in advance, ordinary people and members of Congress (and journalists, for that matter) would be much more likely to actually understand what was going on.

There’s more to this story, though. Conceptual language is great for understanding a bill initially. But eventually lawyers have to translate it into bill text. If something gets lost in translation, lawmakers sometimes have to spend years trying to get it corrected. A friend suggested a way around this: make committee reports more available and accessible.

Committee reports are actually pretty readable (here’s one on a FEMA oversight bill), and offer not just an explanation for what the bill does but also why people believe it’s necessary.

Report language even has some of the effect of law because courts use it when they’re looking for evidence of congressional intent. But right now, you need to sift through link after link on THOMAS to get from the text of a bill to a report explaining what it does. Also, too many people don’t even know that these committee reports exist.

This is fixable. If using conceptual language is impractical, Congress could just require these comprehensive, readable reports—reports that are already written for bills as they are passed out of Committee—be made easily accessible online. It would certainly be a step in the right direction. Does the bill you’re trying to understand today have a committee report associated with it? You can search committee reports here.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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