I've been frustrated lately about how Congress does legislation. Bills are enormous, too big to read prior to our elected officials voting on it. The average citizen has no chance of comprehending what's going on prior to a vote being taken. Too many unrelated amendments are added in, usually because individual members pledge their vote for some pork or pet project, or alternately because someone is playing poison pill politics.
I have often wondered what I would do if I was a Congressman, Senator, or the President, and needed to read all the material you have to make decisions about. It's too much reading for anyone but a speed reader to get through. I figured the way to do it would be for the staff to divide up the work and read the report/bill/law/etc. in sections and do short summaries of each part so that you could get a rapid summary. Then you could browse specific parts in detail if there were the parts you were concerned about.
I've often wondered the same thing about Jon Stewart of the Daily Show. He has lots of guests that he interviews that are out pitching their most recent book and it always seems like he has actually read the book. How does he have the time to read the entire book each time? I have suspected that his reading was outsourced to his staff for some time, and that he got some kind of cliff notes summary version to read. Even if they tagged just a few portions, the best parts of the book, you could get through a book in an hour or so if you only had to read a concise summary and maybe a dozen of the best passages.
There is another concept toward outsourcing and consolidating your work that is done by a website called Galaxy Zoo. This is called crowdsourcing. They take the evaluation of galaxy pictures from Hubble and let subscribers sort through the data with a tutorial and applet to help frame their answers. It takes a group of data that is too big for an individual or small group to process and makes it manageable. While the bulk of the data is still not examined by an expert, it can be accessed quickly and indexed for particular trends or phenomenon. This allows they to sort through some 200 billion photos of galaxies in a couple of years, where this would have taken hundreds of years for all the astrophysicists in the world to examine them.
Why not take legislative review out of the hands of staffers and aids, who are political appointees that probably also have political agendas? Why not crowdsource all pending legislation? Have people read sections and summarize them with an outline or app that standardizes the responses. What does it say? What is it about? What are the problems with it? How do you personally feel about it? This last would be in order to give weighted responses. This would be superior to a posting of the entire bill that had a long stream of random comments by anyone that wants at the bottom. You've all seen these comment threads, they are worthless for helping you understand the content of whatever they comment on. Some of these comments in typical threads are well reasoned and useful, but most of it is emotional or inconsequential.
You have to make a commenting community put their efforts into something more useful and accessible. Summaries could be weighted by reviews from others, or there could be a wiki-like function of editors that could block users that are just trying to obscure the subject, use it as a spam outlet, or derail the conversation because they are politicians or lobbyists themselves.
Ideally, a system like this would enable the public to look at pending legislation and quickly find the objectionable or flawed aspects of it, and put public pressure on their representatives to either amend the legislation or rewrite it completely. Ideally, this system would give power to the public to override lobbyists and special interests.
Unfortunately, it could be subverted really simply if our legislators decided to keep pending legislation secret. This in itself would be something that I would hope the public would protest, if they were aware of it. We've seen committee work taken into secrecy in the past, so you know there is a tendency to hammer out backroom deals outside of the light of public scrutiny.
The legislative review site I'm envisioning could be established as an independent oversight entity controlled by the electorate. It would encourage legislative literacy and participation, particularly if complex legal bullshit currently being put into bills could be made simple, quick, and understandable. I believe it could also bring people together in the center, where most real people reside, not in the extremes that the major parties often use as talking points to rally support and obscure the real issues and real way they run the government. It is possible that we would not need a new or third party if we could take back control of the two major parties. It is possible that many of these legislators would welcome a way to say no to the special interests and actually do what is right for the country. This pressure could be brought to bear if only we had a way of wading through all the verbiage and sorting out what is actually being proposed.
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