Political Equinox

Nearly one hundred years ago in 1914, Congress created the Legislative Reference Service  to provide “nonpartisan, objective analysis and research on all legislative issues.”

In 2003, we taxpayers paid more than $86 million dollars to provide this service to our representatives and senators. If we’re going to pay that much for people to write summaries of legislation I think the public has a right for easy access to this information.

The Problem

A 2003 CRS internal memo states three areas of concern:

• Impairment of Member Communication with Constituents – So instead of recieving a form letter from my congressman telling me in their biased opinion how they plan to vote on the issue I could read an unbiased summary? Sign me up! I wouldn’t contact my representative ask them to explain me a legislative issue anyway, I’d probably look it up on the Internet.
• Risk to Protection of Confidentiality – Easy way to solve this, any documents that contain confidential information would not be published. Honestly, I’m not really sure how much this would affect the overall process. I don’t see this as a huge concern.
• Change in Mission and Congressional Focus – This issue is a joke. If someone hired to write summaries for congressman can’t do that because they know the public will read the document as well shouldn’t be working in the office. The intended audience of all documents should remain the congressional offices, the public would just have access. What’s the worst case scenario? Do academic journals lower their writing standards just because I might happen to see a copy on the internet? Absolutely not! You write for your audience and don’t let third party factors influence your writing.

Apparently, many of our congressmen and senators didn’t even read the stimulus bill. If they aren’t going to use the resources available at least let us have an opportunity to do so. Even if we can’t completely understand all the text in the CRS summaries, they’d certainly be more useful than the bill itself.