Next, we'll allow you to Instagram our filibusters.
While noble-sounding in premise, I find the execution of this
to be agonizingly cynical:
Majority Leader Eric Cantor is launching a website allowing individual citizens to “cosponsor” bills, the latest in a series of online initiatives to increase transparency of the House.
The site,
cosponsor.gov, features a small set of "featured bills" on the front page and a button to "view all bills" that takes you to the rest. At the moment, the "featured" bills consist of an anti-abortion bill, a "Kids First Research Act" that oh-by-the-way eliminates taxpayer funding of presidential campaigns, a border security bill, an anti-Obamacare bill and two employee-screwing bills, all of them GOP-sponsored. So this is your rare opportunity to "like" a bill by Virginia Foxx on Facebook, if you're into that sort of thing.
This, though, is the cynical part:
Cantor is in charge of deciding which bills come to the House floor, and I asked him how much weight he would give to the recommendations of the users on his new website. “I don’t think there’s necessarily going to be a threshold,” he said. “I think that it certainly will be one of the things that our Members, both Republican and Democrat, will be able to weigh in terms of how they look at particular issues and bills making their way through the process.”
In other words, the site will "feature" prioritized GOP bills, list the other bills elsewhere, and the public actually expressing support or disdain for a given bill won't constitute any "threshold" for taking action on it, so sucks to be you, people who actually vote on these things. The "featured" bills right now, for example, aren't even the ones with the most online votes.
That distinction goes, sigh, to a Rob Woodall bill to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and replace it with a national sales tax, because of course it does. Given the _very small number of votes on each bill so far, it also seems an arrangement perfectly suited to astroturfing, so I guess it's good Cantor says they won't be paying much attention to the actual results anyway.
There's another minor issue here, which is that "transparency" is perhaps overstating things a bit. In actual practice it's achingly non-transparent: I defy any of the Facebooked supporters of Virginia Foxx's "SKILL Act" to read the thoughtfully provided text of the actual bill and come away with any glimmer of understanding as to what the bill will do or why it does it. For government watchdogs it's a good thing, but for Facebook-based voting wars it's all but useless. Instead, the only thing most participants will know about each bill is the syrupy-sweet bill titles and one-sentence rah-rah summary that does not necessarily have anything to do with the actual purpose or effects of the bill.
A tool like this can indeed be useful to the public, but Congress is probably the last place that should be implementing it. Cantor and Boehner seem to be heralding the effort as a triumph of Republican techno-savvy, but it's just an online poll. Literally. And online polls, to be blunt, suck.
A better, more "transparent" effort would consist of actual explanations of the bills, submitted by bill proponents and skeptics. An effort might allow the public to make their own arguments for the bill (a comment thread on a government site, what could possibly go wrong with that, eh?)—anything rather than collecting Facebook "follows" for bills, which may be the most depressing representation of democracy ever.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, however, and say that the end result of this is going to be to bite Republicans in the ass. As I said, individual votes for bills are currently at such low numbers that they could easily be overwhelmed by partisan pushes on either side, and the GOP has a rather poor track record of having their own online efforts subverted by nasty non-Republicans (Twitter hashtag wars, anyone?) God help the Republicans if the Democrats start using it too.