Say goodbye to congressional resolutions honoring sports teams and say hello to being able to read legislation online for three days before House members vote on it.

These are two changes GOP leaders plan to implement at the beginning of the 112th Congress, according to Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), who will ascend to House majority leader when the next Congress convenes in January.

Other reforms proposed by Cantor in a Dec. 8 “Dear Colleague” letter include publishing committee attendance and votes online, renaming post offices less frequently and rarely, if ever, conducting roll call votes on the House floor after 7 p.m. (Click here for a pdf file of his full letter.)

Brad Dayspring, Cantor’s spokesman, says the 72-hour review period is a step that will help change a “ludicrous process.”

During the new Congress, the text of all bills will be posted online in their final form for three days before committee mark-up and for three days before floor consideration.

If a committee chairman is preparing new legislation, Dayspring said, then it would need to be posted in its final form on the committee website prior to the mark-up. And if a bill is changing as a result of the committee process or Rules process, it will also need to be posted in its final form on the Rules Committee website, he continued.

“Bills are often quite complex and can be lengthy,” Dayspring told OpenSecrets Blog. “The three-day rule prior to bringing a bill to the floor is already in House Rules. The Democrats, however, waived it time and time again — we will not.”

The notion of giving the public more time to review legislation before it is voted upon has long been supported by the Center for Responsive Politics. In 2009, the Center joined a coalition spearheaded by the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation that endorsed a plan to post all non-emergency legislation online for 72 hours before voting on it.

And the Democratic-led Congress frequently did enforce this three-day rule.

“That was a really positive step,” Gabriela Schneider, communications director at the Sunlight Foundation, told OpenSecrets Blog. “We’re still advocating for a rules change to create a more lasting impact.”

The Sunlight Foundation, which in part funds the Center for Responsive Politics, created a new website called ReadTheBill.org to push for the enforcement of a 72-hour public review period.

ReadTheBill.org also includes a list of bills that have been pushed through Congress without a 72-hour review period, as well as some high-profile examples of bills from this Congress and older ones that we passed without such a public-review period.

Some notable legislation that was rushed through: President George W. Bush’s 2008 bailout legislation and President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus package.

“When Congress rushes to pass complex legislation, the bills are not properly vetted,” ReadTheBill.org states. “With more time to examine the legislation, the public can help ferret out wasteful spending, sneaky provisions that were inserted by well-connected special interests and other problematic provisions.”

But the “read the bill” movement has not been universally embraced.

“What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?” Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) asked on the National Press Club in July 2009.

Nick Baumann, a reporter and blogger at Mother Jones, defended Conyers, arguing the symbolic victories of 72-hour review periods don’t match the reality of what can be reviewed and understood during such a window.

“Conyers is right,” Baumann wrote. “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.”

Bruce Bartlett, the writer and former political hand who worked in the Reagan White House, in the Treasury Department during the George W.H. Bush administration and on the staff of Reps. Ron Paul and Jack Kemp, has also criticized the “read the bill” push along similar lines.

“Reading an actual bill is a completely useless exercise for the vast majority of members of Congress and staff,” Bartlett wrote in a November 2009 blog post titled “Why Reading the Health Bill Is a Waste of Time.”

Bartlett further noted that lawmakers have an array of summaries and other analyses at their disposal, including committee reports, partisan reports from organizations working for their respective parties, trade group analyses, documents from think tanks and materials from lobbyists and “very high-powered lawyers who go through legislation with a fine-tooth comb.”

One must now wait until next year to tell what the new transparency push from the GOP will bring.



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