Proposal: Require Authorship Disclosure in all proposed bills and resolutions

I was thinking about these huge bills that seem to suddenly be authored and are put for a vote in congress without the congress persons even having read the bill or resolution before they are required to vote on it.

I was thinking that if the congressperson can not read the entire bill before signing it into law they are being negligent of course but I wonder if they knew exactly who wrote the bill if they would take more of an interest.

For instance if a lobby group for lets say "clean coal" wants some legal protection for their industry inserted into the bill. If they put language in front of a congressperson while the bill is in committee can you imagine if every author of every word had to be known? What if every piece of it down to the signature of the machine that it was written on and the person who was logged at the time had to be disclosed? What if every component of every bill or proposed resolution had fingerprints all over it to to speak?

Such a situation is not outside of the realm of technology at present. If the system was locked down in this way we would have an open system where special interest could not have a secret meeting with a congress critter and then another 500 pages are added to some bill hours before the vote without that information being disclosed.

I know that this situation is not an easy one to create but I can see it working in my mind's eye and I like the resulting outcome if it were mandated.

What do you think?

reply to post by wayouttheredude


I think that is a great idea...but i can see one problem.

The name of the author could sway the mind of the politician one way or another without even reading it...you see what Im saying?

politician a)
"hhmmm...lets see here...oh i like that guy..he donated to my campaign. deal"... (opposing legislation)..."dont like this guy..didnt give a dime...no deal"

maybe after the legislation has been voted on the authors should have to be disclosed...

star and flag

I think it's a great idea. Accountability is always a good thing. The representatives introducing the bills and amendments would be forced to consider how the other members would respond to the special interests authoring the bills.

Voting is already based primarily on party affiliations rather than content. Voting based on authorship would be no worse and might even be better. It could force closer attention to the actual content.

reply to post by Phage


That was along the lines of what I was thinking when I thought of this. I was thinking that if we could all see who authored every piece of the proposed legislation then we would be able to see the lobby or special interest think tank that actually authored the bill's components.

I know that there are shared work systems already being used by various groups like programmers for instance and each contribution to the code or in this case the law would have an authors hash marks.

It would allow a quick search of the authors and allow congress persons the ability to say flag if a special interest was involved in a particular piece of legislation. It would have to be open to the public from the online versions of the bill as well so we can cross check and flag certain contributors as well.

Your idea deserves a thumb up.

The only problem I see is politicians lying about who actually authored the bill.

I still think it is worth a shot.

reply to post by jam321


There is technology that is used for group work that makes lying about who the author was very difficult. Basically it installs credentials on the host machine that is going to perform the work if it is a staffer laptop or a congressman's desktop it makes not difference. It has a key-logger, it groups the login data, machine ID and if you like biometrics and stamps this into the shared work folder.

The system creates session keys for each login to the system. These are discarded each time and can not be recovered or reused. This is just the stuff I am familiar with. I am sure there are some real security system programmers that know more than I that can figure out a nice system and distribute it in open source format so that anyone who wants to check it can see the source and make certain there are no back doors so to speak.



edited typos:

[edit on 22-9-2009 by wayouttheredude]