[Discuss] keeping an eye on congress

[Matthew Gillen]

On 12/20/2011 08:28 PM, Tom Metro wrote:
> Dan Ritter wrote:
>> http://www.congress.org/congressorg/megavote/
>>
>> There you go. Everything except a different name.
>
> The description:
>
>    Track your Senators' and Representative's votes by e-mail
>    Each week (that Congress is in session) you will receive:
>    o Key votes by your two Senators and U.S. Representative.
>    o Links to send e-mail to your members of Congress using pre-addressed
>      forms.
>    o Upcoming votes for your review and a chance to offer e-mail input
>      before they vote.
>    Use this weekly vote monitor to track the decisions made by your
>    elected officials on key issues.
>
>
> ...sounds spot on. Just filling in your zip code and email. (Note that
> the site accepts an email address containing a "+" character, but
> doesn't escape it correctly if you hit the edit link. I reported the bug.)
>
> I signed up. We'll see how it goes.

There's also opencongress.org.  They have a "money trail" for many bills 
that shows the supporting/adversarial organizations for a bill, and how 
much money representatives received from those organizations, and how 
the rep. voted (this example is the patent reform act from earlier this 
year):
  http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h1249/show
The money doesn't tell the whole story though; for that bill, the "Top 
recipients for ALL supporting interest groups" almost unanimously voted 
"aye", while the "Top recipients for ALL opposing interest groups" has 
the top 4 senators and top 2 representatives voting "aye" as well.  So 
that is likely a case where political and other pressure outweighed raw 
campaign contributions.


While researching H.R. 1249 I found a site that had the republican and 
democratic caucus' memos about that bill (summary of the bill, 
party-line reasons to vote for it / against it).  Can't seem to be able 
to find it now though...too bad, because it was interesting.

Matt