Support bills to put CRS reports on Internet

[Gary Ruskin <gary@essential.org>]

Congressional Reform Briefings			February 10, 1999

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-- Bills would put Congressional Research Service reports on the Internet,
and help citizens to understand issues pending before Congress.

	Yesterday, U.S. Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Patrick Leahy
(D-VT), and Representatives Christopher Shays (R-CT) and David Price
(D-NC) re-introduced legislation to place Congressional Research Service
(CRS) reports and products on the Internet.  These bills would give
citizens timely access to CRS reports on scores of important issues
pending before Congress.  Citizens, scholars, journalists, librarians, and
businesses have long wanted easy access to CRS reports.

	Please urge your Members of Congress to co-sponsor these bills 
(S. 393, H.R. 654).  The Congressional switchboard phone number is (202)
224-3121.  E-mail addresses of Members of Congress are available at:
http://www.lib.umich.edu/libhome/Documents.center/congress/conemail.txt.

	The CRS is a division of the Library of Congress, with a
taxpayer-funded budget of $67.1 million in fiscal year 1999.  CRS provides
high-quality, non-partisan legislative analysis and information to Members
of Congress.  Currently, CRS has about 2,700 reports available on an
internal congressional intranet only for use by Members of Congress and
their staffs -- not the public.  About 300 CRS reports are available on
Senator Tom Daschle's (D-SD) web site at
<http://daschle.senate.gov/services/crs.html>.  About 80 other CRS reports
are on the House Rules Committee web site at
<http://www.house.gov/rules/crs_reports.htm>.

	Taxpayers ought to be able to read the research that we pay for.
But taxpayers cannot obtain most CRS reports directly.  Instead, we must
purchase them from private vendors, or engage in the burdensome and
time-consuming process of requesting a Member of Congress to send CRS
reports to us. Often, citizens must wait for weeks or even months before
such a request is filled.  This barrier to obtaining CRS reports serves no
useful purpose, and harms citizens' ability to participate in the
congressional legislative process.

	The legislation (S. 393, H.R. 654) is endorsed by the American
Association of Law Libraries, American Conservative Union, American
Society of Newspaper Editors, Center for Science in the Public Interest,
Common Cause, Computer & Communications Industry Association, Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility, Consumer Project on Technology,
Congressional Accountability Project, Electronic Frontier Foundation,
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), Forest Service Employees for
Environmental Ethics, Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Impact Voters of
America, League of Women Voters of the U.S., National Association of
Manufacturers, National Citizens Communications Lobby, National Newspaper
Association, National Taxpayers Union, NetAction, OMB Watch, Project on
Government Oversight, Public Citizen, Radio-Television News Directors
Association, Reform Party of the United States, Taxpayers for Common
Sense, and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (USPIRG).  

	The bills are now pending before the Senate Committee on Rules and
Administration, and the House Committee on House Administration.

	The Washington Post published an article today about the CRS
legislation, available at
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-02/10/171l-021099-idx.html.	

	The McCain-Leahy bill has been improved since last Congress. It
now would also put on the Internet lobbyist disclosure reports, which help
citizens to track patterns of influence in Congress, and to discover who
is paying whom how much to lobby on what issues.  In addition, it also
contains a sense of the Senate resolution that Senate and Joint Committees
"should provide access via the Internet to publicly-available committee
information, documents, and proceedings, including bills, reports, and
transcripts of committee meetings that are open to the public."  Congress
owes this to the American people.

	The Internet is an efficient and inexpensive technology for
distributing government information to the public.  The marginal cost of
disseminating government information over the Internet is essentially
zero.  Congress ought to use this technology to distribute the working
documents of our democracy to the public.
					
	Congress has been inexcusably slow in employing the Internet to
distribute the important congressional documents.  Many of these most
valuable congressional materials are still not on the Internet, including
the most important drafts of bills, voting records in a non-partisan
searchable database, many transcripts of hearings, draft committee and
conference reports, and congressional office expenditure reports.
	
	Congress ought to swiftly pass these bills to put CRS reports on
the Internet as a down-payment toward providing citizens with the full
range of information they need to carry out their civic duties and
responsibilities.

	For a sense of the richness of the full collection of CRS Reports,
see the Pennyhill Press website, <http://pennyhill.com/>, which sells CRS
Reports, and claims to have nearly all abstracts of CRS Reports. 

The Congressional Accountability Project is a Congressional watchdog group
affiliated with Ralph Nader.  For more information about the Congressional
Accountability Project, or the failure of Congress to place its most
important documents on the Internet, see
http://www.essential.org/orgs/CAP/CAP.html or send e-mail to
gary@essential.org.

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Gary Ruskin | Congressional Accountability Project| gary@essential.org | 
1611 Connecticut Ave. NW, Suite 3A | Washington, DC 20009 |
Phone: (202) 296-2787 | Fax: (202) 833-2406 | 
http://www.essential.org/orgs/CAP/CAP.html
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