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It seems like every day, I hear about a piece of legislation inserted at the midnight hour into 600-page bills in Congress. It somehow manages to sneak through, only because our representatives somehow don’t notice. After all, who can be expected to read 600 page documents?

Lawyers do it all the time. When lawyers negotiate large contracts, they typically use a feature of Microsoft Word called “Track Changes.” Every time someone opens a document and modifies it, Word keeps track of the modifications, and the next person to open it can opt to see all the changes highlighted in color. This makes it relatively simple to only read the changed/added/deleted portions of the text, and also see who made the change. Lawyers do it, because there are multiple parties with varying interests, who really need to know every change that occurs, because they are actively interested in noticing all modifications to the contract.

Programmers have done it for decades. Modern programs have their beginnings as simple text, and programmers use tools called source control and diffs to achieve the same result. Multiple programmers working on teams need to know quickly who is responsible for certain changes, so that they can communicate and fix problems effectively.

I know of businesspeople, technical writers, and others who use Track Changes to great effect on a daily basis. It saves time and resources. If you’re working in Microsoft Word, it’s automatically available to you.

So my question is, for those people in Washington, what is used to create the US’s legislation? I can’t imagine it’s anything other than MS Word. I’d be flabbergasted if all legislation was continually re-typewritten by aides (talk about a massive carpal tunnel nightmare). Please comment if you have an insight.

As the public who must abide by and pay for these laws and decisions, we must have knowledge of their creation. We cannot ignore a small paragraph of a bill simply because it’s small, so why should Congress have a right to hide its inception? It’s a veritable outrage that we don’t have better insight into the drafting of these bills, when it’s so simple to produce.

I think this is a vitally important piece of pork-barrel reform. Expose all changes to legislative bills to two major groups. The first, and primarily important group, would be the legislative body itself. If they’re tracking changes internally, there’s absolutely no excuse for not noticing changes. The second audience would, of course, be the public. Don’t we have a right to know each change that was made, what representative or group was responsible for that change, and when it happened? This is simple accountability, folks, and it’s so technically available that it’s essentially free if Congress is using a modern document editor.

Note: I understand that Amendments to bills are publicly available through the Library of Congress. I am not interested in the stated intent of amendments, as found here, but rather I am interested in a historical timeline of changes to the documents that become law, viewable in a format similar to Track Changes or modern source control repository browsing.

Another Note: I was able to find certain textual amendments buried in PDFs such as this example. I would like to see this included inside a “track changes” electronic copy of the legislative bill itself, viewable hopefully by the two audiences discussed above. This is the format that lawyers use for final review. I can see no reason to not provide this type of doc internally to the legislative branch, and I would favor its availability to the public.

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