Congress held a hackathon on Constitution Day, Sept. 17th, at the U.S. Capitol. It's a rare, bipartisan tradition and they shipped code.
Readit Newsdschuma commented on Congressional Hackathon 7.0: Coding, Collaboration, & Culture Change firstbranchforecast.subst... · Posted by u/dschuma
dschuma commented on Constitution.congress.gov/constitution 6/8/25 –> 8/4/25 Diff web.archive.org/web/diff/... · Posted by u/ortusdux
Okay, folks, it's time to stop freaking out.
First, this is a link to the Constitution Annotated, a legal treatise that explains the Constitution and its written by the Congressional Research Service, a division inside the Library of Congress. They are NOT subject to Trump administration orders because they are a Legislative branch agency. There is a very live issue about the independence of the Library (that I've previously [written about](https://firstbranchforecast.substack.com/p/a-constitutional-...)), but at the moment the acting Library of Congress is independent and is not a Trump appointee.
Second, the addition or removal of information on the CONAN website has no legal effect and it's not an effort to conceal anything. More likely than not, it's an error on the part of the folks administering the website. You can find the print version of the document on the Government Publishing Office's website.
How do I know about this? Well, I used to work at CRS as a legislative attorney and sat next to the guy who edited the treatise. And then starting in 2009, when I was working at a non-profit, I began advocating for the CONAN to be published online, only to be rebuffed by the Library for more than a decade. Here are my [letters](https://github.com/DanielSchuman/Policy/wiki/Constitution-An...) on the topic.
It is entirely appropriate to be freaking out about the White House's efforts to take over the Legislative branch. I've written about that [here](https://firstbranchforecast.substack.com/p/submission-accomp...). But the CONAN website is not the thing to freak out about.
If you have concerns with the Congress dot gov website, and I have more than a view, use the LC's [feedback website](https://www.research.net/r/congress-gov-feedback) to let them know there's an issue.
(Apparently markdown doesn't work for formatting. Sorry.)
Deleted Comment
> I compare them to Roberts Rules of Order, Revised, which are straightforward enough that most people can grasp them with a reading or two.
Then why don't the House and Senate change their rules to something more like Robert's Rules of Order? All it takes is a majority vote of each house.
Because the rules of the chambers are not designed to be neutral, they're designed to advance the goals of whoever has written them. In the House, it's leadership. In the Senate, it's to protect the powers of each individual senator.
The House Rules change every 2 years. In the Senate, changing the rules takes 2/3s, and that basically never happens.
> In my opinion, the House and Senate rules are so complicated that only a few people can understand them. The procedures are used to gather power in the hands of a few, which undermines their original purpose: to facilitate orderly debate and empower all the members equally.
I disagree, and so does Surdy, as noted extensively in the latter part of this article. Congressional power is gathered and perpetuated primarily through means outside Congressional procedure like fundraising, PAC distributions, control of party apparatus, committee assignments, endorsements, PR, etc. Members of Congress have quite a lot of procedural power but choose not to exercise it in the face of these other incentives. This is not a view specific to Surdy; other parliamentary experts like James Wallner sound the same tune.
Those incentives also therefore dominate the attention of most staff, lobbyists, journalists, etc who make a living supporting, influencing, and covering members of Congress. This is the primary reason so few bother to put in the work to do what Surdy does.
I don’t mean to minimize the intelligence and hard work of Surdy, which is impressive. He may have a significant advantage by being so far from the Beltway bubble that he can ignore all that politics stuff above and just sink into the pure procedure.
He’s also free to tweet. There are other people in DC with at least the same level of parliamentary command, but generally they make a living by providing that expertise privately to those willing to pay for it.
I think you are missing the connection between the rules and the maintenance of power -- both the chamber rules and the caucus/conference rules and arguing there's a disjunction in my and Surdy's vies on power. Let's start by analyzing how power works in the chamber.
Let's use the House as an example. The three major pillars of power in the House are: (1) control of the floor, (2) control of committee assignments, and (3) fundraising/candidate recruitment.
1. Control of the floor is largely managed through the House Rules committee, the members of which are solely appointed by the Democratic and Republican leaders. This contrasts with other committees, whose members are appointed by the parties via the steering committees. From where does leadership derive this power? The chamber rules and the caucus/conference rules. (Suspensions go at the direction of the Speaker, and discharge petitions are rare enough to discount.)
2. While some committees are appointed by the Democratic/Republican leadership, most committee members are selected through the steering committees. When you read the party rules, you can see that steering committee membership is largely chosen by the Democratic and Republican leaders. Because leadership dominates the steering committees, they dominate how those folks are chosen. And, rarely, they will remove people from committees for not following their leadership.
3. What controls the head of the House and Senate fundraising entities? Those folks are appointed by operation of the party rules, which again gives most of the power to leadership. Plus in the modern era, the party leaders are the heavy fundraisers. And they play a significant role in candidate selection.
This wasn't always the case, and you can skim my [summary](https://firstbranchcenter.org/eras-of-control-of-the-house-o...) of eras of control in the House to see how it has been organized different.
James Wallner, who you cite, and I agree a lot. We both think it is important for the factions in the chambers to be able to express themselves. The current incentives for party leadership is to keep their team together and to split the opposing team. What that means is that they've crafted rules and norms designed to keep their team together and prevent defections. That's why most members don't make use of the procedural rules on the floor -- because it's not in their interest to do so. They feign helplessness. When you read the article, it first quotes me, and then him, making a point that Wallner would also agree with.
"But, Schuman said, something of a “rules revolution” has begun to brew in Congress lately, with House Republicans ousting their own speaker and defeating several procedural motions, while their Senate counterparts have freelanced on foreign aid and military nominations, bucking Mitch McConnell.
Surdy, for one, views many of these developments as welcome changes: His tweets often feature critiques of Congress’ centralized power (and how it is unquestioningly reported). He likes to note that leaders — by the rules alone — are mostly figureheads; it is only years of members following the pack, and choosing not to learn their own power, that have made the status quo so rigid."
Let me repeat it: power is centralized (at the top) and the members defer to it. The members choose not to learn their own power, IMO, because there's a collection action problem (which is described in the article). So far, only the Freedom Caucus-aligned folks have been willing to break that mold in the modern era.
One powerful committee chair (this was a while ago) said: “If I let you write the substance and you let me write the procedure, I’ll screw you every time.” The process dominates the results, and the process currently is designed to empower those at the top.
I'm one of the people quoted in the article and most of the others quoted are my peers. A bunch of us have worked on Capitol Hill as staff; several of us worked for Congress's think tank; others have written books on Congress. I say this only to emphasize my point that what Ringwiss has done is truly remarkable.
He has an apparent deep understanding of the rules of procedure that govern the House and the Senate, which are very different from one another, and he can keep them straight. I wouldn't have the patience to watch the floor for hours on end, and while I'm sure I could read through the precedents, it's doubtful that I could retain in active memory more than a fraction. I have read the House and Senate rules cover to cover, more than once -- but that's not the same as being able to operationalize them and recall it at an instant, and it's also not the same as digging through the precedents and understanding what they mean. That comes from a lot of practice.
Besides having a particular interest in the topic, my suspicion is Ringwiss has an eidetic memory. He is a remarkable person and I'm glad that he's doing what he does.
In my opinion, the House and Senate rules are so complicated that only a few people can understand them. The procedures are used to gather power in the hands of a few, which undermines their original purpose: to facilitate orderly debate and empower all the members equally. I compare them to Roberts Rules of Order, Revised, which are straightforward enough that most people can grasp them with a reading or two.
As I said, what he's doing is remarkable, but it's also remarkable that few can do what he's doing.
Nice! I'm glad to see work being done in this area.
From the About page:
> Now, in partnership with a Republican and Democratic member of Congress, we are making these reports available to everyone for free online.
How fragile is this relationship? What can be done to ensure openness like this can continue and be increased?
> We also show how much a report has changed over time (whenever CRS publishes an update), provide RSS feeds
Cool. I see there are different versions available. Are there currently diff visualizations?
Hey! The best thing to do is tell your members of Congress to support the Equal Access to CRS Reports Act. In the House of Representatives it's HR 4702 and in the Senate it's S 2639. The more they hear from you, the more likely they'll be to publish the reports themselves. (You could also ask them to provide the reports to EveryCRSReport.com... the more the merrier).
We didn't build diff visualizations for the site. Not because I didn't want to-- it was in the specs -- but because we didn't have the funds for all the bells and whistles. The code is on GitHub if you want to hack on it and build a new module. Or donations will go to maintaining the site and expanding functionality.