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Internet Life mind governnment

Congress and the White House

  BY LAMONT WOOD   

They're out there in Washington: posturing, fulminating, writing laws that affect our lives, and spending vast amounts of our money. Thankfully, we have the right to participate. Yes, we can write our congresspeople. The following Web sites will help you find out what's happening in the legislative branch and learn how to reach your representative on-line, but before you shoulder your new role as on-line public citizen, nota bene:
1. There is no way to predict what impact your missives will have. The comments of generous campaign contributors are likely to be studied more ardently than yours, but your letter will be taken as representive of dozens of other citizens who did not bother to write.
2. Be informed and be specific. Firing off general complaints about general subjects will net you polite form letters from your representative's computer. Succinct, informed input concerning pending legislation is much more likely to have an impact. Know what confronts your congressperson, and slip him or her suggestions on what to do.
3. Turn off your modem and buy some stamps. The latest count shows that out of 540 lawmakers (100 senators, 440 congresspersons and territorial deputies) only 181 have e-mail addresses. Another 77 have Web pages, and 40 have gopher sites. Yes, it's true: When making telecommunications laws, they are predominantly acting on hearsay.

Congress

For raw congressional contact information, the best overall site is maintained by hobbyist Juan Cabanela. Not only does he cover members' home-district office phone numbers, but he also lists office fax numbers and links to their Web sites and e-mail addresses when available. Juan also offers writing advice concerning how to make the best impression: Two paragraphs, he urges, is best.

For getting the big picture of what legislation is brewing, the best bet is the Thomas Jefferson server of the Library of Congress' legislative information system. You can get full text to, and search, all legislation of the 104th (current) and 103rd (previous) sessions of Congress, plus the Congressional Record for those sessions. You can search by keyword or by sponsor, and limit your searches to bills of one or both houses, bills that generated action on the floor (some bills go straight to a committee and die there), or bills signed into law. Unlike the House system, this server lets you download the full text of any bill. A search will also call up all mentions of the bill in the Congressional Record. For instance, you can locate the text of Sen. Exon's Communications Decency Act and note how the wording criminalizes anyone who "knowingly transmits or knowingly makes available" on-line pornography to minors. Through the Congressional Record links, you can read the senator's speeches in support of the bill, including his exhibits: two newspaper articles about on-line misadventures. You'll also find a list of bills being considered during the current week and bills that recently experienced any kind of floor action. We were less impressed with the list of major bills that had been enacted so far during the session, which appeared to amount to about one a month. Thomas' Congressional Record is the handiest way of finding out how the member's voted on a particular measure. Oddly, though, the entry concerning a bill's passage did not stand out from the list of items dealing with its other floor action.The Thomas site also sports an excellent set of links to other government Web resources.

At first glance, you'll think the U.S. House of Representatives site offers everything an aspiring public citizen could possibly dream of accessing: the status of pending bills, vote tallies, information on contacting congressmembers, legislative calendars, running accounts of floor actions, detailed information about the legislative process, and even an on-line law library. But remember, this site only deals with the business of the House, and so you're seeing only half the picture. What's here is so rich, wide-ranging, and detailed that it may take you a while to notice. Not only will you find floor and committee schedules, but you can see summaries of floor actions current to the hour. A search engine helps you sift through the morass of bills, amendments, and all the actions taken on each. (The legislation status information, incidentally, does cover both houses.) You can also search the database using the names of House bills' sponsors or co-sponsors, to see what your representative has been up to. If that's not enough detail for you, search the Congressional Record. Each member of the House has a page here, with basic background details and contact information including address, office phone, and, when available, e-mail. (Kudos to the 31 members who also link to their personal home pages.) Some sections that looked interesting turned out to be still under construction, such as committee hearing transcripts and committee votes. Last but not least, you'll find visitor's information here, including a map of the local subway system.

The newer U.S. Senate site, by contrast, offers considerable information about the Senate itself, but gives no peek at the business transacted there. (For that, you're told to check the Library of Congress and other systems described below.) Each senator has a page here with a color picture, contact information, e-mail address if available (Sen. Exon doesn't have one), a resume, and committee memberships. (If the member has a home page, you're linked to it instead.) You'll also see membership and jurisdictional information on each committee and general background information on the Senate and the legislative process. The latter includes a tidy organization chart and an essay on the mechanics of Senate leadership by its "parliamentarian emeritus" hinting that you might not want to take the chart too seriously. But aside from its almanac-style contact and organization data, the main draw of the Senate site is its on-line tour of the Capitol building, with clickable maps of each floor, linked to information about the various rotundas, galleries, and crypts, with optional full-screen color pictures of each point of interest. You'll even find selected items from the Senate Art and Photo Gallery, with complete background information.

CapWeb: A Guide to the U.S. Congress, a hobby site put together by a group of Capitol Hill staffers, heavily mimics the House site, with material on each member (contact information, service record, committee assignments, a mug shot, links to whatever on-line sites they maintain, and even links to sites in their home districts). The difference is that CapWeb also covers the Senate. Members are listed by state and party affiliation, and House and Senate standing committees and their members are also listed. CapWeb is a good place to look for links to political organizations. Of course, you can't expect everything from a hobby site: We wanted to see a legislative calendar, and some of the other information was dated.

A service called Will T. Bill is available from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. Eastern time, providing access to the text of all legislation of the House. However, it is limited to the 103rd Congress (i.e., last year's), and you need to set up your browser for WAIS access. Within those limitations, it did provide a wider range of searching parameters than the House system did, such as type, version, sponsor, and key phrases.

. . .and The White House

The vice president always needs to have a sense of humor, and Al Gore proves he has one by posting political cartoons of himself, scanned in from newspapers and used by permission.

Yes, The White House still has some impact on the legislative process. You can find out what the president is thinking, officially, at the White House home page. Not only will you see the obligatory tour and First Family information, but the Office of the President site is here too, with recent speeches, policy statements, and summaries of recent tours and accomplishments. The aspiring public citizen, however, will probably be more interested in the site's list of links to the Cabinet. We saw links to 14 executive departments, from Agriculture to Veterans Affairs. A few are just billboards, but most are full-blown Web sites in themselves, with reams of information about that department, plus the cabinet secretary in charge.

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton has a site that's noticeably superior to that of the average Washington politician. The biography is well-written, with links to on-line family photos, and there's an audio welcoming message and the text of selected speeches. Plus her poised on-line portrait is easier to look at than most congressmen's mugshots, with their stiff collars, rumpled hair, and cheesy grins.

Finally, there's the chief product of the White House: the Budget of the United States Government. Yes, you can get your copy of this depressing 235-page document. It's heavy reading. You have spending by function, spending by agency, and budget authority by agency, plus a bunch of essays on social problems and economic trends. For an overview, the charts on the front page are enough. You'll learn that of a total $1.6 trillion outlay, 48 percent is spent on direct benefits to individuals, 16 percent is for defense, 16 percent is for interest on the national debt, 15 percent is for grants to local governments, and 5 percent is for "other." Individual income taxes produce 39 percent of the revenue, Social Security taxes produce 32 percent, borrowing produces 12 percent, corporate income taxes produce 10 percent, and excise payments and other income produce 7 percent. But to read these figures takes a hefty time investment in your part. For a simpler approach, you can do word searches on the budget.

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congressional contact information

Thomas Jefferson server

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U.S. Senate

CapWeb: A Guide to the U.S. Congress

Will T. Bill

Al Gore

The White House

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton

Budget of the United States Government

word searches on the budget