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Congress and the White House
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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:
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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![]() QUICK CLICK! congressional contact information Thomas Jefferson server U.S. House of Representatives 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 |