Earlier today, a coalition of 15 organizations sent a letter requesting the House Democratic Caucus to publish its current set of Caucus rules. Similar letters were sent on January 31, 2019, February 7, 2019, and April 10, 2019, requesting the Caucus to publish the rules online. The coalition received a response on February 7, 2019, saying that the issue would […]
Written by Amelia Strauss, Amelia@DemandProgress.org Research and Editing Contributions by Daniel Schuman & Taylor J. Swift Download this report as a PDF here. Download the underlying data as a CSV here. Introduction Congress has a security-force-police-department hybrid, the U.S. Capitol Police (USCP), tasked with the critical mission of protecting the Congress—Members, employees, and visitors—so constitutionally […]
For the week ending February 6, 2020, there were 19 Capitol Police incidents reported; 58 individuals arrested. There were 5 traffic related incidents, including 4 invalid permit arrests. Capitol Police arrested 39 individuals for crowding and obstructing the entrance of the U.S. Capitol Building on Wednesday, January 29th at 2:06 pm. Here’s how this week’s […]
Some legislative branch agencies and offices proactively disclose huge amounts of information in a structured data format, disclose what they could not proactively disclose, and follow a FOIA-like process to respond to requests for information. Most do not.
On Halloween we posted a spooky story on the disappearance of CRS’s Annual Reports. The annual reports to Congress explain what the agency has been doing the past year — and what it plans to do — and, for our purposes, contain some useful statistical data that we want for a report we are writing […]
Today Demand Progress Education Fund and the Project on Government Oversight are pleased to publish a primer on congressional staff clearances. It is the result of several years worth of research. Security clearances govern access to classified information. While members of Congress are entitled to access classified information by virtue of the constitutional offices they […]
The passage of the Legislative Branch Appropriations bill for FY 2020 back in December started the clock on a number of projects and reports inside the legislative branch. We took a look at the requests, broke them down by office, and summarized the deadlines, which are drawn from the House committee report, the Senate committee […]
Earlier today, letters signed by 25 organizations were sent to the Committee on House Administration and the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration urging them to address issues of congressional and public access to CRS reports. Previously, Congress directed the Library of Congress to public current and archived CRS reports, but many of these reports […]
The Ash Center is hosting a congressional lunch briefing to offer recommendations and present road map for resurrecting a technology assessment capability in Congress with Zach Graves and Daniel Schuman, authors of “Science, Technology, and Democracy: Building a Modern Congressional Technology Assessment Office”. The briefing will take place on Friday February 21 from 12:00 to […]
For the week ending January 30, 2020, there were 13 Capitol Police incidents reported; 22 individuals arrested. There were 10 traffic related incidents, including 1 DUI and 8 invalid permit arrests. Capitol Police arrested someone attempting to enter the Senate Gallery while it was in session on January 22. The individual refused to leave and […]
For the week ending January 23, 2020, there were 11 Capitol Police incidents reported; 20 individuals arrested. There were 3 traffic related incidents, including 1 DUI and 2 invalid permit arrests. Multiple individuals were also arrested for disorderly conduct that included chanting, shouting, and dropping papers down the Rotunda of the Russell Senate Office Building […]
This blogpost summarizes some recent legislative developments concerning opinions issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. By way of background, OLC interprets the U.S. Constitution, federal statutes, and federal regulations. For many (but not all) matters within the executive branch, the opinions are considered authoritative. For example, the Department of Justice, as a […]