The Top Line
Good morning, everyone.
I recently had the opportunity to attend LegisTech: Artificial Intelligence in Parliaments, a conference hosted by Bússola Tech and the Organization of American States here in Washington, D.C. The event, which brought together experts from around the world, was a fascinating look at the cutting edge of the intersection of AI and parliaments. A few newly released publications caught my eye, including a list of 60 AI use cases actively under consideration by parliaments around the world.
I’ve also been keeping up with the Hansard Society’s take on the British parliament’s current agenda. It’s intriguing to see the similarities and differences compared to our Congress. They’re wrestling with some of the same issues—like managing member conduct, addressing seniority, and reviewing ethical guidelines.
On a different note, the potential election of Sarah McBride, set to become the first openly transgender member of Congress, raises important questions about how the House will handle the expected hostile welcome and commensurate security risks arising from how she is greeted by some quarters of the chamber.
For those who love procedural deep dives, Senate reform is on the table once again. There’s buzz about changing Senate Republican Conference rules and some discussion of changes to the Senate seniority system and concerns arising from how seniority operates in the House. I also took a quick detour on the effects of tv cameras in the Senate.
Rounding things out are a discussion of how the Congress keeps track of past-due agency reports and the Washington Post‘s look at reimbursing members for work-related expenses.
Parliaments and AI
On Thursday and Friday I attended a conference hosted by the Brazilian technology organization Bússola Tech (Bússola means “compass”) and the Organization of American States entitled LegisTech: Artificial Intelligence in Parliaments. It brought together representatives from many of the parliamentary leaders on AI from around the world. There were a handful of resources that I thought might be of interest.
First is a newly released brief, “Key considerations of artificial intelligence in parliaments,” co-authored by many of the leading legislative AI practitioners. The paper provides examples of how AI can enhance parliamentary operations, such as legislative drafting, providing guidance on parliamentary procedures, managing archives, generating transcripts, and supporting constituent relations.
In addition, there are two significant publications that provide guidance for AI use in parliaments. There’s “Using Generative AI in Parliaments,” published by the Inter-Parliamentary Union in April, which provides a 30,000 foot consideration of the topic. (It’s just four pages long). The Westminster Foundation’s May 2024 “AI guidelines for parliaments” is more robust, at 90 pages.
A final resource is an index of parliamentary use cases for AI in parliaments. It’s notable because it is continuously updated by the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s Centre for Innovation in Parliament. It documents at least 60 use cases developed by parliaments, with attribution to the relevant parliament and a significant description of considerations for implementation. Just a reminder: a use case describes how a system should work, not necessarily that it has been implemented. (I’m keeping a running list of parliamentary AI resources here.)
They’re just like us
I’ve been reading the Hansard Society’s weekly email on the British parliament and it is fascinating to see the similarities and differences between there and here. For example, issues their newsletter addresses include:
– Drafting legislation too broadly, before the details are hammered out, which would give the administrative agencies (the ministers) too much power
– Addressing whether and how to disclose or limit gifts to members, managing online registries (with imperfect disclosure), and updating the code of conduct. In addition, they’ll determine whether to limit outside income for MPs from media appearances, book deals, etc.
– They have “private bills” that address a broad policy issue but weren’t announced by the governing majority as part of their program. They do get debate time, as a matter of lottery, but the odds of success seem low.
– The party groups appoint members of the select committees.
– They have (and still use, unlike us) petitions, and they have a petitions committee, including the capability of receiving e-petitions.
– They use a liaison committee, composed of the select committee chairs, whose job is to “scrutinize” the Prime Minister and provide a strategic overview of committee activities
– They’re looking to increase the number of days Parliament is in session from 2 ½ days to 4 days a week.
– They’re looking at bolstering contempt of Parliament.
– They’re considering imposing mandatory retirement in the House of Lords at the age of 80.
Creating a welcoming Congress
The anticipated election of Sarah McBride, who would be the first openly transgender member of Congress, likely will be accompanied by a strain on comity and a rise in security threats, according to NOTUS.
We can expect some members to intentionally and performatively misgender McBride both as an expression of their values and in the hopes of prompting censure for the purpose of raising their profile and cashing in. Such mistreatment will also increase security threats to McBride.
Fix the Senate?
Now is the time to reform Senate Republican Conference rules, writes James Wallner and Kevin Kosar, because Republican senators have a great amount of leverage as their current leader departs that role. Will they use it?
Sen. Mike Lee put pen to paper to outline how he believes the Senate Republican Conference should be reformed. POLITICO’s Rachel Bade has the story and Sen. Lee’s letter. Among his proposals: limit the leader’s ability to fill the amendment tree unless 3/4s of conference agree; four weeks of debate for omnibus spending proposals; and prohibit the leader from whipping measures and nominees unless a majority of the conference agrees.
Paul Kane joined the bandwagon, floating without attribution or much analysis a handful of vague ideas of variable quality to reform the Senate. They include making it easier (somehow) to move legislation to the floor; ending the seniority system; gagging newly elected Senators, and banning cameras. Let’s dig in a bit.
There are many myths about the Senate seniority system. For one, it did not exist in the Senate for much of its early history. As Senator Packwood noted in an essay published in 1975, committee chairman were initially chosen based on who had the most votes (1797-1823), by the presiding officer (1823-1826), by a separate ballot of the Senate (1826-1828), by appointment of the president pro tempore (1828-1833), by separate ballot (1833-1837), by presiding officer (1837-1841), and so on. In 1846, the Senate moved to choosing chairs by the caucus. That change was made, he writes, because “the Senate was tired of balloting for weeks to choose chairman and fill the committees. It distrusted the Vice-President…. [The seniority system] enabled the parties to rapidly organize the Senate and assured succession to the chairmanship on the basis of party loyalty.”
For an instructive look at the House’s efforts to curtail the seniority system, look no further than an excellent, unbiased, and short (!) fact sheet from the Democratic Study Group in 1970. The House’s system was of recent origin, established (but also routinely violated) as a guideline post-1910 and not becoming invariable practice until post WWII. The fact sheet lays out arguments for the seniority system, in opposition, as well as alternatives and modifications. Many of those arguments could apply in the Senate context.
The seniority question is still relevant in the House context, too, as a Bloomberg Government article by Maeve Sheehey points out. Should Democrats retake the House, a number of committee chairs may no longer be fit to serve. How will they be handled?
On televising Senate proceedings, a historian might note that Senate committees had cameras much longer than the House. In fact, political scientists used to wring their hands that the Senate was vastly overshadowing the House. In the 1970s, Catholic University professor Michael Robinson promulgated several laws of videopolitics – I think a play on Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics – the second of which was “television alters the popularly perceived importance of institutions and individuals in direct proportion to the amount of coverage provided.”
Kane implies prohibiting cameras on the Senate floor would result in real debates or more compromise. The most likely result would be a ghost-town, as the only remaining incentive to speak on the floor would disappear. If he wants Senators on the floor, he should demolish the Senate office buildings, require members at their desks in the chamber, and eliminate the internal broadcast system.
If he wants senators to negotiate with one another, he must find a way to weaken party accountability and electoral accountability.
The history of changes in procedure in both chambers are often a catspaw for moving power around. Are there enough members with a coherent agenda who are being slighted by the current circumstances that they’re willing to push for a change?
If anyone is interested in what I’d suggest, my most recent recommendations for strengthening the Senate were issued for the 117th Congress – little has changed since then in how the chamber is managed, unfortunately. I didn’t write recommendations for the Senate Democratic Caucus or Republican Conference rules, which is where a lot of power is exercised, but I did write recommendations for the House Democratic Caucus Rules for the 118th, which I could brush up should I manage to find additional resources and time. You can see here all the amendments to the conference and caucus rules proposed in the House for the 118th.
Speaker Johnson, for his part, is floating raising the threshold on the motion to vacate and making an ill-defined threat of future punishment for members who vote against rules. Who would guess a speaker would want to centralize institutional power in the hands of the party leadership?
Public Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports
More than 500 Congressionally Mandated Reports are available on the Government Publishing Office’s website ten months after the agency stood-up its online repository. These are the reports agencies are required by law to submit to Congress, and the creation of a central repository makes it easier for Congressional staff to access them all in one place and obviates the need for the public and journalists to file FOIA requests for access.
Information on how to use the repository, including training materials that show how you can find reports due to a particular committee, are available online. Seventy-five federal agencies have contributed to the repository so far.
There is no complete list of all the reports that agencies are required by law to submit to Congress, which makes it hard to know whether agencies are submitting all the reports that they are required to upload.
The House Clerk does annually generate a partial list of the reports, however, in a report entitled “Reports to be Made to Congress,” issued pursuant to House rules. The January 2024 report can be found here and is 418 pages long. The Clerk’s report only includes a list of reports due to the House or Senate, and not due to committees and subcommittees. In theory, it is possible to crosswalk the list of reports published on GPO’s website against the list of the reports we know agencies must submit to identify missing and late reports.
Empowering GPO to make sure it receives all mandatory reports, including reports sent to committees and subcommittees, would require additional effort. Fortunately, the report accompanying the House Appropriations Committee FY25 bill would direct the House Clerk in collaboration with other stakeholders to assess what would be required to expand the Clerk’s list of “reports to be made to Congress” to include reports due to committees and subcommittees. Meanwhile, Rep. Quigley submitted testimony to the House Rules Committee on Member Day to update the House Rules to require the list generated by the Clerk to include all reports due to Congress, including its committees and subcommittees.
Broadening who is able to serve in the House
The Washington Post published a follow-up article on member reimbursements for housing and expenses that did not contain a single on-the-record quote in favor or in opposition to the program. The program, instituted with bipartisan support, allows members to claim reimbursement from their Member Representation Account for work-related housing in D.C. and other expenses subject to a daily cap.
The Post’s main gripe is that the rule does not require members to submit receipts, which it believes creates the possibility of fraud. Per the House’s announcement as reported by POLITICO, the “alternative expense and vouchering reimbursement process [] does not require the submission of receipts to reduce burdens and address the potential security risks.” Meals and incidentals are capped at $79 and can claim rental & associated costs capped at a daily rate of $172 or $258, depending on the House’s schedule that month.
Odds and ends
Proxy voting for moms with newborns is the focus of a smart Roll Call story that summarizes competing proposals to allow new parents to take care of their kids and serve their constituents. Even folks who generally oppose proxy voting may make an exception in this case.
The politics of disaster relief was the focus of my blogpost for GovTrack.
Hanging around the Dunkin? The Office of the Whistleblower Ombuds will be hanging out on Wednesday, Oct. 16th from 10-11:30… with complementary donuts and coffee.
Pam Wright, the National Archives’ Chief Innovation Officer, gets a well-deserved close-up in the Washington Post. (Congratulations on being named a member of the inaugural Open Government Federal Advisory Committee).
Fixing the Senate nomination process was the focus of a Senate Rules Committee hearing last December, and the Senate has now published a transcript of that proceeding, which includes questions for the record that start on page 72.
Vandalizing the Internet Archive is as senseless as throwing soup on every book at the Library of Congress, but alas a DDos attack took the site down on October 9th and it’s still running in safe mode. The Internet Archive contains an incredible amount of information, including a crawl of congressional websites at the end of every Congress and a ton of useful older research into the Legislative branch.
The committee report for the bill to sunset the Advisory Committee on the Records of Congress is now publicly available from the Committee on House Administration.
CBO scores CBO. Two CBO bills got their CBO scores. The CBO Oversight Act, which would require the CBO director to testify at four committee hearings annually, would have no effect on the deficit (although it would take up a fair amount of the Director’s time). The Congressional Budget Office Scheduling Reform Act, which requires CBO to “publish on its website an annual schedule of the expected publication dates of major recurring reports,” was also scored as zero budgetary impact.
Executive branch open government events
The Open Government Secretariat at GSA shared information about a number of upcoming (Executive branch) open government events.
Lessons for Open Government and Civic Engagement for D.C, co-organized by the DC Open Government Coalition. Tuesday, October 15th, 5-6:30 PM ET, in person only. Register here.
1st Open Government Federal Advisory Committee Administrative meeting. This virtual meeting will only discuss administrative matters. Friday, October 16th, 1-3:30 PM ET, virtual only. Register here.
Inaugural Open Government Federal Advisory Committee meeting. This hybrid meeting will review the OG FAC charter, hear from senior government officials, and begin the independent advisory committee’s work. Register for in-person or virtual attendance.
Deadline for public input to the 6th Open Government National Action Plan. Written comments are due November 12th, 2024. Read the federal register notice and submit a comment here.
The post FBF: AI, Senate Reform, and Big Challenges for Congress (10/14/2024) appeared first on First Branch Forecast.