Congress-slime: "Stay Ignorant of Our Games, Voters!"

The Ruling Class has a couple of words for you:  stuff it.  Mind you, this Ruling Class bunch is the "R" slime, not "D" slime.

...Folks with computers -- notably, professional and citizen journalists -- would be able to take information about massive numbers of bills and analyze them in myriad ways -- if Congress would allow such information to be downloaded from THOMAS in bulk.

It won't. And, according to a new draft report from the House Appropriations Committee, it won't be allowing bulk data downloads from THOMAS anytime soon.

...Instead of taking a step towards greater transparency, the committee got hung up on whether people would know if the data they're seeing on the Internet were accurate and really from Congress -- "authentication," they call it.

The draft report “represents a tremendous step backward for transparency, and fails to seriously grapple with the history of efforts to free legislative information for widespread public use,” two staffers at the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation wrote.

After having parsed some of Flatten's list of tariff bills, the last thing Congress needs to worry about is being embarrassed by someone making up crazy bills and fraudulently passing them off as the real thing. The real bills are crazy enough....

Next time Paul Ryan shows up around these parts, someone should ask him about this.