S. 1826 would temporarily suspend the duty on certain glass snow globes.

S. 1828 would temporarily suspend the duty on certain metal key chains with acrylic mini-globes.

S. 1829 would temporarily suspend the duty on certain acrylic snow globes (as distinct from glass ones).

And—maybe this would bring your family some holiday cheer—S. 1827 would temporarily suspend the duty on certain glass polyresin magnets!

Yesterday, a couple of resolutions were introduced in the House that I think are noteworthy. Many resolutions have no substance—recognizing “National Brush Your Teeth Day” and such—so we don’t even display them. But the ones that do something we display.

And we are displaying H. Res. 385. It would require congressional committees to publish bills within 24 hours after they have amended them.

Often today, a committee will amend and pass a bill, preparing it for the House floor, but it won’t give the public a look at the changes it made to the bill. Uncool.

Committee practice today is to post no bills. That should end. Kudos to all the members of Congress who cosponsored this resolution. Next, let’s talk about standard formats for posting those bills…

Because the great downfall of congressional earmark reform so far has been the fact that members of Congress and senators posted their earmark requests in all kinds of different formats, with no standard organization at all.

Our incredible earmarks project has compiled earmark requests, if imperfectly, in one searchable database, but this is no substitute for Congress getting it right from the beginning.

But I don’t think calling a committee together to talk about it is needed. That’s why I’m unimpressed with H. Con. Res. 201, which would establish a “select committee on earmark reform.” I suspect such a committee would absorb a lot of energy and produce very little.

Congress, why don’t you publish earmarks in standardized formats from the beginning? We’ll do the rest, the American people.

H. Con. Res. 201 gets a shrug of the shoulders and a “meh” from me.

But what matters is what you think. Here are the current votes on H. Res. 385, requiring congressional committees to publish bills within 24 hours after they have amended them, and H. Con. Res. 201, creating a select committee on earmark reform.

A deep fissure between federal lawmaking practices and the Internet-fueled expectations of the people is just starting to open.

Here’s a fascinating interview with Senator Tom Carper (D-DE), in which he justifies not reading the legislation that he votes on.

He’s right that the bills Congress passes are almost incomprehensible, but he draws the wrong conclusion from it. It’s not OK to pass bills that you can’t read and literally don’t understand.

Congress and the bureaucracy will come to learn a lesson that other parts of our society have learned: The Internet changes things.

Because it is now possible to see legislation before Congress passes it, Americans now expect to see legislation before it passes. And they will come to expect that their representative understand it—in detail.

A machine has grown up in Washington over the past two hundred years where representatives rely on colleagues who rely on staff to write bills. This has not produced a desirable body of federal law, and it is not a process that the public will accept for much longer.

A WashingtonWatch.com user and subscriber to the email list wrote in and asked the following questions:

Hello — I am a total “newbie” to your site — but I am trying hard to become educated about what goes on in Congress — my question is: every week I receive your updates listing these various bills and their associated cost per family (thank you very much) — are these costs in addition to the “budget”? or have these costs per family already been included in the “budget” — if it is all new spending, how is this possible? Are these people crazy? Where will the money to pay for these things come from?

These are good questions. The workings of Washington, D.C. are pretty obscure to normal people out there in the real world. So, in case it helps others, here is the response I sent:

There are basically two types of bills, authorizations and appropriations.

Authorization bills create programs or allow existing programs to continue. Every year or every few years, Congress reauthorizes programs and agencies that are already in place. These bills say that agencies and programs can do what they do, and how they can do it.

So this week, for example, the Senate is debating the National Defense Authorization Act, which will tell the Department of Defense to keep on defending. We don’t have the amount of spending that bill authorizes yet, but you’ve seen those numbers before.

Appropriations bills cause the actual spending to happen – they say that money can come out of the U.S. Treasury to pay the salaries, buy the pencils, pay the contractors, etc. The Defense Appropriations bill will actually spend the money on defending the country. (The Defense approps bills for FY 2010 haven’t been introduced yet.)

Before the appropriations bills get moving each year, Congress passes a budget. The budget sets the total amount it is supposed to spend in all twelve appropriations bills. The budget isn’t a spending bill – it’s a planning document. We give it an estimate and follow it on the site because budget-setting is an important step in the process.

As we emphasize on the “about” page, you can’t add up these different kinds of bills to get a reliable number indicating what Congress is spending.

You can get a rough sense of what Congress is spending in fiscal year 2010, which starts October 1, on the FY 2010 Spending Tracker page. The authorization bills show how much Congress is proposing to spend over several years by starting or continuing programs.

So there may not be as much spending as it looks like – but, yes! They’re crazy! There aren’t enough tax revenues to pay for all the stuff the government is doing, and it’s going to the national debt.

A company called Smartronix will get $18,000,000 to redesign Recovery.gov, the federal Web site intended to track where federal Recovery Act spending goes.

The government purchased technology for a similar site (with a somewhat smaller scope), USASpending.gov, from the non-profit group OMB Watch for only $600,000. A private company already provides information on Recovery Act spending to the public for free.

Seems like a lot of the Recovery Act spending is going into just building a Web site.

Here’s a good idea.

H.R. 2854 would require the Treasury Secretary to redesign the $1 bill, incorporating the preamble to the Constitution, a list of the articles of the Constitution, and a list describing the amendments to the Constitution.

Just this weekend, a friend of mine told me of a lunch she had with some important personages including some members of the federal judiciary. My friend was the only one who carries a copy of the Constitution.

I don’t think you could get the entire constitution onto the $1 bill, but some basic information about the Constitution could give everyone – including federal judges – some important signals about our government’s constitutional structure and the limits on governmental power that help make our country so strong, dynamic, and free.

Here’s the current vote on H.R. 2854. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article about the bill.

Earlier this week, Congress approved two bills to recognize native American tribes. H.R. 31 is the Lumbee Recognition Act, and H.R. 1385 is the Thomasina E. Jordan Indian Tribes of Virginia Federal Recognition Act.

And this week, we’ve seen a couple of bills introduced to recognize tribes: H.R. 2678 would extend federal recognition to the Duwamish Tribe, and S. 1178 would recognize the Chickahominy Indian Tribe, the Chickahominy Indian Tribe-Eastern Division, the Upper Mattaponi Tribe, the Rappahannock Tribe, Inc., the Monacan Indian Nation, and the Nansemond Indian Tribe.

What’s this all about?

There’s an existing way for tribes to be recognized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Department of Interior. You can pick through all of the details if you want.

But perhaps that process is too cumbersome or too restrictive, so people are going to Congress trying to get legislation that gives them recognition. Being recognized as a tribe gets a group a variety of federal benefits – but they don’t just get a check! The Department of Interior wants you to know that.

What say you? (Tribal leaders and representatives, this is your chance to inform us about federal recognition and why it’s important.)

I believe that children are our future. But I don’t know if that means the White House needs to look after them. There certainly are people who do.

A new bill, H.R. 2653, would create a White House Office of National Youth Policy to ensure the coordination and effectiveness of services to youth.

The good folks at WhiteHouseOfficeonChildrenandYouth.org say:

The Federal government runs hundreds of programs to serve children and youth ages 0-24, spread across 12 departments and agencies. The vast majority of these efforts are essential and effective; however, they are not part of an integrated, strategic plan to help at-risk populations achieve successful adulthood. Overall, the federal government’s efforts for children and youth are scattershot and these fragmented efforts, contained within narrow silos, are failing America’s young people.

For this reason, they say, there should be a White House Office on Children and Youth.

But not everything that’s important should be a subject for the federal government to handle, much less the White House. If the government is making a priority of everything, the government is making a priority of nothing.

Agree? Disagree? Comment!

And here is the current vote on H.R. 2653. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article about the bill.

The bills that make it through Congress are not always the best solutions to the nation’s problems from any one perspective, though they do represent hard-fought compromises among a variety of interests.

Among the plans for economic recovery that is only beginning to see the light of day is the “Nation’s Economic Cohabitation Act,” which is discussed at some length and detail in this video.

It’s a good illustration of how special interest groups work to advance their particular interests through the public policy process, sometimes taking advantage of circumstances like the current economic crisis.

Memorial Day hasn’t always fallen on a Monday. In the National Holiday Act of 1971 (P.L. 90-363), Congress changed it from May 30 each year – the anniversary of the original Decoration Day in 1868 – to the last Monday in May. Some argue that this change has detracted from the solemnity of the holiday.

Memorial Day commemorates U.S. men and women who died while in military service. It was first enacted to honor Union soldiers of the American Civil War and was expanded after World War I to include American casualties of any war or military action.

These days we enjoy Memorial Day as much as anything for having a three-day weekend in the late spring. It’s a legitimate question whether all the barbecues take our attention away from paying homage to fallen soldiers.

S. 70 would restore the traditional day of observance of Memorial Day. The bill has been introduced for the last ten Congresses, though, and hasn’t seen much action. Is this the Congress to pass it? Or do we want to keep our three-day weekend?

Here’s the current vote on S. 70. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article on the bill.