August Recess
This recess...
MODERNIZATION
The next public meeting of the Congressional Data Task Force will be held on September 10 from 2:00 to 4:00 PM ET. No information about an in-person location is available at this time, but check the Legislative Branch Innovation Hub for an update and registration link for online participation, as well as records of previous meetings.
The last CDTF meeting in June included a notable number of demos and product introductions for tools behind the congressional firewall. This time, expect updates on the revamps of Congress.gov and the Senate’s website that are in the works. Speaking of, the next annual public forum for Congress.gov with the Library of Congress will be September 24, which will be another opportunity for providing input on the next version of the website.
MORE ON MIA PROJECTS
The Committee on House Administration’s Modernization & Innovation Subcommittee announced at the end of July it had secured funding from the Modernization Initiatives Account for a Rules Committee project and requested support for another. I can share a bit more detail on those projects:
The House Rules Committee’s PRISM project will be a replacement for the system the committee has used to manage amendments and floor rules digitally for about 20 years. It has begun to fail, threatening to bring work on the House floor to a halt. Over the last year, House stakeholders have scoped the project and selected a contractor, so the MIA funds will go straight to development of a system built for the current legislative branch data environment. Eventually, PRISM will integrate with the House Clerk’s Office and Congress.gov, which will be long-awaited enhancements, and also with member offices.
The My Intelligent Assistant (MIA, a play on the account funding it) project was developed based on ideas surfaced at the subcommittee’s hearing on constituent engagement modernization late last year. The constituency in question here, though, is House staff. MIA will be a chatbot to help staff find specific resources within the myriad of offerings inside HouseNet for things like office workplace training materials, how-tos, and templates from sources like the Congressional Staff Academy. Some of this material may only be found currently in specific training modules or resource pages for lessons, making finding them without previous knowledge of their existence very difficult. Rollout should be next year.
The deadline for the subcommittee’s call for ideas to help it develop a new set of modernization recommendations for coming years is August 31. The call is open to submissions from inside and outside the legislative branch and can be made on this portal.
CONSTITUENT ENGAGEMENT
Once a ritual of August recess, member town halls are dwindling. Only 11 members have them scheduled for constituents through the end of the month, which Axios attributes to rising vitriol at the events leading to the NRCC directing its members to stop holding them.
Although facing local crowds is a form of accountability worth saluting, the traditional open-format, in-person town halls are not great forums for effective or satisfying constituent engagement. Ohio State University professor Michael Neblo, one of the witnesses at the aforementioned CHA Modernization & Innovation Subcommittee hearing last December, has studied the positive results for constituents and members in shifting these meetings to an online format that allows collective deliberation on specific topics. Based on initial research published in his book with fellow researchers Kevin Esterling and David Lazer, Neblo and colleague Amy Lee designed a deliberative town hall model at OSU’s Institute for Democratic Engagement and Accountability.
Their research on the impact of the deliberative model on participants found that the format increased trust and approval of the members involved by double digits and boosted trust in Congress generally. It also produced strong depolarizing effects among participants in terms of hostility felt toward the opposing side. Our old colleague Anne Meeker interviewed Neblo and Lee on their program last November for more information.
AI actually can improve upon the model. At Democracy Fund, I supported development of an early experimental platform that Kevin Esterling developed to use AI to sort and organize incoming questions for similar content, balance audience perspectives, and moderate out disruptive or hostile comments. Technology has come light-years since, and the potential for further experimentation with online deliberative models is immense.
It may be that members don’t hold in-person town halls any more because they don’t feel safe, but the format is inferior for engaging substantively and productively with constituents and for building trust between representative and voter. We don’t need to be nostalgic about it.
ODDS & ENDS
See you at APSA. Daniel and I will be attending the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting from Sept. 3-6 in Boston. On Thursday, from 12:00-1:30, we’re organizing a panel discussion “Breaking Up to Hold Together: Congressional Faction and Democracy’s Renewal,” with Molly Reynolds and Ruth Bloch Rubin. Come by and say hi, or drop us a note to meet up for coffee.
Guard changing: Fourteen-term Rep. John Larson, whose health has been in question in recent years, lost his primary last Tuesday. He was in line to chair a Ways and Means subcommittee if Democrats retake the House in November, creating one opening for the caucus that is starting a public discussion about how it prioritizes seniority for leadership posts. At least one senior member, Bill Foster, endorses secret ballot elections for committee gavels.
Multiparty coalitions: Recent Harvard Law graduate Alexander Siegel argues in the Journal of Law & Politics that although Congress has organized itself around two-party rules and norms, its underlying structures could accommodate genuine multi-party governance if third parties consolidate into a unified majority coalition.
Proportional representation in congressional elections, meanwhile, has the support of about half of respondents in a new poll from Fix Our House and New America.
Summer enrichment: There’s still time to earn a certification from the Office of the Whistleblower Ombuds curriculum, which includes on-demand training.
Government Accountability: George Washington University’s Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration has announced a fall symposia on government oversight and accountability across all three branches of government. The first session is September 2, with monthly sessions following through December 2.
Multilingual: A team at Harvard’s Dataverse has translated 3.5 million parliamentary speeches made by legislators in seven European countries over at least two decades into English. Wowzers.
Do you remember your President Nixon? The Levin Center’s Linda Gustitus looks back at the lessons from Watergate for Congress.