As a candidate, Senator Obama promised that he as president would not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days.
So far as I can see, this promise has not been kept.
Unless things like “The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009” are “emergency legislation,” that is.
It looks to me like only one bill, the DTV extension, was actually posted for review for the five days.
So far, I’d say President Obama has failed to keep this promise.
The Ledbetter bill was part of his frickin’ campaign platform. There were far many more than five days available for the public to comment upon it and even have it influence their votes.
Do you, in fact, have *any *valid examples at all to offer of this nefariousness you allege? This is beneath your usual standards (and, coming from me, you know what that means).
There are several possibilities, including (but not limited to):
[ul]
[li] Obama hasn’t given this as much priority as he originally intended[/li][li] Obama has been doing it, but it’s not easily found on the White House website[/li][/ul]
I think the OP’s question is a perfectly valid one.
If that’s the standard, Kimmy, it’s unclear to me what problem this promise was intended to fix, since every bill in the previous administration was posted on thomas.loc.gov when it was introduced in either the House or the Senate and the vast majority signed after more than five days had passed. In other words, if that sequence of events satisfies the promise, it was already happening with regularity.
For this reason, I assumed that when he said it would be posted on the White House website for at least five days, he meant it would be posted on the White House website for at least five days. And I assumed he meant the final version of the bill, as it passed Congress, not the initial text of the bill as proposed.
Thank you. There are more examples – The Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009 was signed into law the same day Congress presented it. The text of what turned out to be the final bill was posted on the White House site on 2/1/09, and it was signed on 2/4/09. A bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 2105 East Cook Street in Springfield, Illinois, as the “Colonel John H. Wilson, Jr. Post Office Building” seems never to have been posted before it was signed; nor was the bill to provide for an additional temporary extension of programs under the Small Business Act and the Small Business Investment Act of 1958.
It’s unlcear to me if ANY bill, apart from the DTV extension law mentioned above, HAS been posted for the requisite five days.
And here’s the Saint Petersburg Times article the wikipedia article quotes:
I think in all liklihood, the Obama administration just decided the campaign pledge wasn’t that important, and decided to break it. It’s not the first time, either for him, or for presidents in general.
I think it is a stupid campaign promise. What’s the President going to do, veto a bill because the White House got a bunch of emails on the subject? A bill that, in all likelihood, is the product of days, weeks, or perhaps even months of congressional negotiations, often with White House involvement? Get real. The promise is blowing sunshine up the behind of certain gullible members of the public. As if the C-SPAN crowd really needs the bill to be posted on the White House website to find out what’s in it.
It’s an empty promise for pointless transparency, and after looking at the exceptions to the policy, it looks like the White House is slowly backing away from it. It may be a broken campaign promise, but it was a dumb promise to begin with.
Perhaps Ravenman is right that it was a silly promise to make in the first place, but it’s not like it would have been a difficult one to keep. Even under his logic, it seems like the costs of keeping the promise are so small as to be outweighed by the benefit of making naive people think government is being more transparent.
So in that case, the real issue is not that he failed to keep his promise but that he made it in the first place. IOW he was pretending to be “change” by something that was in reality virtually meaningless.
Maybe there really are issues in getting the whole this working as they intend. Seems like it should be simple enough but I know from past experience things are not always as simple as they may seem at a glance.
From the White House website:
I’m willing to give them six months to sort this out (so 3(ish) months more from now). I think they all have a lot on their plate these days and I’d put this low on the priority list myself.
That said I will be disappointed and take note if Obama fails on this and lets it slide. Surely he can have someone phone the computer web geeks and tell them to get it sorted ASAP.
What a complete crock of bullshit. There is no reason this can’t be implemented on Day One. This actually disappoints me more than him skirting the five day promise.
You understand correctly. And I’d even venture that it was nice-sounding campaign rhetoric addressing an imaginary problem. (Hastily passed bills that do occasion hand-wringing, the USA PATRIOT Act being the notable example, would surely be classified as emergency legislation).
I think THOMAS works perfectly fine, and few bills make it from the hopper to the Oval Office in fewer than five days. I suppose there is the issue of amendments and conference reports, but overall, this just seems like so much “transparency theater.” If one is keeping score, then yes, this a campaign promise abandoned, but not a very important one, I think.
I’m disappointed that Obama has fallen short on this promise. However, there does appear to be some problems with implementing the promise.
“Sunlight before Signing” is not directly addressed but the general problems are addressed in this article from The Register with Google’s Director of Global Public Policy Andrew McLaughlin, who was part of the transition team.
It’s not high on my list so I’m willing to give them a few more months before I cry foul.
Maybe it is simple, push a button and it happens thing.
Then again maybe not.
In my professional (computer related) career I can guarantee you that seemingly simple problems can be perversely complex. At first glance the nuts and bolts seem simple (e.g. cut and paste bill to web site, wait five days) but the implementation can be screwy in all sorts of ways.
They could be bullshitting us or there could be real issues there. Unless you are privvy to the inner workings of all this I maintain you cannot pass judgment one way or another on this. I agree it looks dodgy from my armchair but willing to give a bit of latitude here. If he doesn’t deliver though then count me among the seriously disappointed as it looks even more like a dodge, “I want to avoid/hide shit” sort of thing.
Sure, the technical aspects may cause a delay in getting it posted. But, I can’t fathom anything preventing Obama—you know, The President—from simply starting the clock from after it is posted. If he wanted it done, it would get done.
“But hey, let’s just shove through a bunch of gnarly stuff for the first six months, okay boss?”
To me, the thing about stuff like this isn’t that I think it is a big deal. To be honest I don’t think the President or the Congress owe us x number of days to look over their legislation. This is a Republic, they are in charge, we elect them to be in charge. The process for rectifying bad leadership is through periodic elections, if the body public views certain legislation negatively it will certainly be very well known and understood by the members of the public interested in knowing about it well before election day–which is the only deadline the public truly has.
What it’s about to me is that many Obamites, during the campaign season, very much bought into the idea that Obama was no mere politician. He was a second coming of Lincoln, he was going to change how things were done in Washington! (Never mind that virtually every major candidate since Reagan has campaigned on “change” to some degree; and many before as well.)
I think what I really want from the hardcore Obama supporters from the election is some admission that the man is a politician at his core, that’s what he is, and he’s very successful at being a politician. He says things to make people happy, even when he doesn’t really know if he can deliver on what he is saying. He does that because that is what politicians do and that is how politicians win elections. It doesn’t make him a bad person, it doesn’t make all politicians bad people (although many are.) What it means is that you have to make a lot of promises to get elected to any office, and more so to the Presidency than with any other office in this country.
To me, a campaign platform is nothing more than a general set of goals. Realists understand that reality is always changing, a specific promise made in August of 2008 may simply not be feasible to uphold in April of 2009. I view specific promises made during the campaign as “things the President might like to do, but we can’t really say for sure what we’ll be able to do until we’re in the White House.”
This Republican is still “more approving” than “disapproving” of President Obama. He’s running at around a 60% approval rating right now and I’d say if I had to give him a grade as President 60-65% is about where I’d stand on it. However I still do not have much respect for his supporters who are still to this day “drinking the kool-aid.” It’s time to man up and admit the man is a shrewd politician, not some starry-eyed idealist hell bent on rebuilding our government and how it works from the ground-up. Get serious people, he’s not a bringer of dramatic change on the fundamental level of our government. He will certainly govern differently than any other President–but the Presidency has only been held by a very, very small number of men, all of them different individuals.
