(Seriously, you raise some interesting possibilities. I have no idea if they’re right, but before your post I couldn’t imagine what COULD be legit reasons for not fulfilling the promise).
Bricker, I didn’t know that his original promise exempted emergency legislation. Given that, I think he ought to say clearly that certain things qualified, clarifying that in this context, “emergency” means “non-trivial harm will result by adding a 5-day delay to the process.”
The HTML code is always released unless you’re using something like Flash or Java - it’s what your browser uses to show you the webpage in the first place.
Isn’t proofreading the sort of thing you do before you sign a bill into law? The bills are already organised, and bills are already permitted to be made available to the public.
They’re plain text - how could they not be in a compatible format?
Yes, they are already available electronically.
As Simplicio says, the White House website already exists. You’d need someone to read the comments, but apart from that the infrastructure is already in place.
Fish, none of your suggested problems make the slightest bit of sense.
What’s the liability of hate speech? Threats between posters? Are any comments endorsed by the White House by simply being on whitehouse.gov?
If you moderate it, is that a violation of free speech? what happens when a group floods it?
Given that the White House had their peepee slapped on the weekly radio address (persistent cookies) in the first few weeks, perhaps when they trialed the functionality with the DTV delay bill they found problems and staff are little shy to whip it out again until they’re sure.
I know that I could do it. And my computer skills are seriously limited. But if President Obama handed me a copy of The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 and told me to have it available online within twenty four hours, I could get it done.
Bills are already uploaded to Thomas, as someone said. If there was a problem with the White House web site the President could simply have his people redirect voters to the other sources of the legislation’s text and delay signing for 5 days.
Why is it so hard for some people to admit Obama isn’t doing it because he just simply doesn’t think it is good policy to wait 5 days before signing important legislation? It was an obviously empty campaign promise and not one that most people cared about.
I do. I built a network from the ground up last summer. Took about two months. We are talking punching down all the cable, pulling the 70 or so servers out of the boxes and building them, configuring routers, firewalls, configuring and installing a couple hundred PCs and 150 or so POS stations. We built a fairly complex network with 20 VLansthat is much more complex than a bunch of web servers since we have all different kinds of departments to support. Even if the Obama White House technical staff had to start from scratch this is fairly trivial*. We built a network with a core team of four people and did it in a very short period of time, though we did pull some really long days. If the White House technical staff can’t hack it, they could always call a vendor and get it done.
This is not particularly hard.
Slee
*The biggest thing I can think of that might cause a delay would be if they had drop fiber somewhere. If that was a problem they could always get space in a co-lo. Heck I bet the government has co-los that could be used.
You’re missing my point. That may explain a delay in getting them up, but not in waiting five days after they’re up. If I we’re Obama and I made that promise, I think it would be a simple decision to start the clock for five days—whenever they’re posted.