1.7: Amendments
Other Information:
Amendments are not the good-news story that bills are. They are "barely available," says Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation.
"Given that amendments (especially in the Senate) can be as large and important as original legislation, this is an egregious
oversight." With a few exceptions, amendments are hard to track in any systematic way. When bills come to the House and Senate
floors, amendment text is often available, but amendments are often plopped somewhere in the middle of the Congressional Record
without any reliable, understood, machine-readable connection to the underlying legislation. It is very hard to see how amendments
affect the bills they would change. In committees, the story is quite a bit worse. Committee amendments are almost completely
opaque. There is almost no publication of amendments at all -- certainly not amendments that have been withdrawn or defeated.
Some major revisions in process are due if committee amendments are going to see the light of day as they should.
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