President Obama’s third full year in office came to an end last week, and I’ve reviewed how well he’s doing with one particular campaign promise on the Cato@LIberty blog. “Sunlight Before Signing” is the moniker for the president’s campaign promise to post online the bills Congress sends him for five days before signing them.

As we start the fourth year, he’s at just over 50% on fulfillment of the promise. Far less if you measure based on the number of pages that got the sunlight he promised.

So I say in Politico today. Highlights:

During his first two years in office, the president generated a lot of heat in the transparency area — but little sunlight. House Republicans can quickly outshine Obama and the Democratic Senate. It all depends on how they implement the watch phrase of their amendment package: “publicly available in electronic form.” . . . The House can reach the gold standard for transparency if its new practices make introducing a bill and publishing the bill online the same thing. Moving a bill out of committee and posting the committee-passed version as online data must also be the same thing. Voting on a bill and publishing all data about the vote online must be standard procedure. . . . The transparency community owes it to Congress to say how it wants to get the data.

Of course, I’ve fooled you just a little bit. The whole thing is a highlight! (ahem) Read it.

The Obama administration seems to be working to pull defeat from the jaws of victory on the president’s “Sunlight Before Signing” campaign promise. Whitehouse.gov sometimes posts bills as “pending” before they get out of Congress, when it’s premature to ask the public for a final review.

The problem is particularly acute today, as I note in a Cato@Liberty post:

H.R. 1586 is a “shell bill” that Congress has been batting back and forth, and it has covered various subject matters in its busy life. It indeed started out as a bill to tax the bonuses of executives in TARP-subsidized firms. When it passed the House, though, it had become the “Aviation Safety and Investment Act of 2010.” And this week it was amended in the Senate to contain a potpourri of spending and revenue programs. (WashingtonWatch.com cost estimate: $125 per U.S. family.) Lets say a high schooler has been assigned by her teacher to monitor the bills President Obama receives from Congress. From the White House’s pending legislation page, she clicks on a link to find a bewildering hodgepodge of bill versions on the Thomas page for the bill. (Click on the image at right to see a screen capture.) And none of the bill versions has passed Congress! Thomas, the Library of Congress’ legislative tracking service, tells visitors that the last bill listed is most recent. But the current version of the bill is item four of six, referrred to as the “XXXXXXAct ofXXXX.” Thanks to Whitehouse.gov, our high schooler is misled into believing that President Obama will soon sign a tax on bonsuses given to TARP-slurping executives when in fact a variety of other policies may soon pass.

The phrase, “well, 26 times, but who‘s counting?” has 26 letters and numbers in it. Each one in this Cato@Liberty blog post about the Obama administration’s moves toward implementing Sunlight Before Signing is a link to another post about Sunlight Before Signing. I do like to entertain me.

Recall that President Obama promised on the campaign trail that he would post bills Congress sends him online for five days before he signs them. His early performance was not good, but he’s improving and Whitehouse.gov took major steps in the last few weeks to advance the ball.

There are now RSS feeds on Whitehouse.gov’s new “pending legislation” page—the stuff getting that sunlight—as well as on the “signed legislation” and “vetoed legislation” pages. Readers of this blog certainly know how feeds can propagate information.

As I said in my C@L post, “A habit of civic awareness can take root thanks to these RSS feeds . . . . We’ll have a more engaged, self-governing citizenry as a result.”

Won’t you help with that process by using these feeds yourself, and by promoting them to others by writing about the feeds, forwarding this post, reTweeting and so on?

Thanks!

Sincerely, Democracy

Over on the WashingtonWatch.com blog, I’ve laid out in the simplest terms I could what’s going on in terms of procedure with health care overhaul legislation. The post, called “What is Deeming, Anyway?“, comes in at a mere 900 words… If you’re a real public policy junkie, you might like it.

But what about the transparency oriented processes that President Obama and leaders like Speaker Pelosi promised the public? Recall that the Speaker promised to post the health care bill online for 72 hours before a vote back in September.

There was debate about whether she stuck to her promise then. And it was probably a one-time promise. It’s almost certain that she will not do so now. If she lines up the votes to pass the bill, the vote will happen. Right. Then.

What about President Obama’s promise to put health care negotiations on C-SPAN? The daylong roundtable debate on health care was an engaging illustration of what happens when you do transparent legislating. Voters got a clearer picture of where each side stands—and perhaps saw that there actually is some competence on both sides of the aisle. Some competence.

The health care negotiations going on right now are the ones that matter. This is when the most important details are being hammered out. This is when the bargaining that draws the public’s ire is happening. But I’m not seeing it on C-SPAN.

President Obama’s promise may have been naive, but that doesn’t excuse it. The inside negotiations going on this week represent an ongoing violation of the president’s C-SPAN promise.

And there’s good reason to anticipate that the president will violate his Sunlight Before Signing promise as well. This was his promise to post bills online for five days after he receives them from Congress before signing them into law.

The reason why I’m so confident of a prospective violation—aside from the promise being flouted more often than not—is that the White House has posted the Senate-passed health care overhaul bill on the “Pending Legislation” page of Whitehouse.gov. H.R. 3590 as passed by the Senate is right there in among the bills Congress has passed, which are getting their five-day public review.

If the White House plans to argue that the health care overhaul legislation got the five-day public review President Obama promised, that will not fly at all.

The substance of the Sunlight Before Signing promise is to post bills for five days after Congress’ final vote. (I’ve recommended starting the clock at “presentment,” the formal constitutional step when the president receives a bill from Congress.)

Something other than that, such as posting the Senate bill before it passes the House—while failing to post the “fixer” bill for five days—would fundamentally violate the president’s transparency promise.

What an irony if all this were to happen this week, which, after all, is Sunshine Week!

I’m delighted to report that the White House’s web site, Whitehouse.gov, has begun posting the bills Congress sends down Pennsylvania Avenue so they can get a final public review. This actually began some time ago, but a link from the home page now directs visitors (and search engines) to the bills that await the president’s signature.

This is an important step toward fulfilling President Obama’s campaign promise to post the bills he receives from Congress online for five days before he signs them.

Take a look for yourself: On the Whitehouse.gov home page, a link at the bottom of the “Featured Legislation” column says “Comment on Pending Legislation.”

Currently, four bills are listed there, arranged in order by the dates they were posted. The final language isn’t posted at the link, and it takes a little sophistication to find the final version at the linked-to page on the Thomas system, but this is substantial progress.

Kudos to the White House for moving toward full implementation of President Obama’s Sunlight Before Signing promise!

The White House announces its open government plans today, live at 11:00 am Eastern, on Whitehouse.gov.

But what about the president’s promise to run his own White House more transparently? In a post on Cato@Liberty this morning, I look into a new development on the Sunlight Before Signing promise, which he has violated more than 100 times since taking office.

At some point earlier this year, the White House began posting links on Whitehouse.gov to bills that were heading its direction, a half-measure the White House told the New York Times it would take. I failed to notice the existence of these pages, but I think it is forgivable error. There is no uniform structure to them, and there is no link I can discover on Whitehouse.gov that would bring anyone to them. Based on my spot-checking, they haven’t been crawled by any search engine, so the only way a person could find them is by searching on Whitehouse.gov for phrases on the yet unseen pages or by searching the House or Senate bill numbers of bills that you know to look for because they have already passed into law. This doesn’t fulfill the spirit of the Sunlight Before Signing pledge. It doesn’t give the public an opportunity to review final bills and comment before the president signs them. I doubt if a single one of the people who cheered when President Obama made his Sunlight Before Signing pledge has visited one of these pages and commented to the president as he told them they would be able to do. There are further curiosities: The pages themselves are undated, but their “posted” dates, which appear in search results, are sometimes well beyond the date on which they became law. A Whitehouse.gov search for H.R. 2131, which became Public Law 111-70 on October 9th, shows that it was posted for comment on October 23rd.

Is the White House posting bills for review after they’ve become law, trying to make it look like they’re providing some measure of sunlight?