I dream of the day legislation is drafted using git and the public can see the pull request from Comcast Corp. lobbyists adding the language to a Senate staff member's fork of the draft and track it being merged up the tree.
Even that would be fine, we would still see that Representative Smith inserted the language into the bill. Its the person that has merge permissions into the main branch that has the accountability
This solves what, exactly? We already know bill sponsors, the provenance of bills is generally not a problem in the US. All the regulatory capture and pork usually happens in the open already.
I’d be less concerned with elected officials taking credit for “good” legislative language they didn’t actually draft and more concerned with a “language laundering” of sorts. By that I mean situations where the “bad” legislative language couldn’t be easily attributed to any specific elected official’s office because they’ve colluded to make successive, small, innocuous changes that, when taken together, turned in to “bad” language but it’s not easy to pinpoint which change, exactly, made the draft “bad”.
Even if the changed was committed by @OfficialComcast, a significant contingent of the temporarily embarrassed millionaires would accept this as the best course of action. After all those captains of industry are experts and probably shouldn't be questioned.
Captain of industry is an ironic name: a captain is typically someone that has been placed in authority by even higher powers, that's not typically how industry leaders like to describe their ascent.
Captian comes from the Byzantine latin word Katepano, while it can mean "placed at the top", there is no implications of higher authority placing them. Usual interpretations are that the person facually at the top how he got there is not really a factor. Somewhat akin to saying "boss" today.
It's different from state to state, but most have some repository you can search. Local governments really vary based on size of city (rural areas have almost nothing online, but cities tend to have trackers).
For most people, I assume they're talking about the federal government when they say things like you said. I just want you to know that it's already open and available. For straight legislation - congress.gov tracks bills and gives you the text of most things. Whereas federalregister.gov gives you regulation changes.
Yes, there is a day or two delay on congress.gov from introduction and when it is transmitted from the GPO to the Library of Congress. But overall it's pretty quick.
Have you heard of (YC backed) UpCodes? You might find their legal troubles[1] interesting and infuriating. TLDR: They were sued for copyright infringement for publishing housing code that had been adopted as law.
