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Comment by LPisGood | Hacker News Reader

I started but could not finish a project I was calling “g(overnm)it blame” - the idea was to track each bill through committee and to the end either a sort of commit history to see which legislator (or at least which committee) added what part of the final bill.

I found it infeasible, but I’m wondering if you saw rich enough data while making this that you think such a project is viable?

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Maybe I'm too software-engineer-brained now, but to me it seems like lawmakers should just be using a tool like git directly. The legal code is a codebase, every bill is a PR, the arguments and proposed changes are captured in review comments, and the PR is accepted/rejected on a vote.

Aside from "lawmakers don't/won't understand the tool", why not do it this way?

I think they pretty much do, it’s just not recorded as such in an easily retrievable format.

From what I understand, it depends on the stage. The United States Code certainly tracks any and all amendments, and you can fully trace which member introduced which amendment, when and where it passed, and even verbatim floor debate.

However, the draft stage isn't documented this way. Members negotiate whatever between themselves (well, really their staffers) and this happens over email, in discussions, via Word documents - whatever works.

I guess in the git metaphor, drafts are in flux while being worked on as a commit, and are squashed and then accessible as such squashed commits once initially introduced or whenever they lead to bill amendments. You can't necessarily track down what member was responsible for a specific sentence in an amendment.

The thing is that there is a voting process eventually so it can at least in principle be known which version is proposed by which legislator, or which committee.

The people behind changes aren't actually as attributable as it sounds though because amendment text gets collaborated on, so showerst might propose an amendment with the key parts of LPisGood's wishlist in it, and then the bill itself will die and then various parts will get cherry picked into an omnibus bill in 6 months anyway.

I've see similar stuff in open source a few times. X post a bug report, Y replies with minimized case, X makes a PR, Z makes a few suggestions, Y add some comments, X updates the PR and W merges it.

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