Bill: Rejected Legislative Transparency Act

[Smami]

A
BILL
TO
Amend the Legislative Standards Act
To Improve Congressional Transparency​

The people of the Commonwealth of Redmont, through their elected Representatives in the Congress and the force of law ordained to that Congress by the people through the constitution, do hereby enact the following provisions into law:

1 — Short Title and Enactment
(1) This Act may be cited as the 'Legislative Transparency Act.'
(2) This Act shall be enacted immediately upon its signage.
(3) This Act has been authored by TheStormcrafter and Representative Smami.
(4) This Act has been co-sponsored by Representative Talion77.

2 — Reasons
(1) Many internal channels are already subject to FOI-Requests.
(2) Having them invisible to the public muddies congressional action and increases burdens on the presiding officers who then have to manually gather the requested information.
(3) Having these channels read-only for members of the public has already been proven to work on StateCraft.

3 — Amendments to the LSA
Insert a new section 19a — Congressional Transparency into the Legislative Standards Act reading the following:

“
(1) All channels not explicitly classified shall be made available to the public read-only.
(2) The channels #congress-chat, #house-chat and #senate-chat shall not be classified under any circumstances.
(3) The congressional Discord server shall have a ticket bot established and maintained for the purposes of any citizen being able to directly contact their congresspeople, which shall satisfy the following criteria:
(a) A ticket may be opened by anyone.
(b) The person opening the ticket may add anyone they deem appropriate.
(c) Anyone not expressly added to the ticket is barred from accessing its content.
”

 

[Franciscus]

Nay. Two primary reasons:

1. Regarding the proposed 19(a)(2): There are times when chats like #house-chat or #congress-chat might be useful for sending out when2meet links, and when disclosure of those links to the general public would allow for trolling/interference and degrade the usefulness of those links.
2. Regarding the proposed 19(a)(3):
   1. Generally: The law would require a ticket bot be added, but does not specify who would govern it. This can create an accountability problem, as neither OCA nor the presiding officers would be tasked with this responsibility.
   2. Regarding 19(a)(3)(c), the law would bar anyone from accessing the content of the ticket other than those individuals who the requestor added. But the law doesn’t actually create a classification mechanism for these tickets, and only the Speaker or Senate President could actually classify the tickets—if neither are added to the ticket, then it could not actually become classified. Under 19(a)(1), this would mean that the ticket would need to be made read-only and available to the public, which is a contradiction in terms. And, as a non-classified document, it would be subject to FOI requests. The mechanism for privacy here has problems that must be addressed before it becomes a law.

I am in favor of additional transparency and directionally agree with this bill, but I think that the bill needs more workshopping before it could be passed into law.

 

[girlfailcoded]

I would like to second Multiman's concerns. There is, on occasion, messages that benefit from the classification, and while I do support making the relevant channels public read-only, I would also like a means to hold classified conversation included within this bill.