Following up on my earlier post about legislative transparency. Had the occasion to track down a bill passed today in the House, and this was the process:

1. Review various news articles about the bill, which also covered several competing versions of the bill. Amazingly, reputable political news sites–ABC, Washington Post, New York Times–neglected to actually say which of the bills had been passed, making it a search engine issue to figure out what was actually becoming law.
2. Finally found a link on the New York Times article which led to a voting report on the bill, and that page deigned to tell me the bill number. But it didn’t link to the bill’s text.
3. So I Google the bill number–and up comes a completely different bill, introduced in the last legislative session.
4. Then I look up the bill in OpenCongress.org, which gives a great overview of the legislative action, but doesn’t (yet) link to full text.
5. Finally, I find the bill in THOMAS. And am then absolutely flummoxed when some AJAX flummery prevents me from actually copying the text off the damn page.

This is ridiculous. We deserve better.