A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis, serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. © James Conner.
Our legislators are not yet out of ideas for new laws. As of today, 327 bills have been introduced, and another 1,903 requested, for a total of 2,230.
Bills that are “probably dead” number 88. Of these, 43 died in process, and 45 were drafts that were canceled. Bills that are probably dead can be resurrected by “…a supermajority vote (usually a 2/3 vote) by the House or Senate.” So a bill only becomes really dead after the legislature adjourns sine die.
A larger subset of unintroduced bills is draft on hold, which means the legislators isn’t ready to cancel the draft but for various reasons no longer assigns the bill request a high priority. As of today, 889 drafts are on hold.
In its 2013 session, the legislature batted .237: 2,218 bills were requested, 1,201 introduced, 596 passed, 71 vetoed, and 525 signed into law.
Summary information on bills requested and introduced is available online. Internet access to the bills is getting better, but it’s still pretty primitive. There’s no free download of all of the information, including the text of bills, in a format that can be opened in a relational database. And while the summary information can be downloaded as tab delimited text, then imported into a database, some of the fields contain more than one kind of data, a practice universally frowned upon by database professionals. The net result: meta analysis of legislation is made much more difficult and time consuming because of the need to parse, convert, and standardize data.
But if you have money — if you’re a lobbying or law firm — you can buy better organized data that the taxpayers have already paid for and should be able for everyone to download for free. Here’s an example (I don’t know how useful this subscription would be, or whether it’s even electronic):
I’m sure most lobbyists and big spenders find this situation just dandy. They can afford the pricy subscriptions and data conversion experts that independent bloggers in Montana cannot.
Is that fair? Of course not. Is that politics? You betcha.