Have Thoughts on SCHIP? The White House is Listening, Kind Of
| Mon Feb. 2, 2009 7:44 AM PST
If you have an opinion on the expansion of children's health insurance, hop on over the White House website, where the SCHIP bill is open for comments. If Obama's campaign promise is followed, commenting will last for five days, at which point the President will sign the bill.
While the move is an admirable nod to openness, it's more of a presidential party trick than anything else. Here's why:
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(1) Public comments aren't made public. The page that I link to above points you to the full text of the SCHIP legislation and has a submission field for a comment, but it does not display previously made comments. I submitted a comment and it was swallowed up by the White House website, presumably never to be seen again.
When the Obama team was in transition, it hosted a site called "Seat at the Table" that enabled everyday citizens to view the policy papers that think tanks and interest groups were submitting to the President-elect. The site allowed users to comment and read the comments of others. That model ought to be followed on the White House website now. If comments could be viewed by everyone, one everyday citizen could identify a problem with the legislation, another could research it further, and a third could suggest a better idea. People could work together to push for improved law. And that's the point, isn't it?
(2) There is no guarantee that administration officials will actually read the comments. The transition website had a feature called "Open for Questions" that allowed users to submit questions to top Obama officials and to vote up or down the questions of others. Popular questions were answered on a somewhat haphazard schedule (and never in fully in-depth way) but at least there was an guarantee that someone was paying attention. The same cannot be said for the five-day commenting period.
(3) The bill has already passed both the House and the Senate. There is no mechanism in the legislative process to change it now that it is on the president's desk. (Obama could use a presidential signing statement, an old Bush Administration trick. But Obama and his camp frowned upon the practice during the campaign.) "All they can do is veto it," says Ellen Miller, Executive Director of the Sunlight Foundation. Given that Obama isn't going to veto something like a long-sought children's health care bill, one has to wonder if this is little more than a way to generate good PR. "It is far more important to have this kind of opportunity for the public to comment during the legislative process," says Miller, "when changes could actually be made."
(4) The site demands that users fit their comment inside 500 characters. The paragraph above is 621. "The notion that there can be quality commenting in 500 characters on a piece of legislation is laughable," says Miller.
Miller suspects that the Obama team simply screwed up. The first bill Obama signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. He did so without making the bill available for comment at all, a fact that earned him the scorn of the transparency community and his first broken promise from PolitiFact.com. That led to the subpar commenting system up now. Says Miller, "They realized they goofed last week and they really needed to create this feature immediately, so they did a very simple, very straight-forward feature. I have every expectation that the ability to comment will become far more meaningful than it is right now."
Fostering legitimate public comment on legislation is clearly a difficult challenge. It does not appear the Obama Administration has the solution just yet.
Comments
Submitted by William W. Wexler (not verified) on Tue Feb. 3, 2009 3:30 AM PST.
This is another in a string of "feedback" schemes that Obama has tried since the middle of the primary race. The idea is that you are supposed to feel empowered somehow because you can leave 250 or 500 words on a website.
Obama has already proven to my satisfaction that this is nothing but a show pony that doesn't really run. First, during the summer, there was a major blowup over his FISA vote that had to be stifled on his own website. There was a thread that turned into an online petition against his FISA vote, and it got over 55,000 signatures before it was squashed.
Second, there was the transition feedback site Change.gov where you were supposed to comment and vote on the top 10 issues that you wanted to have action on in the new Obama administration. This one was quite humorous.
The comments on Change.gov were censored for political embarrassment content. I posted a comment to the effect that since there was a major effort to include Republicans in the new administration (even some chat about a post for McCain), shouldn't the other parties' candidates Nader, Gonzales, Barr, McKinney, et. al. also be in consideration for advisory and cabinet posts? They CENSORED my post. Then I posted another comment that if they didn't really want my ideas, and if they were afraid of them, they shouldn't be emailing me to ask for them. Of course, that one didn't make it either.
But I found the slight I got from Obama to be yet another humorous interlude compared to the chilling response he gave to the other posters. In that "poll", the top comment in the eyes of thousands of participants was the one by Bob Fertik, activist and patriot muckraking blogger from Democrats.com:
"Will you appoint a special prosecutor -- ideally Patrick Fitzgerald -- to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush Administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping?"
Obama's answer to the top question: a sound bite from a minor speech by Joe Biden that became his standard non-answer regarding what many view as his sworn duty to defend and uphold the Constitution.
"Vice President-elect Biden, 12/21/08: '[T]he questions of whether or not a criminal act has been committed or a very, very, very bad judgment has been engaged in isis something the Justice Department decides. Barack Obama and I arePresident-elect Obama and I are not sitting thinking about the past. We're focusing on the future I'm not ruling [prosecution] in and not ruling it out. I just think we should look forward. I think we should be looking forward, not backwards.'"
In other words, those of you who thought that the new government would be based on laws and the Constitution, go fish.
I have taken myself off of all Obama mailing lists because I got tired of being blown off, tired of the creation of the appearance of "change" when it was still accompanied with requests for more donations, and tired of picking up the newspaper every day and reading about the latest compromise of political convenience at the expense of progressive ideas and campaign promises.
However, I did fill out an online job application for the Obama transition team. I'm sure they'll be getting back to me on that sometime soon.
-Wexler
Wexler, I'm with you: that site is total bs. I left a comment about healthcare, specifically the exuberant cost of medical school and its affect on the cost of healthcare. No one is talking about it, period. Afterwards I realized that they will be getting so many comments that they would need a team of full time interns to sift through those comments and organize them into some kind of coherent structure that reflects what American's think about...well, everything.
Personally, I think it boils down to a power struggle between Congress and the Executive branch. We need to focus on pressuring Congress to act in our interests as they have a little bit more power than the president.
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