IP Democracy: Senate Majority Leader Goes Online to Forge Bill

Talk about the Internet democratizing democracy…Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-IL) is conducting an innovative online experiment. He’s engaging in series of four nightly broadband policy discussions in an effort to craft legislation on national broadband policy.

He says he’s doing it in order to open up the legislative process (and he couldn’t have picked a more relevant topic to let net users comment on) and thinks this might set the standard for how legislators go about crafting bills.

There are two reasons I’m asking for your help and participation. The first is because I think we need more public participation and transparency in the way Congress crafts significant legislation. This is an approach to legislation that has never been tried before. If it’s successful — as I believe it will be — it may become the way lawmakers approach drafting bills on other issues like education, health care, and foreign policy.

Durbin also couldn’t have picked a better site to serve as the locus of this experiment. Durbin’s chats will take place on a blog called Open Left, founded by Matt Stoller, Chris Bowers and Mike Lux. Stoller and Bowers were editors at hot progressive blog MyDD until last month and Lux runs a political consulting firm called Progressive Strategies.

But Durbin’s experiment — namely calling on the wisdom of the web crowd to craft legislation — may, in the end, prove to be a passing thing. He’s fighting the well-entrenched industries who run the country’s broadband networks and he’s fighting, well, the nature of political power itself. Legislation rarely reflects the ideal policy approach to any topic and almost always reflect rank, raw political power by special interests. It’s hard to see how a sweet experiment could stand up to hundreds, if not thousands, of years of lawmaking.

Public Knowledge’s Art Brodsky casts some skepticism on this idealistic development and notes, correctly, that:

Passing meaningful telecommunications legislation is very difficult because just about any progressive ideas or bills geared to introducing competition or innovation will incur the wrath of the telephone and/or cable companies, and possibly the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as well.

Still, Durbin’s heart is (perhaps) in the right place and it’s nice to see someone try to open up the legislative process to the most democratic of all communications media.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on July 23, 2007 4:52 PM to IP Democracy