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Georgetown University

Voices: I still teach students to read the bill

Paul Singer
USA TODAY

I teach a journalism class at Georgetown University called Covering Capitol Hill that sometimes feels hopelessly out-of-date.

This week I will discuss with my students how a bill becomes a law. I start with the old Schoolhouse Rock! cartoon "I'm just a bill, yes I'm only a bill …" which is really a pretty good primer.

Then I hand out a detailed chart of how the congressional process is supposed to work: markups in the House and Senate; committee votes; amendments on the floor; conference committees to reconcile competing bills in the House and Senate; final passage and presidential signature.

These days I teach this stuff as a kind of historic record. This is how it used to work, young people, back when computer screens were green or amber and documents were delivered by bike messenger, not e-mail.

Congress doesn't work like this anymore, for the most part. For starters, very little legislation actually passes. For bills that do have a chance of making it, committee markups are largely formalities, when they happen at all. The real decisions on any major piece of legislation are made by the House speaker, the Senate majority and minority leaders and the White House. Bills routinely come straight to the floor without any committee action at all, and amendments are often barred entirely.

For a young reporter trying to write about Congress, this creates an unpleasant problem: There is no real activity to write about, only people who are not "in the room" talking about what they think should or could happen.

But we persevere, my students and I.

I assign them to write about a bill that is moving through the process — even if it is fruitless — and require them to read the bill to figure out whether it would actually do what the sponsors say it will do. I require them to go to a congressional hearing and describe the major themes. I tell them to seek comment from experts who were not handpicked by lawmakers to provide preapproved testimony. I teach them to pore over government spending records or the personal wealth of members of Congress. And I require them to write full stories of their own discovery, not aggregate the work of others.

I recognize that all of this is kind of old-school, and, perhaps, increasingly irrelevant to their futures in the news business, if indeed any of us actually have futures in the news business.

But it is also where the joy lies in journalism. Digging into the unexamined thing and finding something new and newsworthy provides a kind of rush, almost a high. Everybody who has ever been a reporter can tell you what it feels like to get a big scoop, though they can never really come close to expressing the euphoria. I once wept tears of joy when, after months of searching, I discovered a previously unknown data set that laid bare the story I had been unable to confirm.

Congress is slow and unproductive and partisan and petty, more and more (it seems) than ever before. But it is still full of real news stories: legislation that could have a dramatic impact on the lives of real people; whispered deals that erupt into raging controversy when uncloaked; billions of dollars of taxpayer money being wagered every day on ideas that are wise or wacky or sometimes both.

So I am unembarrassed when I tell my students to read the bill or go to the markup. This is the reason our forebears made a free press a fundamental pillar of the nation: so that somebody would read the bill and tell the people whether it really does what the lawmaker says it does.

Singer is USA TODAY's politics editor

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