Friday, May 24, 1996

House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Rules of the House, Committee on Rules,
Washington, D.C.

The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10 a.m. in Room 2318, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. David Dreier [chairman of the subcommittee] presiding.
Present: Representatives Dreier, McInnis (via videoconference from Pueblo, Colorado), and Beilenson.
Also Present: Representative Goss.

Mr. Dreier. The subcommittee will come to order. I am very pleased to welcome all of you to the 21st Century and to convene this historic hearing. It is, as you can see by the surroundings, a wired, interactive hearing that will begin to examine the issue of how information technology will transform the United States Congress.

At the same time, I thought it relevant to the hearing that we should experience and showcase some of these technologies that we hope can make committee hearings more effective.

A member of the subcommittee, Mr. McInnis, who I see over there, is participating via video conference from Pueblo, Colorado. Also joining us from cyberspace is one of our hearing witnesses, Mr. Patrick Flahaven from the State capitol of St. Paul, Minnesota. I will go through an introduction of him when we get into this. He is the Secretary of the Minnesota State senate.

Let me say that we are also privileged to have my colleague, Vern Ehlers, here. All of the technologies that we are utilizing this morning, videoconferencing, television coverage and Internet use, are in use in some form or another by a number of State legislatures around the country. I am very pleased to welcome the Ranking Minority Member, Mr. Beilenson, who has arrived.

We wanted to start the 21st Century punctually, Tony, and we have got a place for you right over here.

I was mentioning the role that State legislatures have played. In California, for example, people can watch the assembly hearings on cable television and can call in and participate in the hearing. We don't have the capability to do that here today, but we do have a Web site, which I actually mentioned on C-SPAN a few minutes ago; and I used the incorrect address to access that, and I am going to correct that now. It is www.house.gov/rules/21ccp.htm. I have almost gotten that committed to memory.

It explains what this hearing is about and allows us to receive public feedback as we examine this issue over the next several months.

We also have an e-mail address so that people watching the hearing on C-SPAN can contact us directly with comments and questions, and that address is xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.

Anybody who has spent a great deal of time in Congress or studying the Congress has developed an appreciation and an understanding for the language of the Hill. Terms such as previous question, closure, germaneness, motion to recommit, budget authority, five-minute rule and so on are certainly familiar to those of us who are members of the Rules Committee and those who follow the proceedings here. But as we approach this new millennium, a new language of the Hill is taking hold. It includes such terms as Internet, networks, open systems, client server systems and graphical user interfaces, to name just a few.

If the experience of other organizations holds true, these new terms and the technologies they describe will fundamentally alter the customs, operations and responsibilities of the United States Congress. There are a number of factors driving Congress' investment in new information technologies. Our newer colleagues are demanding the efficiencies and flexibility that come from cost-reducing and time-saving technologies that most organizations across the country benefit from.

At the same time, the American people are demanding realtime access to information so that they can play a more meaningful role in making government work better. Technology can help us bridge the gap of time and distance to bring representative government closer to the people. It can help us to create a more orderly process and to reduce costs and bureaucracy. But at the same time, misapplied technology can exacerbate inequities in our political system, maintain those aspects of the status quo that require change and undermine the nature of representative government that has served our country so well over the past two centuries.

This is the beginning of a long-term effort to determine how we can ensure that technology is used effectively and responsibly. The goal is to determine how we can meet the internal demand for more flexibility and efficiency and the external public demand for increased access to Congress and its information, while maintaining the Jeffersonian tradition of representative democracy and the decorum and deliberative nature of the House.

We have with us a number of witnesses, as I have said at the outset, who have a great deal of experience on the issue of technology and the impact of those on legislative institutions.

Before recognizing the Ranking Minority Member, Mr. Beilenson, let me describe how I hope we will be able to proceed with the hearing. Unless there is an objection, I would like to recognize the witnesses as one panel. And each witness has been asked to summarize their statements in 5 minutes, after which we would proceed somewhat informally with a discussion unencumbered by the 5-minute rule. In other words, if you have something to say, we are going to ask those who are out there in cyberspace to just speak up. This is a voice-activated system. It is an alternative hearing format that I think will provide the opportunity for a better free-flow discussion. And I know it is somewhat awkward with all of this equipment around, and we are with the traditional committee structure that we had hoped that we would not have. We were actually hoping to be sitting at the lower level there.

And I should say also that I am sorry that my colleague, the Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Bill Thomas, could not be here. He has spent a great deal of time working on this, and he and Mr. Ehlers work closely on these issues. And also I am very sorry that the Speaker of the House, who had hoped to be here, coming by videoconference from Florida, is unable to be here because of technical problems that we have had. He very much wanted to participate, and as recently as yesterday told me that he hoped to be able to be following the Congress' move towards the third-wave information-based society, something in which he has a little interest. And so he is sorry that he can't be here.

My colleague from California, Tony Beilenson, has chosen to retire from the Congress before the millennium and this may have something to do with it. We are very pleased that he has brought his decades of expertise to this hearing, and we look forward to his input. And I am happy to call on my dear friend from California.