It is hard to understand how “conference reports” from Congress on pending legislation can have fallen from 200 per year to just 11 over the past three decades. Secret Bill Writing On the Rise [Washington Post]. But it indicates, sadly, that laws in America are increasingly being made in back rooms, not the public forums our system of politics has traditionally used. That may be mere window-dressing, but it is IMPORTANT symbolically, in my view.

In a letter to C-SPAN Chairman Brian Lamb, House Republican leader John Boehner wrote, “Unfortunately, the president, Speaker (Nancy) Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader (Harry) Reid now intend to shut out the American people at the most critical hour by skipping a bipartisan conference committee and hammering out a final health care bill in secret.”  The complaint sounded a lot like one nine years ago, when Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., said Republicans “locked out the Democrats from the conference committee” meeting on the budget. “We were invited to the first meeting and told we would not be invited back, that the Republican majority was going to write this budget all on their own, which they have done. So much for bipartisanship.”

[Editor’s Note: This is now, more than ever, relevant to tech legislation as more and more policy making for the tech world is being handed off to agencies like the FTC and the FCC, and events like Cory Doctorow’s secret copyright treaties happen more often than we’d think. –mrh]