In scoping
Legislative Bodies
State assemblies. State senates. City councils that write law. The U.S. Congress. These are the bodies that draft, debate, and enact the rules everyone else is supposed to follow. When they fail, they fail quietly — and the failure is invisible until you measure the gap between what was said and what got voted.
Where rules get set and outright ignored here
- Bills die in committee with no public record of why. Nine New York condominium ombudsman bills since 2005 — not one floor vote.
- Sponsors attach their names to legislation for press cycles, then never move it out of committee.
- Disclosure requirements on outside income, gifts, and travel are routinely filed late or incompletely, with minimal consequence.
- Committee hearings are scheduled to guarantee low attendance, then reported as "robust debate."
- Floor votes contradict stated positions. Those contradictions are not aggregated or published.
What TASFGA will track
- Bill lifecycle — every bill TASFGA supports or opposes, from drafting to enactment to enforcement
- Sponsor scorecards — stated position, vote record, follow-through
- Committee ledger — what got heard, what got buried, and who buried it
- Disclosure compliance — financial, gift, travel filings — on time, accurate, or neither
- Promise vs. vote index — aggregated contradictions between public statements and legislative votes
Why this matters
A legislature that does not meet its own published rules is not a legislature — it's theatre. Accountability here is not partisan. It is arithmetic. Was the bill filed? Did it get a hearing? Did the vote match the speech? The answers exist in the record. TASFGA's job is to put them in one place and keep them there.