People on the other side are horrible, and their ideas are stupid. It’s a rule of modern politics that deeply disserves our country. Even in its softer forms, it can be foolhardy. So I was bemused, perhaps annoyed, earlier this week when the New York Times’ morning newsletter cautioned against some of the reforms won by dissident Republicans in the recent process for selecting a new House speaker:

Consider some of the assurances the holdout Republicans received from McCarthy: more time to read and debate legislation, as well as to propose unlimited changes to it.

In theory, these changes might sound like common sense, since legislators should, ideally, be taking time to understand and finalize bills. But in practice, these kinds of allowances have slowed Congress’s work, if not halted it altogether, by giving lawmakers more chances to stand in the way of any kind of legislation.

Outwardly thoughtful, these words slip over into arguing that members of Congress should not behave as democratic theory and our system of government requires. The Twittersphere validated my critical Tweet. Many suggested that the New York Times is horrible, and its ideas are stupid.

The argument is actually about premises: If the government is going to be as large and activist as it is, there is no practical way for Congress to oversee it. Let’s “legislate” through the executive process we have now.

On the opposite side, “ultraconservatives” (in the language of the Times) are arguing for a government that can be run democratically—in the old, linguistically sound sense of “democracy.” Such a government can’t do as much.

But there has been advocacy in the past for better-run, more democratic government in the United States. It wasn’t any ultraconservative or Donald Trump supporter. Barack Obama promised in his first presidential campaign to post bills online for five days before he would sign them. It’s easily derided, as bills reaching the president are not likely to go back for amendment. But the chance of exposing chicanery upstream in the legislative process made that a real, if modest, reform.

Reform is hard, and “sunlight before signing” was President Obama’s first broken promise. But there are ways to make democracy run better without necessarily slowing it down. President Obama’s election spurred an upwelling of interest in open government and civic tech. My offering at the time was an effort to make congressional legislation machine-readable. For these purposes, “machine” means “computer,” and “readable” means “amenable to parsing,” so that computers can distill for people the immediate meanings of bills.

Congress publishes most legislation in a data format called XML (short for eXtensible Markup Language). It’s a code originally designed for electronic publishing that can do lots of things, such as instruct a screen or printer that a line of text should be printed bold or italic. XML can also carry meaning through embedded codes. It might inform a computer that the name “Smith” refers to Bob Smith, the former senator from New Hampshire, and not Lamar Smith, the former representative from Texas.

XML in congressional legislation can—and sometimes does—identify what existing statutes a bill would amend. It can identify what agencies a bill would affect. It can articulate references to locations: cities, states, government facilities, national parks, and so on. It can even convey where bills authorize spending or appropriate funds and how much.

For a short time almost a decade ago, XML did that. “Deepbills” was a project I ran out of the Cato Institute that upgraded the XML in bills from Congress to indicate more of their meaning. Using Deepbills’ data enhancements to legislation, the Washington Examiner briefly published a webpage that allowed people to investigate appropriations bills for themselves. It’s something they had never been able to do before, and they haven’t since.

The project of publishing Congress’s materials and activities as data moved slowly even at a time of some foment. I haven’t followed it for much of the past decade. But without many other options in these times, we all must look for ways forward. Perhaps giving a restart to computer-aided transparent government would allow a national government in the United States that actually operates consistent with democratic ideals. That would be good even if the authors of reform are, to some minds, horrible and stupid.

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