As a test, I tried zeroing in on a particular provision which is of interest to me: The personal mandate. To begin with, I looked under "mandate"; there was nothing there. I next tried looking under "responsibility", which is how I've seen the mandate provision described by some of its advocates in Congress. I did find it there, although by this point I was finding that switching pages on the site is somewhat slow (maybe it's being slashdotted right now, so to speak). It forwarded me to section 301, "Individual Responsibility". However, this is what it showed me when I clicked to see it:

For an individual’s responsibility to obtain acceptable coverage, see section 59B of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 (as added by section 401 of this Act).

Unfortunately, here I seemed to be blocked. There was no way to get to section 401 of the act, since there is no table of contents and no "next provision" button on the individual text pages.

Based on my couple of minutes of tooling here, I'd say this is a really neat site which could be even better with some adjustments. If you'd like some recommendations, here are some things to maybe change I can think of, in order of least to most difficulty:

1. You may want to add a "mandate: see responsibility, individual" item to the index in the Ms. I think that is a provision many people are curious about and they may know it better under the other name.

2. A table of contents option would be great, for situations where you know you want "section 401" but don't know how to look that up in the index.

3. It would be nice if there were some way to link from the little tiny section pages directly into a part of the bill. The way I'd normally look at legislation like this is to just open a PDF and "Find" over and over again for whatever string I'm looking at. This is less convenient than your index, but it does mean that once I've found what I'm looking for I can see it in its original context. Could it maybe be possible to integrate the site with Scribd somehow, or at least link directly to the bill text (the section pages say only "original available on thomas.gov"... I seem to remember at least at one time thomas was kind of difficult to link into, but you might have more luck with govtrack.us).

4. What to me would be really neat is if the site also contained similar indices for the Senate (HELP and Finance) bills! This would be REALLY useful, and present a feature that just ctrl-f-ing PDFs can't as it would allow one to essentially compare side by side comparable provisions from each of the three bills.

5. It seems like you've got a nice infrastructure here, but what would be ultimately most useful is if this had some sort of "wiki" feature so users could make or suggest changes-- say for example that I as a random user had stumbled in, looked for "mandate", not found it, then realized it was under "individual responsibility". If there were some way to make or recommend changes to the site, I could have just gone and added the "mandate" item myself. Retrofitting something like this might be intractably difficult if it wasn't planned for to begin with, but it would make a lot of things easier (for example, you could crowdsource adding the HELP and Finance bills) and would actually mean you could even open up the site to covering other bills in future.

6. It does seem surprising that the "top level" index pages are going so slow. Are they actually being generated dynamically? Maybe you should look into mod_cache, or enabling your web architecture's caching system for at least those top level pages.

Anyway good luck with this.

I don't know. Can you think of any?

while helping his chances of reelection?

Wait, are you sure this is desirable? Senators are fairly unaccountable, and Harry Reid is procedurally speaking the most powerful Senator. It seems unlikely Harry Reid can be influenced to do much of anything he doesn't want to unless his chances of reelection are to some degree made conditional on the public option passing.

Does "I stood up to the left" work when in this particular instance "the left" encompasses an absolute majority of the population? I mean what he'd really be doing, if he tried that card, is turning to voters and say "I stood up to you, and I won." Is this a good way to win elections?

I mean, I spot two unmistakable references in there to things that I don't think you'd notice unless you were highly plugged into blogs or some other sort of specialized media. The "[epithet]-rig" thing from the case with the road sign earlier this week, the "fed scrawled on the chest" thing from the Sparkman case. I don't quite think I would have recognized what those meant if it weren't that I read TPM/Wonkette every day.

Whatever issues the guy has, the way those issues are manifesting are clearly being shaped in an incredibly specific way by the political media he consumes.

Is there any way to know how much of it was out-of-state?

...Michelle, you have to be at least 25 years of age to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives.

So what happens now? I'm still a little confused by this conference committee that will merge the bills. Who is on it? Can we pressure them or otherwise influence the outcome of the conference process?

I know Chris Dodd made some strong statements saying that as representative of HELP in the conference he would fight for a strong bill with a public option.

For some reason all I can think of is "The Music Man".