Writer/Expert on U.S. Congress & Public Policy

VoterPunch needs an expert on U.S. Congress & Public Policy to write Congressional vote descriptions for our searchable database of Congressional votes. To see what the job entails, the best thing to do is to visit www.ProgressivePunch.Org, a licensee of ours, and drill down until you actually see paragraph long individual vote descriptions (one click PAST the 1 sentence vote description summaries).
We're looking for people who are very lucid and succinct expository writers (think magazine writing not theses.) You should also have a very comprehensive knowledge of the inner workings of the US Congress – e.g. parliamentary maneuverings such as motions to recommit, previous question motions etc. as well as a broad command of the range of policy issues confronting Congress and the politics that surround Congressional votes. We're looking for someone who has this information down cold, not a first year Ph.D. student who's just learning it. The two individuals who have written the descriptions that are currently posted on the site are PhD candidates in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. But you don't have to be an academic, especially since we aim at a popular audience. Actual Capital Hill experience highly desirable, not absolutely mandatory. Decent pay. We're expecting a five day turnaround which means that you will always have the weekend to work on the vote descriptions. The number of vote descriptions that need to be written up total just about one half of all the votes cast in each house of Congress.
(For a discussion of which votes you would be writing descriptions for and which ones you wouldn't, see the "What Is a Progressive Vote?" description on the ProgressivePunch.Org website.)

Send CV, cover letter & (preferably non-academic) political writing sample to Jobs@VoterPunch.org. If academic writing is only thing available, send that.

SUBMIT WRITING SAMPLE WITH YOUR INITITAL APPLICATION AND COVER LETTER OR YOU WILL NOT BE CONSIDERED FOR THE POSITION.

An ideal writing submission would incorporate the following elements:

• Describes/reviews a specific piece of legislation and/or a floor vote in Congress.
• Explains the politics of the matter (e.g. How Republicans are trying to screw Democrats and vice versa).
• Demystifies/explains the parliamentary maneuvering.
• Explains the actual public policy implications of the legislation.
• Provides the rationales behind both the conservative and the progressive perspective.

We also have a position for someone which could either be combined with the job above or could be filled by a completely separate person – or two people. We need people who are C-Span junkies to write extremely brief, that is to say one or two sentence, descriptions of the votes cast on Capital Hill. (e.g. Senate votes to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.) We want to email these one sentence vote descriptions so that people have them in their email boxes by 7 AM Eastern Time for votes cast up to midnight the night before. We're not sure if this is realistic. It may be that we will have a cut off of all votes cast up until 5 PM the night before. The salary for this is negotiable. It's definitely not included in the duties of the longer analytical vote descriptions displayed on ProgressivePunch.Org in the position described above. In other words there would be an extra salary for doing this work, we don't expect someone to do it for free just because they're doing the longer descriptions above. People can apply for either or both positions.