The New York Times' Katharine Seelye notes that there is one promise that President Barack Obama has not, on the facts, kept since coming into office, and that's his pledge that bills emerging from Congress would get a five-day public vetting on the White House website before President Obama would put his pen to them. The actual utility of the five-day pledge has never been all that clear. What good is asking the public for input on legislation if the legislation has already been finished and delivered to the president for signature? (Especially in the absence of a line-item veto, where at least then the president would, on some bills, have the option of exercising the public will). On the technical execution of the pledge, Seelye has White House spokesperson Nick Shapiro resetting the clock, moving back the five-day period so that it starts "once it is clear that a bill will be coming to the president’s desk" -- rather than when the legislation is technically passed out of Congress and to the White House.

But some are arguing that the major flaw in the five-pledge isn't in its execution. The trouble is in its very conception. The president asking for feedback on a bill is a bit like your officemate clicking "send" on an email to your boss and then asking you to give it a once over. What's done is done, my friend. While the five-day pledge sounded great on the campaign trail and planted a flag for the idea of Obama as a transparency-minded candidate, Sunlight Foundation executive director Ellen Miller argues in Seelye's piece that in practice it's "meaningless." Sunlight's Paul Blumenthal makes the case that far preferable is a 72-hour period during the time Congress is considering a bill, a proposal recently introduced in the House as H. Res. 554. It might well be time for the White House to call a whoopsie on this pledge, and put its leverage to use backing reform in Congress, where legislation actually gets made.