researching Congressional bills at Thomas

[snorko]

Essay 2 encourages students to research a Congressional bill. Try some
of the following steps of researching topics, bills, and specific
speeches from the Congressional Record:

Open Thomas (http://thomas.loc.gov), the web site of the Library of
Congress. Not only is the address short and simple, but the one word
Thomas usually matches the site first in a Google search.

Under search bill text, try "corruption." As of this writing, 185
bills match the search. Searching "bribery" returns 58 bills, and 1000
bills mention "Washington DC". By contrast, "American empire" does not
appear in any bill.

Note that while searching by bill number is an option, and sometimes
this option can quickly identify one bill of many, it can also be a
bit tricky or fussy. Searching bill text may be more often more
useful.

Another option is to browse the full list of all bills introduced.
This would not at all be a good way to find one particular bill about
which some information (topic, bill number) is known; compare starting
at the As in a dictionary or phone book and browsing page by page for
the definition or number desired. It is a very good method, however,
for ascertaining a broad view of the many, many bills introduced each
year. It is also a good way to find unknown bills serendipitously.

Here is the long path to the whole list of all bills: From the Thomas
home page, under "Find more legislation," click "Search multiple,
previous Congresses." Next, click "Search bill summary, status," then
under "Browse by," click "Popular and short titles."

After getting a general overview, let's take a look at a couple bills
in more detail. Go back to the Thomas home page. Some bills are very
long, a thousand pages or more, and some are very short, only a page
long. A couple bills have been selected for comparison: S. 1 ENR, H.
R. 2316, H. R. 1063 EH, H. Res. 228, H. Res. 607 IH, and 1292 IH. Find
the bills quickly by searching Thomas for the words "honest
leadership" (S. 1 ENR), "225th" (H. Res. 1063 EH), "Greece
democracy" (H. Res. 228), "British India" (H. Res. 607 IH), and
"military force" (1292 IH).

Browse the bills for the topic and recommended action and decide
whether each should pass and why. Then compare your evaluation of the
bills to Congress' by checking at the top of each bill the link "Bill
summary & status," which shows the support for (or lack thereof) and
actions taken on the bill. How much support do these bills have? Check
under "Cosponsors" to find out. What's happened with the bills
recently? Check under "All Congressional actions" to find out. Most
college students will/should know how many US Senators there are, the
names of California's, and a little about them; fewer will know how
many US House Reps there are (right now) and the names of the Reps for
both their home address and LACC's or much about them. Nearly zero
support is nearly zero regardless of the total, but it's still good to
note the difference in the total numbers of each half of Congress when
gauging a bill's cosponsor support.

To find out more about particular politicians, try two different
methods: search for the bills they've introduced, and search for the
speeches they've made in Congress. To check the bills introduced by a
politican, from Thomas' home page, under "browse bills by sponsor,"
pull down and select either a House Rep or a Senator and browse over
the bills introduced. What impression do you gather about the
personality of the politician from the bills introduced? This may work
better for some than for others. To search for speeches made, go back
to Thomas' home page and under "Other legislative activity" select
"Congressional Record." Here, as with bills, topics can be searched as
well, but this time try selecting a politician's name from the lists,
searching, then browsing. This may work better, again, for some than
for others.