Documents produced during the legislative process can help understand Congressional intent or clarify statutory language. Documents include bill(s), floor debates (in the Congressional Record), and committee publications (hearings, prints, documents, reports). Additional materials that may help are reports from the Congressional Budget Office, Government Accountability Office, and Congressional Research Service; and Presidential documents such as executive orders, messages when acting on legislation, or speeches.
Official site for U.S. federal legislative information, including Public Laws and bills, daily Congressional Record, CRS reports, roll call votes, committee schedules, legislator profiles, and treaty documents.
Use these commands when searching ProQuest databases:
AND requires both search words to appear, e.g., clinton AND trump
OR allows either or both search words to appear, e.g., clinton OR trump
NOT excludes a word, e.g., clinton NOT trump
Use " " around an exact phrase, e.g., "electoral college"
An asterisk (*) on a word stem accepts any endings, e.g., politic* will find politics, political, politician, etc.
ProQuest automatically searches within full text, so you may want to use some "proximity" commands between search words to control how far apart they can be:
NEAR/# requires search words to be within your specified # number of words of each other, e.g., campaign* NEAR/5 president*
Use () to group OR'd words in a complex search also containing AND, e.g., (campaign* OR debate* OR speech*) AND (clinton OR trump) AND immigra*
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Public Laws are enacted legislation (bills that survive the legislative process) identified by the number of the Congressional session and a sequential number, e.g., P.L. 113-1 is the first public law passed by the 113th Congress. Private laws are numbered separately and are rare. Both are issued first as individual "slip laws" and then reprinted in sequential (chronological) order in the United States Statutes at Large (Stat.), the "session laws" for each legislative session. Note: The statutes have volume numbers that do not correspond with the number of the Congress.
Available in Andersen Library's 1st-floor Federal Documents: AE 2.111: (since 1984), GS 4.111: (1964-1983), microfiche GS 4.111: for older, and online.
Public laws are codified into relevant subject titles of the official, government-printed federal code, the United States Code (U.S.C.), so that all current legislation on the same topic is gathered together, but this is a lengthy process. Each piece of legislation can add new language, delete or edit existing language, renumber sections, or any combination of these. Two well-known, privately-published (unofficial) versions of the U.S.C. are United States Code Annotated (U.S.C.A.) and United States Code Service (U.S.C.S.).
Available in Andersen Library's 1st-floor Federal Documents, Y 1.2/5:, and online.
