Federal Legislative History

Legislation begins with a proposed bill.  A bill contains the text of a proposed law and is introduced on the floor of the House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate by its sponsor.  Most online sources for bills allow you to search using keywords.  However, if the topic of the bill has been proposed many times, it may be difficult to find the bill you want. 

In researching federal legislative history, it helps to know in which Congress and session the bill was introduced in. This will help you limit your search results. Each Congress occurs over two years and has two sessions, labeled 1 and 2 respectively, with each session lasting a year.  For example, on January 2025, the 119th Congress, session 1 began and will adjourn or end in December 2025 or early January 2026.  The second session of the 119th Congress will begin in January 2026 and adjourn or end in December 2026 or early January 2027. 

An introduced bill (regardless of whether it advances or not) will have a numeric label that indicates the Congress, the session, and the chronological number assigned to the bill when it was brought to the House Clerk. On January 23, 2025, House bill number 165, The Wounded Knee Massacre Memorial and Sacred Site Act, was proposed.  This means that the bill was the 165th piece of legislation put before the House Clerk.  A citation for the unenacted bill could look like this:  H.R. 165, 119th Cong. (1st Sess. 2025) or this: 119-1 H.R. 165 (2025).  Senate bills would be cited in a similar fashion and look like this: S. 165 119th Cong. (1st Sess. 2025) or: 119-1 S. 165 (2025).  A similar numbering system is used for resolutions, House and Senate joint resolutions, House and Senate concurrent resolutions, and Senate executive resolutions.

Joint resolutions are used to propose constitutional amendments and, most importantly for the researcher, continuing appropriations. Joint resolutions proceed through the same legislative process as bills and can be tracked or found in a similar manner.  

If you only know the year the legislation passed, you can usually determine which Congress and session it was enacted by looking at the Dates of Sessions of Congress chart maintained online by the U.S. Senate.  This will help you find the Congressional session where the legislation was passed.     

The best place to start searching for the full text of bills is thru Congress.gov which is maintained by the Library of Congress. Congress.gov has the full text of legislation beginning with the 101st Congress (1989-1990).  It also provides links to the Congressional Record, live streams for debates, information about House and Senate Floor Activities, calendars, committees, and individual members' websites. If you are looking for legislative tracking, Congress.gov has a number of alert services that provide up to the minute reports on bill status, sponsors of legislation, House and Senate floor activity, and much more.   

Another source for legislative text is the GovInfo website that is maintained by the Government Printing Office or GPO.  The GovInfo website allows you to search the full text of bills from the 103rd Congress (1993-1994) to present.  It also has a Browse Bills feature that lets you look at all the legislation from each Congress by number.      

If you are a Scalia Law student, you also have access to full text legislation through a number of different databases: 

• ProQuest Congressional - extensive topical focus on Congressional information that includes public policy research, news and social media links, committee reports, bills, CRS reports, Congressional Record statements, text from debates, and other similar government sources.
• ProQuest Legislative Insight - primarily focused on legislation and sources of information produced by Congress including committee reports, texts of laws, texts of hearings, and Congressional record materials.  This resource will easily allow you to compile a legislative history using all materials that are publicly available. Coverage begins with the 1st Congress. 
• HeinOnline.org - extensive collections of federal legislative materials; while there's no federal bills database per se, you can search the daily Congressional Record on the day the legislation was introduced to find the bill and any comments made by the sponsor or other members of Congress. To find the federal legislative materials, choose U.S. Federal Content from the Database Type menu and scroll through the databases.
• Westlaw Precision - collections of Federal bills from the current Congress back to 1995 or the 104th Congress. To access current bills, click on the Federal materials tab, then choose Federal Proposed and Enacted Legislation, or type in your request in the search bar. Westlaw also has the CRS Summaries of Proposed Bills which is a summary of the bills written by the staff of the Congressional Research Service.
• Lexis+ - contains collections of Federal legislative materials from the current Congress back to 1989 or the 101st Congress.  To access current bills click on the Content tab, then choose Statutes and Legislation, then choose Bill Text, and type in your keywords to find the most current bills.