Search Previous Congresses

Previous Congresses can be searched from several points:

• The Bill Text search page (searches the full text of bills and resolutions for one Congress)
• The Bill Summary & Status search page (searches information about bills and resolutions for one Congress)
• The Multi Congress search page (searches the full text of bills and resolutions for one or more Congresses)

In the first two cases, previous Congresses can be searched one at a time by selecting a Congress from the menu at the top of the search pages. In the case of searching multiple Congresses, one or more Congresses can be selected on the search form.

Not all information available for searching in recent Congresses is offered in the earlier Congresses. For example,

• Links to the full text of legislation are not available until the 101st Congress.
• Amendment information is not available for the 93rd and 94th Congresses.
• Abstracts of legislation are available only from the 94th to 102nd Congresses.
• Congressional Record page references were not added until the 103rd Congress.
• Committee information was collected only for committees of referral from the 93rd to the 95th Congress; from the 96th Congress forward, committee information includes committees of referral, origin and reporting.
• Information about bills becoming Public Law without the President's signature or becoming Public Law enacted over the President's veto is not searchable until the 102nd Congress.
• Subject (index) terms have been added and deleted since indexing of legislation began in 1973. A search using an index (Legislative Indexing Vocabulary - LIV) term added in the 104th Congress, for example, would not retrieve bills on that topic in the 93rd Congress. For Congresses earlier than the 104th, if you do not know the correct subject (index) term, do a word/phrase search on your topic, and note the term(s) listed under the Subject(s) option of bills of interest. Click on the linked subject term to find other bills on that topic in that Congress.