Senator Kyl is often contacted
by constituents interested in tracking legislation and getting
copies of current bills and laws. Most of this material is available
on the Internet. You should find these links helpful.
If the legislative process is new to you (or even
if you are familiar with it but need a refresher), you may enjoy
these articles:
Learning
About the Legislative Process, a collection of reference material
on the U.S. Senate web site. Includes the Riddicks Book, "Enactment
of a Law, Guide to Senate Legislative Processes" (Congressional
Research Service, Feb. 2002), Nominations, Treaties, and Filibuster
and Cloture.
Tying
It All Together: A summary explanation of how the legislative
process works provided by the House of Representatives.
How
Our Laws Are Made, Revised and Updated by Charles W. Johnson,
Parliamentarian, United States House of Representatives.
The Library
of Congress web site "Thomas" has a quick search
from its home page for the text of bills from the current Congress.
This information is searchable by bill number, but if you don't
know the bill number, you can also do a text search.
Status of Bill
If you would like know the status of a bill you
can use the "Bill
Status & Summary" service on Thomas. This search
will give you: the bill titles, bill status, committees with jurisdiction
over the bill, related House committees, documents, amendments,
related bill details, and cosponsors. It will also provide a summary.
You can search this data by word or phrase,
subject, bill/amendment number, stage in legislative process,
date of introduction, sponsor/cosponsor, or committee.
These reports provide Senate "Roll
Call Vote" results for the current and several previous
Congresses, including votes taken today. Roll call vote results
are compiled through the Senate Legislative Information System
by the Senate Bill Clerk, under the direction of the Secretary
of the Senate.
A bill is proposed legislation being considered
in Congress. A law is a bill that has been approved by
Congress and signed by the President. You can browse through all
public laws in law number sequence. The United States Government
Printing Office allows you to search
for public laws using words or phrases.
The US
Code is also available online and searchable by word or phrase.
The gateway
to statistics from over 100 federal agencies.
The
FirstGov Reference Shelf has links to information on national
libraries, U.S. laws, bills in Congress, regulations, statistical
information, government publications and more.
Executive Orders are available on the National Archives and
Records Administration website.
In addition to the material already mentioned
here, the Library
of Congress Thomas web site also provides access to:
