I believe it is the responsibility of every American to familiarize themselves with major legislative actions of Congress. Unfortunately, the process of fact-checking, cross-referencing, and researching can be time consuming. I find most news outlets unsatisfactory, as most of them are pushing an agenda or are completely full of shit. Instead, I prefer reading the actual legislation. The process is a lot simpler (and much less boring) than you might think.
The Library of Congress has a website for accessing proposed and passed legislation at: http://thomas.loc.gov/. Searches can be conducted with text criteria or bill numbers. Advanced searches allow visitors to break searches down by: session of congress, date ranges, congressman, and so on.
Every bill in Congress is available through the website above. More importantly, every bill has an Excerpt page which explains the bill’s provisions in plain English.
Example Search
Let’s try to find the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act:
- Visit http://thomas.loc.gov/.
- Select the search by ‘Bill number’ radio toggle.
- Enter “hr3590″ in the search field and click Search.
The bill’s summary page will appear next. The summary page provides quick access to:
- List of everyone involved in writing the bill.
- The entire bill text in HTML or PDF form.
- Any Congressional Budget Office estimates requested.
- And so on…
Click the ‘All Information (excerpt text)’ link to view the Layman’s explanation of the bill. This particular bill is a bit heavy (full text is ~900 pages, excerpt is ~60 pages).