Federal Legislative History Research

Often, different versions of the same bill will rise through both chambers. The bicameralism requirement necessitates that both the House and the Senate agree upon the same bill version. When dealing with complex, different bill versions, Congress will sometimes create a conference committee in which a group of leaders from each chamber will work together to create a new version of the bill that functions as a compromise of all the prior versions.

Conference report: Conference reports, much like committee reports, can be extremely useful in determining legislative intent. Conference reports are generated during the conference committee markup session and generally include a detailed, line-by-line analysis of the bill.

• Because Congress creates conference reports late in the publication process, they can be especially useful in determining legislative intent about final language decisions for bills.
• Conference reports are issued as House Reports, with the committee as the Committee of Conference. You will find that often, databases store conference reports in the same location as committee reports.

New bill drafts: If a conference committee decides to create an entirely new bill, that bill draft often retains language the committee cherry-picked from the different bills. Compare the differences between the bill versions for a better understanding of congressional intent.

Conference reports:

• Congress.gov: 1995 to the present; coverage may not be complete, and there may be some coverage extending beyond these dates
  • Locate the bill in Congress.gov > select “actions” from the navigation bar > filter by “all actions” > if a conference report exists, it will be labeled “Conference report filed with a link to the report”
• Govinfo.gov: 1995 to the present
  • Govinfo.gov Advanced Search > Refine by Collection “Committee Reports”

New bill drafts:

• Congress.gov: provides the full text of bills from 1989 to the present and metadata from 1973 to the present
  • Locate the bill in congress.gov > select “text” from the navigation bar > use the dropdown menu to download the different bill versions.
  • Congress.gov does not have a compare documents feature. To set up a side-by-side comparison, try using the Word or Adobe redlining features.