Congressional Bills and Bill Tracking on Westlaw
Congressional bills - CONG-BILLTXT - Affords unofficial full text coverage of all versions of all bills from the current Congress, to which Westlaw adds references to existing legislation these measures may affect. Bill text coverage began with the 104th Congress, 1995 - CONG-BILLTXT104. (Bills originate from Thomas, a web site of the U.S. Library of Congress.) Find can be employed to retrieve the full text of a bill for which the year of introduction (1995 or later) and bill number are known, e.g. - Find: 1997 cong us hr 6 or Find: 1995 cong us s 555. However, to insure retrieval of all drafts of a bill for which versions may appear in both yearly sessions of a given Congress, it is preferable to conduct a citation field search in the appropriate Congressional database, e.g. - ci("hr 6") in CONG-BILLTXT105.
The Find by citation service on Westlaw can be used to retrieve Congressional bill status reports but is limited to bills from the two most recent Congresses. In addition to the bill number, a proper citation format includes the year of the first session of the Congress in which a bill was introduced. So to locate a tracking report for a bill from the 109th Congress, e.g., enter this Find search: 2005 us hr 11 sn (where "sn" stands for STATE NET, a service of Information for Public Affairs, Inc., the source of bill tracking data on Westlaw. If a bill number is not known, a terms and connectors search can be conducted in the US-STN-BILLTXT database. For bill tracking reports from earlier Congresses dating from the 102nd Congress, 1991, Find is not an available citation search option. The alternative is to select the BILLTRK-OLD database and conduct a citation field search formatted as follows: ci(“h.b. 6” & "105th Congress") - (where “h.b.” and “s.b.” are the abbreviations for Senate bill and House bill, respectively).