Bills in the United States

Note: for detailed information about legislative history and bills, see the U.S. bills platform.

Bill Status

Federal Bills

You can get information on the status of a Federal bill by calling Congress (202-225-1772). For information on Presidential action call the White House Clerk (202-456-2226). Or you can look up the bill bill status on Thomas.

Thomas can also give you a list of all the bill that have reached a particular state in the legislative process. So if you need a list of all bills that have passed the House, passed the Senate, been cleared for or Presented to the President, etc., can go to Thomas and click on “Bill Summary & Status” for either the current or previous Congresses (back to the 93rd Congress(1973-74)). Scroll down to the search for “Stage in Legislative Process,” choose the appropriate action and click the button.

To track the status of Federal bills, you can set up a free alert on Congress.gov or Govtrack. You can also use a subscription service like CQ Roll Call (in CQ Roll Call ), Lexis or Bloomberg Law. On Lexis you would set up an Alert in the LEGIS;BILLS database.

For an educated guess on whether a pending bill will pass, search the Billcast database on Lexis (LEGIS;BLCAST) or Westlaw (BC).

State Bills

For information on state bill status and state-level bill tracking, see the State Bills and Bill Tracking entry and the entries for individual states.

See Also

Federal Bills
State Bills
Bill Tracking
Public Laws
Private Laws
Congress

Logrolling in the International Business Landscape

Definition of Logrolling in the context of U.S. international business and public trade policy: Mutual aid among politicians with reciprocal support for each other’s bills.