Searching the Committee Schedule: Congress.gov New, Tip, and Top for September 2019

One of the new features to Congress.gov that we have been refining this year is the Committee Schedule, which “combines announcements about future House and Senate committee meetings and hearings for the selected week.” Robert announced its launch in January.  Since then, we have added indicators for rescheduled and postponed meetings, upcoming meetings to the homepage, links to supporting documentation such as legislation, and the date picker to the weekly view of the schedule.

With this update we are adding the Committee Meetings from the Committee Schedule to our global “All Sources” search results as well as adding Committee Meetings to our Committee Profile pages.

You can now go to specific House or Senate Committee pages to see the Committee Meetings listed.  You can select “Committee Meetings” and check “Search Within” at the top to search the meetings for that committee.

To search for the Committee Meetings in the global search, change “Current Legislation” to “All Sources” in the drop down menu.  You can add a search term or leave the search box empty and run the search.  After you get your results make sure just “Committee Meetings” is checked.  You can also use the Committee filter to narrow your results.  For example, if you were interested in the Rules Committee Meetings you could save this search and then select “Get Alerts” for when new upcoming meetings are added.  You could also select “Download Results” from the link at the top of the results if you need a quick spreadsheet of dates and times a committee met.

Searching Committee Meetings is a great next step in our incorporation of this new material into Congress.gov.  Our team has been hard at work to continue to bring you new enhancements to the site.  Stay tuned as there are more updates to come.

One other new feature with this release is a link to Law Library of Congress Reports on the homepage.  It is under the heading of Library of Congress Reports along with the Search CRS Reports link.

We also updated the Appropriations link on the homepage to go to the Appropriations Status Table on the CRS Reports site.

Enhancements for September 2019

You can read through all of the Congress.gov Enhancements for September:

Enhancement – Committee Schedule – Search

• Committee Schedule meeting information is searched from the search bar when you select All Sources.

Enhancement – Committee Profiles – Committee Meetings

• Committee meetings are listed on each committee’s profile page.

Enhancement – Law Library Reports – Homepage Link

• Link from the Congress.gov homepage to the Law Library’s Comprehensive Index of Legal Reports.

Enhancement – Find Your Representative by Zip Code

• Members of the U.S. Congress now includes a link to locate your representative by zip code.
• The Congress.gov Contact Us Page now includes a link to locate your representative by zip code.

Enhancement – Appropriations Tables

• The Congress.gov Appropriations Table has an improved interface, and includes additional content, such as House resolutions.

Search Tip

This week’s search tip on billCosponsorCount is by Claudia.

Use the field label billCosponsorCount: in the Legislation Search form (click More Options if collapsed) to find bills with an exact number of cosponsors or bills with a number of cosponsors within a range.

Examples:

• billCosponsorCount:50. Finds bills with exactly 50 cosponsors.
• billCosponsorCount:[50 TO *]. Finds bills with 50 cosponsors or more.
• billCosponsorCount:[1 TO 49]. Finds bills with cosponsors within the specified range.

  

Most-Viewed Bills

Below are the Most-Viewed Bills for September 1, 2019.  All are from the current 116th Congress.

Please share below or submit feedback for what you would like to see on Congress.gov.