Congress.gov August 2021 New, Tip, and Top

At the end of July, Andrew shared the enhancements from the last Congress.gov release, which included adding Key Word In Context (KWIC) search results for the Bound Congressional Record and new customization options for bill alerts.

With this month’s release, a link to the treaty errata tab from the overview section on treaty detail pages has been added to Congress.gov. The Congress.gov team has also added a “relatedBill” field for searching bill citations on committee meetings and hearings. You can see an example of how this works by clicking here. In this example, the drop-down menu on the global search box was changed to “committee materials” and the search terms used were congressId:117 AND relatedBill:”s1″

This release also adds fields to search for nominations or Senate executive communications that were referred to multiple committees. For example, to search for a nomination that was referred to two or more Senate committees, you can use the “All Congresses” option on the global search drop-down menu and type in this syntax: nominationSenateReferralCommitteeCount:[2 TO *]. Similarly, to search for an executive communication that was referred to two or more Senate committees, you can use the “All Congresses” option on the global search drop-down menu and type in this syntax: executiveCommunicationSenateReferralCommitteeCount:[2 TO *].

The ability to display multiple dates for a hearing in the overview of a committee meeting has been added to Congress.gov. Finally, the Congress.gov team added “to accompany” rows that display the relationship between a treaty and an executive report on the Executive Reports Browse page.

Enhancements

Enhancement – Congressional Record – Bound Edition

• The Congressional Record Bound edition is now available for the 67th and 68th Congresses (1921-1925).

Enhancement – Committee Meetings – Search

• Use the relatedBill: search label to find committee meetings and hearings related to a specific bill.

Enhancement – Nominations – Search

• Use the nominationSenateReferralCommitteeCount: search label to find nominations that have been referred to a particular number of Senate committees.

Enhancement – Senate Communications – Search

• Use the executiveCommunicationSenateReferralCommitteeCount: search label to find Senate communications that have been referred to a particular number of Senate committees.

Enhancement – Treaty Documents – Errata

• Treaty documents errata are linked from the overview and display on the Text – Treaty Document Errata tab.

Search Tip

You can explore 30,000 historical bills and resolutions from the 19th century that were recently added to Congress.gov.

Most-Viewed Bills

These were the most-viewed bills for the week of August 8, 2021: