A Primer on How to Read Legislative Bills

Photo source: Kevin Bohn. CNN. January 15, 2013. “‘I’m just a bill:’ Schoolhouse Rock, 40 years later, still teaches generations.” https://www.cnn.com/2013/01/14/politics/schoolhouse-rock-40/index.html (accessed February 6, 2024).

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“I’m just a bill. Yes, I’m only a bill. And I’m sitting here on Capitol Hill.”

That’s a quote from an iconic episode of the educational series Schoolhouse Rock, featuring a personified piece of legislation teaching a child about the basics of how such legislation gets passed in Congress. (If you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favor and watch it.) Even a half-century after the episode premiered, it’s still a valuable civics teaching tool to introduce all ages to the legislative process.

But it’s one thing to know how the legislative process works. It’s another to know what the legislation in the process actually says.

Of course, political groups and individuals — the parties, officeholders, activists, candidates, media personalities, etc. — are eager to tell you all about what they think of legislation. How legislators in Congress and state governments vote is a key component of political ads around election time.

• “Look how incredible of a person our candidate is because of how they voted for this wonderful bill/voted against this horrific bill and stood up for citizens.”
• “Look how evil this candidate was for voting for this despicable bill/against this amazing bill and betraying our citizens.”
• “That candidate says they didn’t vote for this terrible bill, but they lied. They actually voted for said bill.”

Some variation of those three quotes is the basis of many such ads. But who and what can you trust? Those who are active in politics often have biases that paint legislation in certain ways. They may deliberately obfuscate the intentions of a bill — be they advocates or opponents of said bill — or it may be what they legitimately think a bill is trying to do. Maybe the biases are accurate about what the bill does.

In any case, there are several major issues that arise when debates over legislative bills happen.

• Many people don’t know how to read legislation for themselves.
• Even for people that may know how to read them, some don’t know where to look for the information.
• And even for people that know where to look, they don’t necessarily have the time to read the legislation.

People with large personal investments in these debates that have ulterior motives often try to exploit these knowledge gaps for political gain. Of course, nobody can read every single bill that comes up in a legislative session, so at some point everyone needs to rely on information from other people. But for times you want to go straight to the source — the legislation itself — how do you find it? How do you know what you are looking at? Today’s article is an introduction to how to understand legislation in both Congress and state legislatures.

Names and Summaries of Bills

Before you start looking at bills, you should know the basics of how naming and summaries of bills work. Bills don’t just have a name — they have an acronym and number that goes along with the bill title as well. LegiScan (a state legislative searching tool that I will talk more about later) has a useful guide to how all 50 states, Congress, and the Washington, D.C. City Council use acronyms and numbers. Some examples of what you might see include “HB736,” “SB240,” and “JR689.”

For the most part, these bill numbering schemes will be the same across most legislatures, but there will be some exceptions. You typically see at least one or two letters followed by a number. Some states also have types of legislation that other states don’t (e.g., five states have an “M” designation for memorial legislation).

Generally speaking, however, legislation numbers look like this for Congress and the 50 state legislatures:

• Legislation numbers will always start with either an “H,” “A,” “S,” or “J” (except for North Dakota’s Legislature, which does not use any letters in bill numbers). An “H” refers to legislation originating in the House, or an “A” if a state calls it an Assembly (such as Nevada). But “H” and “A” are functionally the same. An “S” is for legislation originating in the Senate. A “J” means joint, referring to the fact that legislation is jointly between a House and Senate. However, the “J” could be preceded by an “H” or “S” to indicate which chamber it originated in.
• In many instances, you will also see a second letter in the legislation number. Usually, this will be “B” for a bill or “R” for resolution. Usually, a resolution only concerns the operations of either (or both) the house and senate of a legislature, while a bill directly affects people outside of the two chambers. (For information on bills and resolutions, including different types of resolutions, here are the U.S. House and U.S. Senate sources.)
• You might even see a third letter in the legislation number. This is for a more specific category of legislation that require more than one letter. An example of this is states that use “HCR” for “House Concurrent Resolution” instead of simply “HR” for “House Resolution.”
• Finally, you have the actual number of the legislation that follows the letters. This number indicates that it is that number bill that has been filed in a legislative session. For example, “HB203” indicates it is the 203rd House bill filed in a session. But there can be an HB203 for different sessions of a legislature and be about completely different topics. A state’s HB203 in 2018 may have been about gun ownership, but the HB203 that was in 2019 may have been about healthcare.

Next are the bill titles and summaries. Sometimes these are the same (e.g., both are “Generally revise election laws” Montana’s SB254 from 2023). Other times, the summaries are a bit more, or much more, descriptive (e.g., Florida’s S1312 from 2024 is titled “Tuskegee Airmen Commemoration Day,” but the summary goes into a little more detail about the date it will be held).

But of course, the most information is going to come from reading the legislation’s actual text. Because legislation is usually bills changing laws, the text is often going to be written in language that sounds formally lawlike and thus may be harder to parse for some readers.

To help with that, in some cases, there may be official analyses written on the legislation, or even opinions that argue for or against the legislation that are published on a government’s website. Such cases can help shed light on what exactly legislation seeks to do. For example, this document concerns an amendment to Nevada’s Constitution from a previous recent legislative session, what opponents and proponents argue, and potential fiscal impact. Some policy analyses, however, can be affected by bias depending on the source, so keep that in mind.

Some legislation will also be broad in scope in what law(s) they are trying to change. Others are going to be more narrow and focused. Sometimes, it isn’t the content of a bill that causes a debate so much as the wording of a bill and how broad or narrow it is. For example, Legislator A may support a gun control measure that raises the minimum age to buy a firearm to 21 years old, but does not support a bill introduced by Legislator B because it includes more gun control measures such as banning semi-automatic rifles. Legislator A may then try to file an amendment to the bill.

This kind of nuance can become easy political fodder for trying to tank candidates’ election bids. Someone could say things like “look how this legislator voted against [insert bill here] that would benefit people” when they supported some but not all parts of the legislation. This makes understanding the history of a bill and changes made to it over time an even more important aspect to the debate, and ultimately votes, on a bill.

Where Do I Find Legislation?

Federal Legislation (Congress)

Of course, the website for Congress itself is a starting point for researching federal bills. The search engine for the website has a bunch of different filters through which to limit your search, such as chamber of origin, the congressional term, policy area, committee, and sponsor(s) (i.e., who introduced a bill).

Another great source on congressional legislation is GovTrack, a website that tracks Congress to make it more open and accessible. In addition to the search engine for legislation, GovTrack has roll call votes for each congressional term, statistics pertaining to members of Congress, and a map of the congressional districts, among other things.

State Legislation

In the cases of state legislatures, each state will have their own search engines for looking up their bills. Certain states’ search engines will be better and easier to use than others — sometimes considerably so (more on this in the next section). States will either have one singular website for their legislature, a website each for the state house and senate, or websites for each chamber AND an overarching website for the whole legislature. Each of these might have their own search engine.

But the state websites themselves are not the only place to find information on legislation. In fact, if you’re new to the game of researching legislation, they might not be the best place to start. That’s where other legislative trackers come in that cover more of the states and are generally easier to use. Such trackers include, but are not limited to, the following (and they have more data than what I describe below):

• BillTrack50 has both free and paid versions that lets you quick search bills, legislators, and committees across the 50 states. It also lets you view overarching data on each state including the partisan makeup of the legislative chambers, a pie chart visualizing the partisanship of bill sponsors, and the number of introduced pieces of legislation in recent years. The below example of state stats is for Florida, my home state:

• LegiScan is another great source that includes free and paid versions. You can search by state, bill number, and/or bill text. You can even view trends such as the top 50 searches for the past 72 hours and the top 50 bills with the most activity and public interest. Each state also has tabs to recent legislative sessions of a state so you can more easily look back at old bills and how they fared. LegiScan also has links to other useful related information, including links to voter registration websites, a table of when governors must sign or veto bills in each state, and a general outline of various statuses of the legislative process. The below example is a simple search of recent Delaware bills.

• The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) is an incredible resource for researching the state legislatures in general, and it includes legislation tracking as well. It breaks down legislation into different policy areas (e.g., capital punishment, collective bargaining, state tax actions), and from there you can further search by state, subtopic, year, bill status, etc. The below example comes from NCSL’s Pre-K through 12th grade education database.

What Information is Available on Legislation?

The states’ legislative websites vary in their quality and ease of use. Some are clunky while others are more intuitive. Some have more robust search engines with a bunch of filters to make searching for bills easier while other search engines are more basic. Some have information that is more readily available (e.g., a list of recent bills filed in a legislative session), while others make finding any legislation a slower process.

In any case, the following information is ideally available. How readily accessible these are (or if they are available at all) differs amongst the states’ legislative websites:

• History of the bill, including when it was filed, the number of readings before a committee or full chamber, referrals to relevant committees, and amendments added or failed
• Current stage of a bill in the legislative process (e.g., passed one legislative chamber, died at the committee stage)
• Related bills, including in the other legislative chamber
• Bill text, including what it said at previous times (the wording of bills often changes throughout the legislative process)
• Amendments that were adopted, failed, or withdrawn
• Analyses by relevant committees detailing how they view the bills and the context surrounding the bills
• Changes in current laws that would be enacted should the legislation become law, showing what text would be added and which would be removed
• Vote history showing the number of yeas, nays, abstentions, and legislators not present (sometimes, legislators are not available to vote, or they are present but decide to not vote one way or another on the bill)
• Citations of relevant state constitutional or statute passages
• Videos of legislative debates so you can watch legislators discuss a bill for yourself

When you view a law that a bill is looking to change, text will be marked in a way that incorporates what the bill would be. Typically, you will see additions to that law marked by underlined text, while removals will be marked by strikethrough text. For example, take a look at Oklahoma Senate Bill 244 for 2024, which makes changes to election dates allowed for school district elections.

For more information on what legislative jargon means, check out this useful glossary from the Washington State Legislature. The terms won’t necessarily apply to all the other states — the terms/definitions may be different or the term doesn’t apply to another state at all. But it’s a helpful reference as most of the terms and definitions will more or less be the same for other legislatures.

Reading Legislative Bills Going Forward

Hopefully, this primer has served as a clear guide on how to read pieces of legislation. Of course, it can’t be expected that anyone will be able to do this for every piece of legislation. Even those of us who are involved in politics for a living can’t do that because their time is limited. That’s partly why Congress and the state legislatures have staffers whose duties include summarizing would-be changes to the law for the legislators or legislative committees they work for.

But when it comes to the most heated controversies over bills, you may want to read what a bill does for yourself to evaluate if any arguments hold water from your perspective. Sometimes, political biases paint how candidates, officeholders, activists, etc. see a bill. And more research on the actual wording and history of a piece of legislation only helps to increase government accountability.