No discussion of federal legislative history research would be complete without some mention of the Congressional Record. The Congressional Record itself has been published since 1873, but its precursors date back to the 1st Congress in 1789, so this publication has great historical importance. The Congressional Record is important for legislative history research because it records House and Senate floor debates relating to pending bills. As we saw earlier, references to date or page numbers in the Congressional Record may be found in USCCAN, CIS Annual and PQ Legislative Insight.
Shown above is an issue of the Congressional Record daily edition. The daily edition is published first, followed by the permanent edition, which is available via HeinOnline U.S. Congressional Documents Library. Note that pagination differs depending on which edition you are using. If you see an “H” or “S” preceding the page number, that page number reference is to the daily edition.
The Congressional Record daily edition is available electronically via Westlaw from 1985 (99th Congress) and Lexis from 1989 (101st Congress) to date. Both Westlaw and Lexis have powerful search engines that provide the researcher with many search options. The two major online search techniques are boolean and natural language. Both platforms also offer an advanced search option, which is a template for doing boolean or terms and connectors searches.
For example, one might run a search in the online version of the Congressional Record, using the bill number as a search term as shown below. This kind of search makes sense as one is looking backwards in time before the bill became law. Before becoming law, legislators would have referred to the bill by its bill number or popular name only.
However, there may be many references to H.R. 2622, since we know that bill numbers are not unique to a particular Congress and bills are renumbered with the start of each new Congress. One should, therefore, refine one's search with additional search terms, such as the popular name or a date restriction as shown above, in order to insure relevancy of the search results. Alternatively, one can select a Congressional Record database by individual Congress, like the Lexis databases shown above, which makes a date restriction unnecessary.
If one searches the Congressional Record by bill number and popular name during the specific Congress or years in question, one will retrieve results like those shown below.
Note that a boolean or terms and connector search will retrieve any document which contains all of one's search terms. A natural language search will pull up a preset number of results, whatever that may be. It may even retrieve documents that do not contain all of the search terms, unless one makes such terms mandatory. In natural language mode, the most statistically relevant results appear first. Relevance is based, in part, on the number of times the search term appears in a given document.
Thus, natural language searching allows one to find the most relevant results quickly. However, with a Boolean search, one will retrieve every reference to the bill number, not a preset number of results. Both techniques are useful for researching legislative history materials, as long as one understands the difference in the two methods.
Both the daily and permanent editions of the Congressional Record are archived in HeinOnline’s U.S. Congressional Documents Library. The helpful locator tool, shown on the the left, enables the researcher to convert page numbers between the two editions. Precursors of the Congressional Record, including the Congressional Globe and Annals of Congress are also available in this Library.
As a digital archive, HeinOnline allows researchers to see this historic material in a format that is identical to the original print publication. In addition, the same features and finding tools that accompany the print volumes, such as the Daily Digest and the Congressional Record Index, are available in the HeinOnline U.S. Congressional Documents Library as well. Note that HeinOnline offers complete coverage of the Congressional Record from inception, whereas Westlaw and Lexis offer coverage of the daily edition back to 1985 only.
HeinOnline also allows for full text searching like Westlaw and Lexis by means of a search template like that shown below. Generally the HeinOnline search engine is not quite as flexible or powerful as that offered by Westlaw and Lexis. You may wish to search for citations to the Congressional Record in Westlaw and Lexis, and then look them up on HeinOnline.
Alternatively, you may wish to cross check your results by searching in either Westlaw or Lexis and HeinOnline. Note that only HeinOnline provides digital coverage of the permanent edition of the Congressional Record. If you find pages in one edition and wish to convert them to another, the “locator” feature allows you to do so. There is no easy way to do this using the print version of the Congressional Record, so this added feature of the HeinOnline version is a great benefit.
Note that there is always a lag in publication of the permanent edition of the Congressional Record, so you will see current issues of the daily edition, but the permanent edition may be several years out of date. You will probably need to use the permanent edition to research the legislative history of older laws and the daily edition for more recent laws.
Below are the results of a search in HeinOnline’s Congressional Record permanent edition for the bill number 2622 and the phrase "identity theft" for the years 2003 and 2004. Results can be displayed in volume or relevance order. One can click on the links provided to see the full text, such as this speech by Representative Oxley. Many researchers prefer to read a document in its original print format. That is one reason HeinOnline is so popular. HeinOnline offers many navigation features, including the table of contents on the left hand side and the page number pull down menu shown here.
Note that some legislative history materials carry more weight than others, especially those materials that represent the views of Congress as a whole. When researching debate in the Congressional Record, beware of citing the views of one legislator as representing the entire Congress. In this instance, the remarks of Representative Oxley as shown below might be especially relevant as they accompany a section by section analysis of the law.
