How not to look up a bill

You may remember that at the beginning of this month the House and Senate passed a $26 billion bill to 1) prop up state Medicaid programs ($16 billion) and 2) shore up state education budgets to prevent teacher layoffs ($10 billion).

At the time, I noticed a silly mistake around the internets that, while annoying, offers a teachable moment. Information is readily available in this day and age but it's important to know how to interpret it once you've found it. The mistake I'm talking about is exemplified by this entry on this site:

P.L. 111-226, The XXXXXX Act of XXXX

H.R. 1586 would impose an additional tax on bonuses received from certain TARP recipients.

H.R. 1586 is the bill number of the bill that I mentioned above--the aid to states for education and Medicaid (now signed by the President and thus a public law: P.L. 111-126). You might notice right away that those things have nothing to do with TARP (the financial bailout bill from 2008). But some folks, trying to look up this Medicaid/education bill they'd heard about, went to sites like that and thought that somehow the Democrats had pulled a fast one: this was all just a ruse to tax bonuses! Actually, no. These are the wrong trousers, Gromit!

It's possible to look up the right bill and still get the wrong bill. As you undoubtedly know, bills that get introduced in either chamber of Congress get a unique number: H.R. ## for House bills, S. ## for Senate bills. The numbers start over at the beginning of each session of Congress--i.e. every 2 years--but if you look up a specific bill number, you're unlikely to stumble across that bill from a previous Congress unless you're really trying to. So what happened?

First, always go to the authoritative source for the text of Congressional bills: the Library of Congress's THOMAS (Thomas, like the groundhog third President). There are others that are decent--OpenCongress is making a nice attempt at getting a community thing going--but this is the one you know is bulletproof. Now, if you went to THOMAS and looked up this education and Medicaid funding bill by typing its unique number, H.R. 1586, into the search field, you'd find that it comes in seven versions, all from the current Congressional session:

1 . To impose an additional tax on bonuses received from certain TARP recipients. (Introduced in House - IH)[H.R.1586.IH][PDF]
2 . FAA Air Transportation Modernization and Safety Improvement Act (Engrossed Amendment Senate - EAS)[H.R.1586.EAS][PDF]
3 . To impose an additional tax on bonuses received from certain TARP recipients. (Engrossed in House [Passed House] - EH)[H.R.1586.EH][PDF]
4 . XXXXXXAct ofXXXX (Engrossed Amendment Senate - EAS)[H.R.1586.EAS2][PDF]
5 . Aviation Safety and Investment Act of 2010 (Engrossed Amendment House - EAH)[H.R.1586.EAH][PDF]
6 . To impose an additional tax on bonuses received from certain TARP recipients. (Placed on Calendar Senate - PCS)[H.R.1586.PCS][PDF]
7 . XXXXXXAct ofXXXX (Enrolled Bill [Final as Passed Both House and Senate] - ENR)[H.R.1586.ENR][PDF]

Now, usually when you see a list like that on THOMAS, those versions are in chronological order. That's not quite true of this list. So let's trace the life of this particular bill.

This one started out as the "H.R. 1586--To impose an additional tax on bonuses received from certain TARP recipients," introduced in the House on March 18, 2009. That's the first item on the list (the ".IH" means it was introduced in the House but didn't pass in that form). The next day it passed the House with the text listed at number 3 in the list (the ".EH" means it was engrossed in the House, i.e. passed out of that chamber and sent to the Senate), which is also the text of version 6--the bill placed on the calendar of the Senate (".PSC"). There it sat, a bill taxing the TARP bonus money that passed the House in March 2009.

Fast forward a year. The Senate "took up" the legislation, by which I mean they pulled the text of the bill the House had sent them out of the drawer, blew the dust off, and stuck in--via an amendment--the text of a completely unrelated bill they wanted to pass, entitled " FAA Air Transportation Modernization and Safety Improvement Act." What's the deal there? Why not just write a new bill--"S. ##"--instead of usurping H.R. 1586? Well, if you look at this version of the text of the bill, you'll notice one of the titles is "TITLE VIII--AIRPORT AND AIRWAY TRUST FUND PROVISIONS AND RELATED TAXES." Article 1, Section VII tells us that "All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills." So when the Senate wants to start the ball rolling on legislation that will raise revenue, they'll often take a bill that's passed the House, completely scrap its text and replace it with an amendment containing the full text of their own new bill. So the revenue-raising bill starts with "H.R. ##" as required by the Constitution but the Senate still gets to introduce a revenue bill with a wink and a nod. This is why the health care bill that became law in March was numbered H.R. 3590 even though it was actually the Senate's health care bill (and thus one might naively have thought it should have been numbered S. ##).

So this transportation bill, number 2 in the list, was engrossed in the Senate and sent back to the House on March 22, 2010. The House then amended the Senate amendment to produce yet another iteration of the bill--now called the " Aviation Safety and Investment Act of 2010"--which it passed and sent back to the Senate on March 25, 2010. Since both chambers have to pass the same piece of legislation before it goes to the President, it can ping pong back and forth like this for a while.

This one, however, didn't. It sat in the Senate until the beginning of this month, at which point yet another amendment ("SENATE AMENDMENT TO HOUSE AMENDMENT TO SENATE AMENDMENT") was used to strip out all the text and put in a completely new bill. This is the one they didn't bother titling that extends Medicaid and education funds to states. That's number 4 on the list, " XXXXXXAct ofXXXX." The Senate passed this, at which point it went to the House which passed it unaltered (that's number 7 on the list: "Enrolled Bill [Final as Passed Both House and Senate]").

This bill--the sixth or seventh iteration of H.R. 1586 and the third completely different bill bearing that number--is what the House came back to Washington to pass earlier this month. They did so and the President signed it. But this isn't the TARP bonuses bill and it isn't the Aviation Safety bill. The text of those bills was each thrown out as this thing ping ponged back and forth between the two chambers until, finally, they both agreed to the same text.

Kind of reminds you of the Ship of Theseus, doesn't it? If you dismantle a bill piece by piece and replace it with something else, is it still the same bill? That's one for the philosophers but it certainly does keep the same bill number. So don't get confused.