About Historical Bill Text and Documents

Bills, joint resolutions and historical documents, which were available on the Library of Congress Century of Lawmaking site, are now available on Congress.gov.

Bills and joint resolutions from this collection are labeled as Historical Bill Text in Congress.gov.  There are some important differences to note in the display of historical bills on Congress.gov versus current legislation.

• Historical bill and document text predates authenticated digital publishing.
• Only the bill text from 1799 (6th Congress) to 1809 (10th Congress) are searchable. For the rest of the collection, only the title and a minimal amount of metadata are searchable.
• You can also choose to browse this collection.
• Bills from 1799 (6th Congress) to 1817 (14th Congress) were not numbered and appear as such on Congress.gov. There is not an authoritative bill number associated with these bills and the number that appears in the URL is not a bill number. Read more about early congress bill numbering on our Numbers, Numbers, Numbers blog.
• Tabs displayed for this collection include Text, Actions, Similar Bills, and if the data is available, Committees.
• Similar Bills is a machine-generated list based on matching words in bill titles. Learn more about the Similar Bills Tool at About Related Bills.

Historical Documents

• Items migrated from this collection in Century of Lawmaking to Congress.gov that are not bills, such as motions, are labeled as Historical Documents.