Be Informed on the Legislative Process - Part II

Part II:  How can a DKG member receive daily legislative updates and review pending legislation?

To obtain a daily update on legislation that is pending, go to www.govtrack.us and sign up for legislative updates.  You can choose to get updates on topics of interest via email. When you open the email and click on a bill title, you get a summary of the bill. If you don’t want daily updates, you can go to the site and click on a section called “Find Legislation that Affects You.”  The drop-down menu has various areas of legislation, such as “Education,” where users can review pending bills. If you want to review bills with a more limited focus in the area of Education, this site has twenty-two subcategories of Education.  These subcategories include such topics as “Special Education,” “Higher Education,” and “Preschool Education.”  This site uses the congress.gov information provided by the Library of Congress and organizes it for you.  When you click on a bill here, the sponsor, the history, and the current status of the bill in the legislative process are given.  The site also gives information about the likelihood of the bill becoming a law and includes legislators’ statements in regards to this piece of legislation.