Patricia from Minnesota wrote in with a question about public comments:

Something else I would absolutely LOVE to see, is a compilation of all legislation that is open for public comments. Almost invariably, I find out about legislation that I have an interest in just as the comment period is about to end or is already closed.

“Public comments” refers to the rule making process in the executive branch, which is different from legislation in Congress. When federal agencies like the FAA, the DOT, etc. want to create regulations, they must first go through a long process called rule making. Rule making involves a mandatory public comment period, and the agencies are required to take the comments into consideration. The end of the rule making process is usually a regulation, and it appears in the Federal Register and later the Code of Federal Regulations.

On GovTrack we only do legislation — that is, the bills proposed and enacted by the legislative branch of government (the Congress). So while we don’t get involved in regulations and public comments, you can write your representative and senators any time about any bill currently before Congress. To do so, look for the Speak Up At POPVOX button on every bill page (for live bills) — you’ll be taken to POPVOX.com, a company I co-founded in 2010 to help constituents write letters to Congress.

It used to be that us outsiders never exactly knew when a bill was going to come up for a vote. But thanks to recent developments in the House we can be more involved in the legislative process in the crucial days before a bill comes to a vote.

GovTrack’s new Docket page and Coming Up feed give you a heads-up about bills coming up in the House and Senate. We’re also tweeting the upcoming bills and posting them to our Facebook page as they are posted. For instance, we just tweeted that H.R. 4119: Border Tunnel Prevention Act of 2012 and a handful of other bills were added on Friday to the House’s schedule for next week.

The House schedule is based on a new House website called docs.house.gov that came online this past January thanks to the work of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the Office of the Clerk, the Committee on House Administration, and the Speaker’s office. The Senate schedule is based on the Floor Schedule for the next day published on Senate.gov.

The new docs.house.gov website is a major milestone for legislative transparency. For the first time, House leadership is not only committing to a rough schedule a week in advance but is also publishing the schedule in a re-usable, machine-processable format that allows websites like GovTrack to include the information quickly and reliably. Which we’ve done.

We’ve been pushing Congress to share more information in technologically-enabled ways for the last five years. This new docs.house.gov website came out of a pledge from Cantor’s office about a year ago to make more legislative data available. It was a response to the concerns we raised along with a handful of other government transparency organizations. While there’s much more legislative data we want, docs.house.gov is itself a laudable milestone.

One of my own favorite new parts of GovTrack 2.0 is the advanced bill search, which you can find in Browse => Bills => Search & Track => Advanced Search.

The advanced search — or in technical jargon the “faceted” search — can be used to drill-down into all of the bills that are currently before the U.S. Congress or actually any bill introduced since 1973. Besides searching bill titles, you can narrow your search using a number of other filters. What’s really cool is that the filters change as you drill-down so that you can find the available choices quickly.

For instance, choose Rep. Eric Cantor as the sponsor and then the filter for bill current status will only show the statuses of Cantor’s 17 bills in the current Congress. Next to each status is the number of Cantor’s bills with that status: 3 signed by the president, 2 bills passed the House, 11 resolutions passed, 1 bill waiting on committee action. Cantor has gotten a lot of bills passed.

You can also use this to get a quick count of the number of bills enacted since the start of the current session of Congress (2011-2012). Start at the advanced search and then find the filter “Signed by the President.” Next to it, it currently reads 106 bills. That’s how many bills became law. The count is updated as fast as the other bill information on GovTrack — typically it’s one or two days behind. Congress’s parliamentary procedure is pretty complex, so if you hover your mouse over any of the status options you’ll get a little explanatory text for it.

The filters in advanced search are: when the bill was introduced, who sponsored it, its current status in the legislative process, its subject area, and the bill’s type (e.g. bill versus resolution). You can also sort the results by the bill’s most recent status change date, by its date of introduction, or by its relevancy to a title text search.

The same search interface appears in a few other places on GovTrack. Can you find them all?