• We started writing original summaries of select bills. Read them all here.
• Vice presidents now have pages on GovTrack. Remember that they cast tie-breaking votes in the Senate, like in this one. Tie-breaking votes now indicate which vice president was the one who cast the vote.
• You can now search bills by their slip law number, which looks like P.L. 111-64. And enacted bills now show their slip law number, such as on this page.
• Email updates are now on a new schedule: daily weekday updates are now going out around 8am ET (was previously 8pm), and weekly updates are now going out Saturday around 2pm ET (was previously Sundays at 8pm).
• House committee assignments are finally now listed on GovTrack (thanks to The New York Times for contributing the information).

Here are some other less-visible changes we made:

• We replaced the ‘dot diagram’ on vote pages with a seating chart diagram, like on this vote page. The seating chart diagram arranges Members of Congress according to our ideology score, and that can reveal interesting patterns about how Members of Congress are voting.
• In tracked events for bills, we’re no longer including a separate “referred to committee” event if the referral occurs on the same day as the bill’s introduction.
• We added some explanatory text when a bill is “providing for the consideration” of another bill and for so-called “original” bills and resolutions. The text appears on bill and vote pages.
• Our bill prognosis now includes committee assignments as factors, and we dropped factors that don’t meet new significance testing.
• On district map pages, there is now a link to download a KML file of the map (inside the embed link).
• We made some fixes for how the site appears on mobile devices.

• We released version 2 of our API. Version 1 is now deprecated.

Last month we began adding original summaries of select legislation introduced in this Congress.

Civic engagement in the legislative process requires not only that the public have access to legislation proposed in Congress, but also that they be able to understand it. However, bills can be extremely long and often consist primarily of cross-references to other paragraphs and sections, as well as current law. This means that you may need to open multiple documents to understand a single bill. Moreover, the purpose of many bills is not clearly spelled out, and historical or legislative background is only occasionally provided.

Thus, the unfortunate reality is that even Members of Congress and their staff sometimes don’t fully know what a bill contains. Witness the confusion surrounding the lengthy and complicated health care bill in 2009. And lawmakers are aware of this problem: Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) recently proposed a bill that would require every piece of congressional legislation to be written in a way that allows members to understand what it does.

Here at GovTrack we’ve gotten a fair amount of complaints about wordy, incomprehensible legislative language. So we’ve started doing our own research on certain bills, in an effort to provide simple and straightforward explanations of their content and purpose. These are bills that have gotten a lot of coverage in the press and social media, have many of our users tracking them, or have piqued our interest. Oftentimes, they have all three features.

Here’s a list of the bills we’ve summarized so far, ordered by the number of users tracking them:

1. H.J.Res. 15: A bill to repeal presidential term limits
2. S. 150, H.R. 437: Assault Weapons Ban of 2013
3. H.R. 138, S. 33: Large Capacity Ammunition Feeding Device Act
4. H.R. 142, S. 35: Stop Online Ammunition Sales Act of 2013
5. H.R. 21: NRA Members’ Gun Safety Act of 2013
6. H.R. 141: Gun Show Loophole Closing Act of 2013
7. H.R. 193: Seed Availability and Competition Act of 2013
8. S. 22: Gun Show Background Check Act of 2013