I learned a new word recently: prorogation. Which got me thinking, an inspired this post. It’s true that the states are all on different calendars. But many start early in the year, and many are done round about now, or recently finished, or will soon finish. As of now, we have 118,000 bills or so introduced so far this year, including federal bills. You can pull up a map from our home page (the link is in the first paragraph) any time to see how those bills are distributed geographically.
But how do they look over time? I took a look at new bills getting introduced, actions (bills being read on the floor, moved to committee, scheduled to be heard, etc), and votes each week. Notice actions is against the second access – there’s a lot of them! You can see bills get introduced mostly all in a rush. Actions similarly peak and drop off, but remain steady at an impressive 60,000 a week, give or take. And votes don’t get started until a little later, which makes sense, and follow their own pattern. I showed the end of last year so you can see the level of activity when almost everyone is out, and then prefiling starting, as a harbinger of the sessions to come.
Line Graph of Bills, Actions, Votes introduced weekly Nov 2012 – Apr 2013
About BillTrack50 – BillTrack50 offers free tools for citizens to easily research legislators and bills across all 50 states and Congress. BillTrack50 also offers professional tools to help organizations with ongoing legislative and regulatory tracking, as well as easy ways to share information both internally and with the public.