BillTrack50 Help Center

This post covers the query tab on your bill sheet. Like all things BillTrack50, writing a query is a low-stress process because you can always adjust your query later to refine your results. You can create as many bill sheets as you like to experiment with different search terms and filter settings. To review this topic in video, click here. As always, for additional help and guidance, please grab a time to chat on our calendar.

Start a New Bill Sheet

Start by clicking on the Bill Sheets option in the navigation panel and choose View All. This will take you to the main Bill Sheets screen with the + New Sheet button. Click that button!

Query Screen Sections

After choosing a name for your new bill sheet, you’ll be taken to the query screen. Let’s walk through the 8 sections of the query screen together: 1. State Selection, 2. Search Term Selection, 3. Bill Type Filter,  4. Bill Progress Filter, 5. Session Timeline Filter, 6. Committee Category Filter, 7. Sponsored by Filter, 8. Include Bills.

Section 1: State(s)

Choose a state (or all states) to search. Note: Federal bills are listed under United States, and DC City Council is listed under Washington DC. If you select all, you’ll have 52 states which are the 50 states, DC City Council, and Congress. To select states, click on the drop-down and make sure the checkmark displays next to the states of interest. You MUST choose at least one state for your bill sheet to work.

Section 2: Search Terms

Your search terms are words or phrases that make a bill interesting to you. Search terms can be in the title, summary, or full text of a bill. Don’t worry if you aren’t confident that you know all of the terms you will need; once you save your initial search and look over the results you can come back and make adjustments, and keep going back and forth until you are happy. Usually, if you can get in the ballpark then looking at the results will help you figure out the rest of the terms you need.

To get started, choose a search type by clicking on “Add bill text search condition” to see the menu of choices. It's a type of boolean search, using keywords and a combination of AND, OR and NOT to improve on standard keyword searching:

• “Text must contain all” requires all words or phrases you enter to be in the bill (an AND search)
• “Text must contain any of” requires any one of the words or phrases to be in the bill (an OR search)
• “Text must contain near” requires all words to appear and they must appear near each other (+/- 10 words)
• “Text must not contain” removes bills that contain any of these words (a NOT search)

Once you select the option you want you’ll be given a place to actually enter your terms.

• For multiple words just put a space between words
• Exact phrases should have quotes around them like “Minimum Wage”
• To get all endings use as a wildcard, like Bank (would return matches for bank, banks, banking, banker, etc.)
• To search for all bills in a particular state, you can put the state code (like FL or TX) into the “Text must contain all” box to get all bills. If the state abbreviation is a word, namely OR or IN, then your best bet is to enter the whole state name.

You can continue choosing from the “Add bill text search condition” menu to build up a fairly complex search. If you have multiple lines, a bill will need to match all of the conditions to be listed in your results. For example:

This search requires a bill to have some variation of the word 'drive', so 'driving', 'drives', 'driver' AND either 'autonomous vehicle' / 'autonomous vehicles' OR 'autonomous technology', AND one of the other common self driving cars phrases. It MUST NOT contain 'appropriation' or 'appropriations' (to eliminate budget bills which tend to crop up in most searches because they often list many different policy areas). And I still have the option to add another 'must contain' and a 'near' search.

For a more detailed walk-through of using multiple search lines see here. For more help choosing search terms see our search terms library.

Section 3: Bill Type Filter

You can set filter options to remove bills you know you won’t be interested in. The first filter is bill type. By default, all boxes are checked so all bills will be included. But you can uncheck the box next to any of the bill types to remove those kinds of bills from your results. The different types are:

• Bill – A bill is a proposal for a new law or an amendment to existing law (including repealing the law).
• Resolution – Resolutions are general statements of opinion or support.
• Memorial – A Memorial is used by legislatures to recognize an individual, generally after they have died. Not all states have a separate designation of Memorial in which case they will be Resolutions.
• Other – typically Constitutional Amendments or other unusual circumstances, 'Other' bills can carry the force of law.

Section 4: Bill Progress Filter

You can choose to include or exclude bills based on their progress through the legislative process. Perhaps you don’t want to see bills once they have passed and it’s too late to call your legislator. Maybe you don’t want to keep dead bills in your results. Maybe you aren’t interested in bills until they’ve crossed over so you know they might actually pass. The different progress categories are:

• Introduced: The bill has been introduced (or pre-filed) but not assigned to a committee yet.
• In Committee: The bill has been assigned to a committee but hasn’t left the originating chamber.
• Crossed Over: The bill passed a floor vote in the originating chamber and is now being considered in the other chamber (engrossed).
• Passed: The bill has been passed in identical form in both chambers (enrolled). The legislature is done with this bill.
• Signed/Enacted/Adopted: The bill has been signed by the appropriate executive (governor, secretary of state, president) or the time period allowed for a veto has expired. The bill will go into effect on the date defined in the bill, or based on the rules of the state.
• Failed/Dead: The bill has not passed and cannot make further progress, usually because the legislative session it was introduced in has ended sine die (Latin for "without date", meaning it cannot reconvene).
• Vetoed: The bill was vetoed by the appropriate executive.
• Veto Override: The veto of the executive was overridden by the legislature. The bill will go into effect on the date defined in the bill, or based on the rules of the state.

Note: if you include bills only when they’ve reached a certain step in the process, for example, you uncheck Introduced and In Committee so you only see bills that are crossed over, then bills will be added to your results the day after they cross over. If you have a “new bill” alert set you will get an email that there is a new bill. So in that case the alert means the bill is new to your sheet, not newly introduced.

Section 5: Session Timeline Filter

By default, this filter will be set to show only bills in the current session(s). You can change the filter to look at older bills by clicking on the Current Sessions drop down menu and changing it to Session Years:

You can now drag the two ends of the timeline back and forth to select exactly the time period you are interested in.

This filter can be especially useful for research when combined with the bill progress filter so you can see, for example, bills that passed over the last few years on a particular topic. For an in-depth look at searching for past session bills, check out this post.

Section 6: Committee Category Filter

When you select one or more of the categories, it will filter the bills on the bill sheet to just bills that have been assigned to a committee that falls into the broad category. This allows you to make sure your search isn't returning bills that are unconnected with the main topic of your search. So if you're searching for bills related to medical marijuana, you can select the Health and Social Services category which should help to filter out those bills related to the commercial aspects of marijuana legislation.

A few things to note:

• Not all bills are sent to a committee. So if you choose to use this filter, you won't find those bills.
• Bills can be sent to more than one committee, in which case they may be in more than one committee category.

You can also choose to filter your bill sheet by a specific committee the bill has been assigned to, by choosing Committee from the drop down menu. YOU MUST set up a single states and save your sheet before this feature will work. Start typing the name of the committee you would like to filter by. After you type three characters, you’ll get a list of all matching committees for the states you have chosen on the state list. Keep typing to narrow down further and click on the committees you want. The committee filter will limit your existing results to bills that were ever assigned to the committee(s) in question, NOT just bills currently in that committee.

If you want all bills that went through a specific committee you will need to enter search terms that will return all bills and then apply the committee filter. If you are searching a single state put the state code (like FL or TX) into the “Text must contain all” box to get all bills. Unfortunately, if the state abbreviation is a word, namely OR or IN, then your best bet is to enter the whole state name.

If you want to search across the whole country then try the following in the “Text must contain all” box: act enact* state sec*. That should get you all bills. If you want resolutions then add: whereas resolv*. For more on searching by committee, check out this post.

Section 7: Sponsored By Filter

This filter requires you to pick your states and save your bill sheet before it will work. Once you’ve done that, you can start typing a legislator’s name, and they will appear in the drop-down to select. You can select more than one legislator in the filter. If you want to see all bills introduced by a specific legislator, you’ll need to enter a search term to get all bills (see the discussion above).

Section 8: Include Bills

Finally, you can add bills explicitly by bill number. Bills added by bill number show up regardless of if they meet your other criteria. If you prefer, you can not use any search terms at all and only add bills by bill number. To add a bill, type in the state abbreviation and then a space, like “FL ” and then wait for the drop-down list to show you bills to pick from. You can use the drop-down list as a guide for the bill number format. You can keep typing and the list will narrow as you go, or you can actually select from the list. For ways to add a whole list of bill numbers see this post.

Click Save and Celebrate!

That’s it! Save your search and you’ll be taken to a grid displaying your results. You can go back to the query tab to tweak your settings anytime. Note: you won’t start getting alerts on these bills until you choose which alerts you want (on the alerts tab).

You can create as many additional sheets as you need. Remember to start a new search click “view all” under the bill sheet section of the navigation panel. This will take you a summary of all of your bill sheets, which is where the “new sheet” button lives.