Many Congressional publications are being put online in fulltext and are available through GPO Access , the GPO's website. It covers subjects such as public administration, business, economics, social conditions, and international relations. For further information on indexes, read the Indexes and Electronic Databases section. Government Documents and the Law We will learn more about legal research in another lesson . But for now, we will discuss how laws come into being and are distributed in the government documents system.
Bills are the usual form in which legislation is proposed.
Though thousands of bills are introduced each session of Congress, only a few become law. Joint resolutions are basically the same as bills but are usually used only for constitutional amendments and money matters. If vetoed by the President, a two-thirds majority of each chamber is needed to override. Bills can be either public or private. Private bills become private laws which affect only certain citizens or organizations and are printed separately in Statutes at Large from public laws which affect the general public.