Originally posted as an aside to WPR's reporters, SenatorJPO shares his bill-finding walkthrough with WPR Rebuttal. Now equipped with this knowledge, go-out and find those bills!
How does one find Senate and Assembly bills on the Wisconsin legislative website?
- Finding proposed Wisconsin laws involves more trial-and-error searching than does finding enacted Wisconsin laws. It should not be this difficult to locate legislation online -- but, alas!
- Whereas "acts" are turned into statutes that can be readily searched; legislative proposals are -not- displayed in any online-indexed directory. They're what I call "legislation lacking hyperlinks!"
- These bills are instead hidden-away, without any inbound hyperlinks, until the "second reading" of the bill. (At which point, the bill -might- be displayed via hyperlink in the lefthand column of the Senate or Assembly "session" homepage, depending on the presenting chamber.)
- For this example, I will show you how to find
"2017 Senate Bill 700" on the legislative website.
- Although you could attempt to Google a bill, it is difficult to search-for a legislative proposal when you don't even have the bill number. How do you that you've found the right one?
- Furthermore, navigation within the legislative website itself can be tricky. The process I follow is:
1) Go to the main page of
Wisconsin's legislative website -- you'll see a top menu-bar with "Home," "Senate," etc.
2) From the top menu-bar,
click "Senate."
3) From the drop-down bar,
click "Session."
4) A page with a large right-hand side and a small left-hand column will load. Click any of the "SB" hyperlinks in that column.
5) The page will load for whichever Senate Bill you had clicked. Go to the browser's web-address bar and type "sb700" instead of whatever number follows the "proposal" part of the URL. For example,
"proposals/sb650" would become
"proposals/sb700."
6) Press "enter." The page for
Senate Bill 2017 is now displayed!
To find an Assembly bill, repeat the preceding process, except:
-
Click "Assembly" instead of "Senate;" and
-
Type "ab" instead of "sb" in the web address.
P.S.
I sent the link for this walkthrough to Wisconsin Public Radio via their contact form. They will (hopefully) utilize this bill-finding process to ensure -every- news article about a proposed bill also lists the bill number and a hyperlink to the bill text.
Filed under: Finding the Complete Text and Sponsors of Proposed Laws (Bills) for the State of Wisconsin, Walkthrough
