Congressional Record for the House for February 23, 2010 regarding the Akaka bill. The Akaka bill passed the House of Representatives on February 23, 2010. The Congressional Record contains transcripts of the entire floor debate on the bill and proposed amendments, the text of the bill, the yeas and nays of several recorded votes, and selected testimony. Here's how to find everything.

Here are three different displays of the roll call results on final passage of the Akaka bill:

The Clerk of the House of Representatives (Library of Congress):
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2010/roll059.xml

GovTrack has a colorful display and a list in alphabetical order of the states.
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/vote.xpd?vote=h2010-59

Open Congress (caution: absentees are marked "abstain")
http://www.opencongress.org/vote/2010/h/59

The Congressional Record is available on the internet. But it's a HUGE website and requires time and effort to learn how to use it. Below are some instructions on how to use it to find all pages of the Congressional Record for February 23, 2010 that are relevant to the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization bill (Akaka bill). As you'll see, there's no practical way to provide a consolidated webpage containing all the materials from the Congressional Record in one place. You'll have to go to the Library of Congress website to get what you need, piece by piece. But the instructions below will make it as easy as possible for you to do that.

The materials available include transcripts of the floor debate on the resolution to bring the Akaka bill to the floor; transcripts of the debate on the bill itself; the text of the bill as it was before the Abercrombie substitute; transcripts of the debate on whether to allow Abercrombie to make his substitute; text of the bill as it was after Abercrombie was allowed to substitute his amended version; the text of two amendments proposed by Representatives Jeff Flake and Doc Hastings and transcripts of the debates over whether to put the amendments into the bill; the names of the 435 Representatives and how they voted on each recorded vote (there were recorded votes on the resolution to proceed, the motion to substitute the new version, each of the proposed amendments, and final passage); additional "extraneous" materials placed into the record such as a letter from Julie Kitka (head of the Alaska federation of natives), a letter from Robin Danner (head of the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement); etc. etc.

Here are the phrases to look for and the clickable links that will take you to those places, in the correct order:

1. THOMAS -- In the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, legislative information from the Library of Congress
http://www.thomas.gov/

2. Search the Congressional Record for the 111th Congress (2009-2010)
http://www.thomas.gov/home/r111query.htmlE

3. Browse daily
http://www.thomas.gov/r111/r111.html

4. February 2010 -- February 23 House
http://www.thomas.gov/cgi-bin/query/B?r111:@FIELD(FLD003+h)+@FIELD(DDATE+20100223)

5. In the list of topics, search for "Native Hawaiian" stuff. You'll find it at topics # 114, 122, and 124.

6. In each of those three topics there's a clickable link. When you click on one of those links, you get a list of page numbers with very short descriptions of the content.

However, that list of page numbers will be available for only about 10-15 minutes, and then your time has expired and you must begin the process all over again. There's no way to get a permanent URL for those lists of page numbers -- if you look at the URL in your browser window you'll see the word "temp" meaning the link is only temporary. That's because the website is so enormous and there are so many millions of people using it that they don't have enough space on their server to make all the pages of the Congressional Record immediately available with a permanent link. You can read one page at a time without placing any further demands on the system, and then another page, etc.; but each page is "in use" only as you click for it. After 10-15 minutes the temporary link expires. You can try using your "back" button one or more times until you get to a permanent page from where you can click your way forward again; or if you get lost, start over again by following the pathway shown above.

Each page number is a clickable link allowing you to see one or two or three pages of the Congressional Record beginning at that page number, and you can copy/paste any content you wish.

Remember that Congress often has several different things happening at once, and most members are not present on the floor for most of the activity (they are having committee meetings or working in their offices). Therefore the floor leaders try to postpone recorded votes until all such votes can be held one after another when everyone is present on the floor. The result is that proceedings on the Akaka bill were sometimes temporarily stopped to allow other matters to intervene. Therefore, some pages of the Congressional Record are "missing" from the sequence of page numbers because they have no content related to to the Akaka bill.

Here are the items from indexes for the three topics you will get by following step #5 above:

INDEX -- EVEN THOUGH THESE PAGE NUMBERS APPEAR TO BE CLICKABLE LINKS, THEY ARE NOT. THIS LIST MERELY SHOWS YOU WHAT YOU WILL GET. YOU MUST FOLLOW THE STEPS ABOVE IN ORDER TO GET THESE ITEMS TO WORK. THE BEST WAY IS TO GO DIRECTLY TO THIS LINK
http://www.thomas.gov/cgi-bin/query/B?r111:@FIELD(FLD003+h)+@FIELD(DDATE+20100223)
AND LOOK FOR ITEMS # 114, 122, and 124.

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Send comments or questions to:
Ken_Conklin@yahoo.com

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