Talk:List of United States federal legislation

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Contents

[edit] Wade-Davis

Why is the Wade-Davis Bill listed? It failed. 69.19.2.225 08:00, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] All caps

Does this article's title need all caps? Maybe List of United States federal legislation or List of United States Federal legislation? RickK 02:25 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

no probably not, if you change the name, also fix the "What links here". dml

[edit] Acts of Congress vs. legislation

Is there any real difference between "Acts of Congress" and "Legislation?" Do we need separate lists? (this page has both). -Anthropos 07:00, 31 Dec 2003 (UTC)

There should only be one list. dml 13:55, 31 Dec 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Category

Any point in making a category version of this page, so new law entries can be added automatically? --Calton 06:08, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] User:BD2412/Federal legislation

I've compiled a list of "major" federal acts from the table of legislation in Major Acts of Congress, Brian K. Landsberg (ed), ISBN: 0028657497. Many are already in here, and many others need articles written. I'll be able to work on it when I get back from the Bar exam, in about a week. Cheers! -- BD2412 talk 16:31, July 23, 2005 (UTC)

  • Update = project done. BD2412 T 16:48, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Federal Legislation Infobox

I've added the new infobox to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act page. Feedback would be much appreciated. Thanks! --Saucy Intruder 01:29, 26 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Divide the page?

It's 68 kb now - I propose splitting it in three, with one article covering up to the 50th Congress, a second to the 100th, and the third everything after. Thoughts? bd2412 T 01:34, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

  • Oppose. I really like this as one page. It allows for better searching (you know, with your browser's "find" function). It's also, frankly, prettier. I just like it that way, darn it.—Markles 02:18, 17 October 2006 (UTC). Furthermore, Wikipedia:Article size#Occasional exceptions states that lists may be exceptions to the "too long" rule; and, in fact, Special:Longpages, shows that most of the long pages are lists.—Markles 02:45, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Minor legislation

This is a list of legislation which I've removed from the article because they were either minor or redlinked. Feel free to restore them or delete them from here. —Markles 21:41, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Amendments and legislation

Merge arrow
 For the sake of a broader audience, part or all of the discussion below has been transferred from the User namespace at User_talk:Markles#Amendments and legislation to this space below. Please continue the discussion here.

Markles, I respectfully submit that your notion that Constitutional Amendments aren't legislation is misguided and incorrect. The American Heritage Dictionary defines "legislation" as "1. The act or process of legislating; lawmaking. 2. A proposed or enacted law or group of laws." Definition one applies to the amendment approval and subsequent ratification process, while definition two most definitely applies to amendments themselves, given that the Constitution itself explicitly states that it is the "supreme law of the land". Groupthink 21:15, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

  • A fair point. However, legislation is a subset of law. It is created through the legislative process. Statutes are legislation; court decisions are not. Both, however, are laws. Very often the word "law" is broadly defined, as it is in your definition from the Amer. Heritage Dictionary. This Wikipedia article (List of United States federal legislation) is limited to Acts of Congress. Congress does other things which are not included here; such as: resolutions, constitutional amendments, and internal business. This article is strictly for statutes as promulgated under Congress's constitutional authority to enact legislation. All of the items in this list were enacted by majorities of both houses and signed by the president or enacted over the President's veto. Constituional amendments are, of course, supreme, but this list is only concerned with statutes, a.k.a. legislation. Also, in your Edit summary for the change you said Amendments aren't "non-legislation", quite the opposite! They're uber-legislation! Über-legislation is not legislation, any more than sub-legislation would be. I don't doubt that the constitution is supreme to legislation, but that right there means it's not itself legislation. Would you also say that constituional amendments should be included in lists of executive orders? How about in lists of common law holdings? Or lists of local ordinances? These are all important types of laws, but they are all in their own ways different.—Markles 21:29, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
    Your points are also fair, and I don't disagree with any of them, especially after re-reading the intro graf to this article (although I think you're twisting my words with my "uber-legislation" point – what I meant by uber-legislation is legislation that controls all other legislation, not something of a different but superior nature to legislation). However, I would like to point out that while the amendments themselves might not precisely technically qualify for this list, there is a legislative process (and here I'm using that phrase as you used it, to mean an Act of Congress) underlying their proposal and ratification. Aside from the non-standard states convention route, an amendment requires a resolution from both Houses of Congress in order to be proposed for ratification. Now granted, the resolution in question would be a concurrent resolution, not a joint resolution, but we're not talking about your run-of-the-mill adjournment notice or enrollment correction here: we're talking about a con. res. requiring two-thirds approval from both the House and the Senate, which is then sent to the states for ratification. Now Dcmacnut also makes a good point in the article edit history: the President does not have to sign an amendment-proposing con. res. in order for it to go before the states... but what s/he neglected to mention is that the President can sign and has signed amendment proposals due to their importance. One other note: once ratified, amendments are published in U.S. Statutes at Large. Groupthink 16:39, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
    I agree with Groupthink: amendments are a special case of "legislation" because they result from actions by Congress and state legislatures. The fact that amendments could be classed as "über-legislation" doesn't change this in my opinion. Supreme Court rulings, on the other hand, are clearly (again, in my view) not legislation, so I have no quarrel at all with taking the "race legislation" tag off the Wong Kim Ark case. But I do think the category tag should be reinstated on the Fourteenth Amendment article. Richwales 02:22, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
    No. There are many kinds of law: Executive orders, constitutional provisions, case law, statutes. One does not overflow to another. Some statutes can dictate how an executive order may work, but that doesn't mean an executive order is a kind of statute. Some constitutional provisions control statutes, but that doesn't mean constitutional provisions are statutes. Some judge-issued writ may order an executive official to act, but that doesn't mean that the judge issued an executive order. The kinds of law may interact, but they are each separate and distinct. This is very simple.—Markles 10:31, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

My name was bandied around a little, so I'll weigh in. First, Constitutional Amendmenets all are joint resolutions, not concurrent resolutions as mentioned by Groupthink. The fact that president's have signed these amendment-proposing joint resolutions is irrelevant, because that signature has no effect because these resolutions are submitted directly to the states. The President can't veto them either. Joint resolutions and regular bills are the only two forms of legislation passed by Congress that can become public law, such as the current stop-gap spending measure for fiscal year 2008 HJ 52. They key distinction between a joint resolution for a Constitutional Amendment and other legislation is that they do not receive a public law number, even when ratified by the states. The Archivist of the United States simply issues a certification that it is duly part of the Constution. This article list should be reserved to only those notable pieces of legislation that were enacted into law through signature by the president and which are assigned a public law number.Dcmacnut 14:06, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Anarchist Exclusion Act

Does anyone know how to find more info about a piece of legislation? I have (32 Stat. at L. 1222, chap. 1012, § 39, sec. 32) as a starter, and it's been referred to as the "Anarchist Exclusion Act" several times. It was passed on the last day of the 57th Congress (March 3, 1903). Are there sources for finding more details about a piece? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Murderbike (talk • contribs) 07:54, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

  • I can't find too much on it online. If you can, go to a library (preferably one which is a US Government Depository Library), and ask for volume 32 of the "United States Statutes at Large"'. Look at page 1222. Start from there. Good luck.
    I've linked the citation and created an article, so if you get more information, please put it there:
    Anarchist Exclusion Act, ch. 1012, 32 Stat. 1222, 1903-03-03, 57th United States Congress.
    —Markles 16:57, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
Cool, I've got the article going in my sandbox, was probably gonna finish it today. I'll just paste into that spot. Thanks! Murderbike (talk) 20:47, 7 December 2007 (UTC)