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Legislation Research Project
Continued from
Step #3
Step #4: Interest Group Report
Go to google.com (or another search
engine) and enter the House or Senate bill number in the search box.
See what you get.
[Important
Note: The example used below is from a previous year, so it
refers to the 109th Congress. Your bill should be in the 111th
Congress, which is the current one.]
When I did that for HR 2989 I got a
few results for HR 2989 in the 109th Congress, but many more
for HR 2989 in the 108th Congress (a transportation bill that was
very controversial) and a bunch more for HR 2989 in the 107th
Congress (a trade with Cuba bill). So I went to the "Advanced
Search" box and entered the following:
That was much better. I found, not
surprisingly that a bunch of teachers organizations support HR 2989
in the 109th Congress!
If you don't find any group that
supports or opposes your bill, start over with another bill!
Report your findings on the
Interest Groups Report Form. You must cite your sources. Use the
Citation
Machine for proper citation form.
Deadline:
Wednesday, November 4th.
Step #5: Researching the
Interest Group
It's important to understand what
type of group you are really seeing. The Internet, especially, can
be deceiving. Sometimes groups are not very forthcoming about their
ideological predispositions, habits, and prejudices.
Famous is the example of a
Northwestern University professor who has a site "proving" that the
holocaust never really happened. Lots of students have been misled
by the fact that this is a major university professor whose site
appears on Northwestern's .edu Website. [It turns out he's a science
professor, hardly qualifying him for scholarly research on the
holocaust.]
A great tool for determining what
the orientation of a site is involves searching to see what other
sites link to a particular site. Doing such a search on that
holocaust site, mentioned above, reveals that only NAZI and white
supremacist sites link to his "study" of the holocaust.
So please do such a search on any
one of the interest groups you
identified in step #4. Altavista.com has a special "Webmaster
search" that does this. Or, using Google, just enter
link:www.yoursite.org (substituting your interest group's root URL
for yoursite.org). Make sure you are checking for the root URL - the
site's home page - when you do this link search! The good thing
about the Altavista search is that you can exclude other pages in
the organization's own site (which, of course, all have links back
to the home page).
Report your results using the
Research the Interest Group Report form.
Deadline:
Friday, November 6th.
Congratulations, you're finished! I hope you
learned something about legislative research.
Pages relating to this assignment:
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