Legislative History Research Guide

Committee transcripts (e.g. hearing transcripts, markup session transcripts) can be some of the most elusive Congressional documents.

• Hearings are the most commonly-sought type of committee transcripts. In hearings, House and Senate committees hear testimony on proposed legislation in order to determine the need for new legislation in a particular area and to hear the views of various persons or organizations interested in the legislation. Hearings can provide a wealth of information for background research into the issue Congress is addressing. Hearings are held for most substantive legislation and transcripts of most hearings (including exhibits provided by those testifying) are published.  (For interpreting enacted legislation, however, note that hearings may be less useful than other legislative documents because they focus on the views of the parties testifying rather than the views of the committee or Congress.) 
  The Law Library has selected individual hearing transcripts in both paper and microform. Search for them in our catalog by the title of the hearing, name of the committee, or the subject of the investigation. Hearing transcripts may also be available electronically; see the databases list below.
• Markup sessions are committee meetings where a bill is "marked up" via amendments. Members may debate and vote on the amendments before any changes are made. Markup sessions usually end with a vote to report the bill out of committee.  Markup sessions and other committee transcripts (other than hearings) can be quite difficult to locate.  

Note that there is sometimes a significant lag-time between when a hearing or committee meeting is held and when official transcripts are published.  In addition, each committee chooses whether to publish transcripts (or other committee materials) at all; not all materials are published or made available to the public. That said, third party publishers (see database list below) often provide unofficial transcripts of hearings that are available much sooner than official versions, and sometimes also transcripts of other committee meetings, like markup sessions.  In addition, sometimes committee meetings or hearings are livestreamed on the committee's website and/or are broadcast on C-SPAN.

For very recent hearings you may find that transcripts are difficult to find.  First, note that you may be able to obtain hearing materials from the committee website itself (House Committees / Senate Committees).  The Federal News Service (available via Westlaw) also transcribes selected hearings and uploads them daily. Another source to check for recent hearing transcriptions is CQ Transcriptions on Nexis Uni (see note below).

You may also be able to find video recordings of hearings at C-SPAN.org (sometimes these have search-able closed captioning, though be aware that this captioning may contain spelling errors).

Miscellaneous documents from House Committees (bill versions, written witness statements, prints, etc.) can be found in the Committee Repository at docs.house.gov (click Committee Repository on the right, then Document Search at the top; run an initial search to get "Search Refinements" on the left, which allow for filtering by Committee, Meeting Type (Markup, Hearing, or Meeting), or Congress).

Note about Nexis Uni: If you are logged in to Lexis, Nexis Uni links may not work properly, and vice versa. Try accessing Nexis Uni in a separate browser from the one used to access Lexis.  You can also try clearing your cache and cookies between uses of Lexis and Nexis Uni.