LIBRARIAN Act of 2007

On Monday, the Librarian Incentive to Boost Recruitment and Retention in Areas of Need (LIBRARIAN) Act of 2007 was introduced in both the Senate and the House.  The bill amends the Higher Education Act of 1965 to provide for Perkins student loan forgiveness, which will encourage individuals to become and remain librarians in low-income schools and public libraries.

The bills are S. 1121 and H.R. 1877.

Voting records

There are a number of sources for tracking how your members of congress vote on particular legislation. The Washington Post’s Congress Votes Database is one - it includes data going back to 1991, and includes information on who missed votes, most voted on bills, late night votes, etc. RSS feeds for individual members of Congress are available, as is an RSS feed for the 10 most recent votes.

OpenCongress does not have votes going back to past sessions of Congress - it begins with the 110th (Current) congress. This site includes RSS feeds for Members’ votes, for each piece of legislation introduced (the full-text and status of legislation is also included), and also allows you to subscribe to blog posts and news articles mentioning your Member of Congress.

The official federal government sources for Members’ voting records are the Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House, respectively.

The only site I’ve been able to find for the Alabama legislature is their official site, ALISON. Keep in mind that ALISON only works with Internet Explorer. In order to view votes, follow these steps (from the legislature’s web site):

When you have a bill or list of bills that display the bill buttons. You click a bill button first, and then go to the History button at the top. In the history list you should see one or more Roll NNN buttons(N=a number). This button is visible for any votes except a voice vote. Also, vote buttons are available in the BIR History window, which is accessible from the History window. Yea, Nay, Abstain, and Present are the vote options.

I haven’t yet found a source that compiles the roll call votes & makes them available…but I’ll keep looking.

Update, 2008-02-24: ALISON now works in the Firefox browser!  HT: Daily Dixie.

H.R. 1591 passes

H.R. 1591, “Making emergency supplemental appropriations for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2007, and for other purposes,” passed today with a vote of 51 ayes, 47 nays, and 2 abstentions (This is the bill that doesn’t just give more money for the war in Iraq - note that ‘other purposes’ line because that can range from peanuts to the minimum wage.)

Both Alabama Senators voted against the legislation.