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The first session of the 107th Congress is now in progress. The hardworking legislators in the Senate and the House of Representatives are back from spring break (April 7-23, 2001). They'll take another week off around Memorial Day (to attend barbecues and picnics in their home districts), and they'll be out of town again for most of August. We used the Yahoo! directory to find schedules posted on the official congressional sites. It took us eight steps to find your answer: - First, we clicked on the top-level Government category.
- Our next stop was U.S. Government.
- There, we selected the Legislative
Branch.
- Next click: the House of Representatives.
- The first listing was the the official house.gov site. A quick scan of the front page led us to the 2001 House Calendar and a partial answer to your question.
- Next, we backtracked (via the browser "Back" button) to the Legislative Branch category and clicked on Senate.
- We chose the official web home of the U.S. Senate.
- Under the "Today's Calendar" heading on the front page, we located
the Senate's 2001 Schedule.
Both houses hope to adjourn the first session of the 107th Congress on October 5. We used the graphical month-by-month calendar and counted all the red-letter dates: 151 days in session in 2001. It wasn't until we consulted the FAQ on Thomas, a consummate resource for U.S. legislative information from the Library of Congress, that we found out how congressional sessions work: A "new" Congress convenes every two years, in the January following a November congressional election... Typically, each Congress
meets in two annual "sessions," one in its first calendar year and another in the second calendar year. Thus, the first session of the 107th Congress occurs in 2001 and the second in 2002.
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