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Please note that this post addresses amendments offered during committee or floor consideration.

What is an amendment?

An amendment is a change to a bill or resolution that is proposed either during committee or floor consideration.

During committee consideration of a bill, amendments can be offered by a member of that committee, whereas any member can offer amendments to a bill during floor consideration.

When can bills and resolutions be amended?

A floor amendment can be offered during second reading or third reading consideration of a bill. During the second reading of a bill, each amendment must be approved by a majority of the members present and voting to be adopted. However, a vote of two-thirds of the members present is required to adopt an amendment during the third reading of a bill.

Like floor amendments, a committee amendment must also be approved by majority vote of the chamber in which the bill is pending. A committee amendment is laid out and subject to debate on the chamber floor during the second reading consideration of the bill.

Where can I find information about amendments?

For amendments to current or recent legislation, use the Amendment Search on the Texas Legislature Online (TLO). This search tool allows you to use the following parameters to narrow your search results:

The "Amendment Search" engine on TLO is located under the "Search" tab.

The ability to search for text within an amendment is particularly useful to see if language from one bill has been added by an amendment to another bill.

An explanation of the columns of information in the "Amendments" tab is provided above.

The "Amendments" tab in TLO contains more information about amendments, including the author of the amendment, amendment type, action, date the amendment was proposed, and link(s) to the amendment text.

The Current Amendment feature on TLO displays the text of amendments as they are considered on the House floor. 

If you are conducting historical research about a bill, use the Legislative Archive System database and the collection of scanned House and Senate Journals to look for amendment-related information. Bill files, which can be found under the "Text" tab, contain adopted amendments, while journals contain all proposed amendments.

When using the Legislative Archive System, the bill file is located under the "Text" tab.

More information about amendments can be found in the following resources:

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Now, go back and click on those committee links on the History tab. (This part will only work in TLO.) You'll see a list of the committee members for that session, and on the right, a "Meetings" link. Click here to see a list of all of the meetings the committee conducted in that session. Find the hearing date you determined from the action list to access its hearing notice, minutes, and witness list. Since multiple bills often are considered in a single hearing, do a Control-F for your bill number to find the relevant sections. You can also look on the websites for each of the committees (House, Senate), as they sometimes include meeting handouts and transcripts for the current session.

 

 

You then can use the committee names and hearing dates to search for the relevant recordings in the house and senate video archives (for which links also are available on TLO and on the "Additional sources" tab in a LAS search). There is a chart in our legislative intent guide with more information about which dates are available online or on audio tape. Transcripts are rare, but House Video/Audio Services (512-463-0920) or Senate Staff Services (512-463-0430) may have transcripts or know if one exists (perhaps with the committee records) for a certain committee hearing.

 

Another avenue of committee testimony research is the LRL's committee minutes project, which makes available minutes and related documents for house, senate, and joint committees from the 63rd-74th Legislatures (1973-1995). Some have testimony transcripts--it is always worthwhile to check.

 

For example, a search in the committee minutes database for the Senate Committee on Finance, 72R (1991) yields 92 days' worth of scanned meeting minutes. Most of the documents summarize the proceedings of the meeting and simply make note when testimony was taken, but the March 5, 1991, minutes includes a transcript.

 

The committee minutes database includes interim committees, so even if you don't have a particular bill in mind, searching here can be helpful for many legislative history projects.

 

 

Cover image by Flickr user hyacinth50.

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