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Bills that became other bills

A bill can pass one chamber, cross to the other, and have every word after the enacting clause struck out and replaced with something unrelated. The number stays. The sponsor stays. The committee report and the plain-English summary stay, describing legislation that is no longer there. Congress calls the result a vehicle.

6 bills in the 119th Congress had their text replaced this way after passing their own chamber.

Found by comparing the name a bill passed under against the name it carried when the other chamber sent it back — the only trace a substitution leaves in the official record. The method is deliberately cautious and will miss bills whose title never changed, so treat this as a floor rather than a total.

Why it's allowed

Partly because the Constitution requires it. Article I, Section 7 says bills raising revenue must originate in the House, so when the Senate wants to write tax law it has no choice but to take a House-passed bill and replace its contents. The Affordable Care Act reached the statute book this way, as H.R. 3590 — a bill introduced as the Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act.

The rest is procedure. A bill already through one chamber has cleared committee referral and sits on the calendar, and amending it between the chambers avoids a conference committee, which in the modern Senate takes several separate votes just to convene. When a deadline is days away, the nearest available bill becomes the vehicle.

What it doesn't mean

It does not mean the new text was enacted without a vote. An amended bill goes back to the chamber it came from, which has to agree to the changes before it can become law. Both chambers still pass the same words.

What changes is the paper trail. The bill keeps a number, a sponsor, a committee report and a summary that belong to different legislation, and anyone reading the record later sees a continuous history that was never continuous. That is what this page is for.

How we find them

GovInfo records a separate title for every printed version of a bill's text. A bill that passed the House under one name and returned from the Senate under another has both on the record, tagged to the version each came from. Where those disagree, the text was replaced.

Bills marked title history only are ones where the title record shows the change but no formal amendment to the title was recorded alongside it. The rest have both.

The check is set to under-report rather than over-report. A bill whose text was replaced without its name changing — which happens with reconciliation bills, whose titles are boilerplate at both ends — will not appear here. Read against GovInfo bill status bulk data.