Permalinks for California Bills?
I've worked with California legislation and law for almost a decade, and one consistently frustrating thing is that it seems impossible to link to bills.
For example, Gov. Schwarzenegger signed SB 1404 yesterday, which is a landmark bill to require voting system manufacturers to report to the CA Secretary of State any known flaws and defects in their products. To find this bill, one would normally do the following:
- Open http://leginfo.ca.gov/
- Click on "Bill Information".
- Select "Senate" in the drop-down and type "1404" in the text field and submit.
- This is the "splash page" for a legislative bill with all the associated information... including past versions, bill status.
- Woo!
However, how does one link to that page? It's a POST query, which means the terms are hidden and there's no obvious way to link to this page. However, after asking a friend who works there, this seems to be the goods, at least for current bills:
http://leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/postquery?bill_number=sb_1404&sess=CUR
Sigh. Citability, anyone?