Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, as was mentioned by my colleague Mr. Kilmer, this is the Constitution Annotated, or CONAN, as it is better known today. Its origins date back to 1797 when Congress passed legislation requiring that every Member of Congress be provided a copy of the Constitution. These copies were then expanded to include Supreme Court case citations so that Members could see which clauses of the Constitution the Court used to decide those cases. As the number of citations grew, Members became frustrated with the new format. The hundreds of citations listed under each clause of the Constitution were useless to most of them because they had no idea what the cases were about and what questions were before the Court. In 1921, Congress passed a resolution requiring reprints of the Constitution to include explanatory language that would make sense of all the case citations throughout. This requirement made the reprints much more useful to the Members, and the format created then is one that is still used today. Initially, CONAN was printed every 10 years or so, but by 1970, Members began to complain that it was outdated almost as soon as it was printed. They addressed this by passing a resolution requiring that a paperbound supplement to CONAN be printed every 2 years, in addition to printing the hardbound version of the CONAN every 10. Since 1972, that is what we have done: Print a hardbound version of CONAN every 10 years and a paperbound supplement every 2.…”