Making Improvements in the Enactment of Title United States Code, Into A Positive Law Title and to Improve the Code

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, one of the most important responsibilities the House gives the House Committee on the Judiciary is to oversee the revision and codification of the statutes of the United States.

Keeping track of the new laws Congress passes every session is a formidable challenge, but it is an essential part of maintaining the rule of law in our country. It is a role we take seriously on the House Committee on the Judiciary.

I thank the chairman of the committee for bringing this legislation to the floor on a bipartisan basis today to further this important duty.

The body of Federal law is so large and complex at this point that it would be almost completely unmanageable without the United States Code. Currently consisting of 54 titles, the code compiles the general and permanent laws of the United States into coherent subject areas. This makes our Federal laws accessible both to the government officials who work to fairly administer them and to the private citizens who seek the benefits or relief the laws provide them.

To date, 27 of these 54 titles have been enacted into ``positive law,'' which means the text of these titles is itself the law while the remaining titles are ``non-positive,'' meaning they organize Federal statutes for users' convenience but do not themselves have the force of law.

The painstaking and vital work of maintaining and updating the code falls to the expert lawyers working under the supervision of the House in the Office of the Law Revision Counsel. We owe a great debt to these attorneys who ably carry out their statutory mandate ``to develop and keep current an official and positive codification of the laws of the United States,'' while maintaining strict impartiality as to legislative policy.

H.R. 7324 is the first of five bills that we are taking up today that make conforming changes to statutes that have been impacted by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel's positive law codification efforts while making no change in the meaning or effect of any existing laws.

This legislation will help ensure that the code is an authoritative, accurate, and accessible source of Federal law, and I thank the gentlewoman from Vermont (Ms. Balint) for introducing the bill.

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Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Balint).

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Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I support this legislation, and I encourage my colleagues to do the same. I yield back the balance of my time.

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