Congress doesn’t really have you in mind when it acts. It hasn’t occurred to them that you might be trying to follow along, and they’ve made it a little tough to figure out what’s going on next week. So let’s go through that.

There seems to be consensus on a bunch of jobs-related bills, so the leadership decided to pack ‘em all into one bill that will be going to the House floor. But rather than put them into a new bill, they’re swapping out the language of an existing bill.

H.R. 3606 was introduced as the “Reopening American Capital Markets to Emerging Growth Companies Act of 2011.” It’s meant to improve access to the public capital markets for emerging growth companies. But it won’t be called that, and it will do a lot more than that, by the time it reaches the House floor this coming week.

When the House Rules Committee set the terms for debate on that bill, they decided to stuff all the jobs bills they’ve agreed on into H.R. 3606. According to the “committee print” of the bill, it will include H.R. 1070, H.R. 2930, and H.R. 2940 as passed by the House, H.R. 2167 as reported and H.R. 3606 as ordered reported by the Committee on Financial Services, and H.R. 4088 as introduced, along with necessary technical and conforming changes.

Follow the links if you want to learn what all the bills are about and what people think of them (to the extent people think much at all). Below we’ll put the current votes on all the bills. Maybe the vote on H.R. 3606 will end up being an average of all six…

Swapping out bill text and replacing it with different content makes it tough for conversations about bills to go on seamlessly on this site and others. It makes it tough to collect votes on the bills that are being considered. It makes it hard for people to find information on search engines.

Congress didn’t devise this practice to make things hard, but it does make things hard, and it’s something they ought not do. Not if they want to be transparent.

Here are the current votes on H.R. 1070, H.R. 2930, H.R. 2940, H.R. 2167, H.R. 3606, and H.R. 4088. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki articles about these bills.