A note from your editor

Massive legislation is months in the making, if not years. It usually sits in committee for a while, has to get passed through one (but often more than one), then can possibly come up for debate on the floor(s), before being voted on, then voted again by the other branch, then reconciled between the two. At that point it's on the US Statues at Large. And then it's actually codified into law in the United States Code (USC) - possibly also subject to regulation via the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). So nothing gets dumped at the last minute. The US system isn't fundamentally any less complex or less advanced than the old English Westminster system.

What does happen is that general pandering happens at the last minute in the form of amendments to bills, though similar things happen in the UK (although the notion of tacking on unrelated issues - such as student loans onto a Healthcare Bill in this case - would not fly as well outside of the US). OpenCongress and other sites provide a good level of information on ongoing activities (I generally shy away from reading comments on OC due to their often uninformed and Right-Wing nature). I get the Federal Register each morning (delivered to my Kindle via cron). I don't read it every day, but it is a good way to see exactly what the US Federal government did yesterday, similar to the Hansard in the UK. If you're *really* bored, you can even read the Rules of the House, etc. I have for the current Congress because I like to be anally overinformed.