What do legislative trackers (Congress.gov, GovTrack, BillTrack50) list as Al Franken’s sponsored bills that were ultimately enacted into law?
Executive summary
GovTrack’s public profile for Senator Al Franken states he was the primary sponsor of four bills that were enacted into law, explicitly noting one—his bill served as the vehicle for the Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act—while also describing the rules it uses to count an enactment [1]. The Library of Congress’s Congress.gov hosts Franken’s member page and registers his sponsorship record but the supplied snippets do not enumerate a definitive, itemized list of enacted-sponsor bills in this dataset [2] [3]. BillTrack50 holds a legislator profile for Franken but the available excerpt does not provide a clear, cited tally of enacted primary-sponsored bills; independent summaries (Ballotpedia, local reporting) rely on GovTrack’s accounting [4] [5] [6].
1. What GovTrack explicitly reports about Franken’s enacted sponsorships
GovTrack’s Franken profile states, in plain terms, that “Franken was the primary sponsor of 4 bills that were enacted,” and calls out that one of those bills functioned as the vehicle for passage of the Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act in the form it was enacted [1]. That same GovTrack page emphasizes the rarity of enacted bills for most legislators and places Franken’s enacted-sponsor count in that broader context [1]. Local reporting and secondary references to Franken’s legislative portfolio cite GovTrack’s analysis, reflecting its use as a common public-facing tally [6] [5].
2. How GovTrack’s methodology changes what “enacted” can mean
GovTrack does not limit “enacted” to only bills that pass Congress exactly as introduced; rather, it defines a bill as enacted if the original bill itself was enacted, a companion in the other chamber was enacted, or if about half of its provisions were incorporated into enacted legislation according to an automated text analysis—an approach the site documents and applies from the 110th Congress onward [1] [7]. That methodology can raise the enacted-sponsor count by crediting a sponsor for legislative text that survives in other forms or in companion vehicles, which is why GovTrack’s total of four enacted-sponsored bills for Franken should be read through the lens of those inclusion rules [1] [7].
3. What Congress.gov records and the limitations of the available excerpts
Congress.gov is the primary official repository of bill texts, actions, and sponsor metadata and hosts Franken’s member page listing the bills he sponsored across sessions, but the search snippets provided here do not isolate which of Franken’s primary-sponsored measures ultimately became law nor do they replicate GovTrack’s “incorporated provisions” logic in these excerpts [2] [3]. Congress.gov can be used to compile a definitive list by searching Franken as sponsor and filtering by “Enacted,” but the supplied search-result excerpts in this dataset instead show a sampling of Franken-associated bills and other senators’ measures rather than an explicit enacted-by-Franken roll call [2] [3].
4. BillTrack50, Ballotpedia and corroboration across trackers
BillTrack50 maintains a legislator page for Al Franken, which functions as a tracker similar to GovTrack and Congress.gov, but the snippet provided here does not display its enacted-sponsor tally or a named list in this dataset; other secondary sources such as Ballotpedia reference GovTrack’s findings when summarizing Franken’s ideological and legislative record, indicating that GovTrack’s count is often treated as the convenient public figure for enacted sponsorships [4] [5]. Because BillTrack50 and Congress.gov are authoritative sources for bill status, they can corroborate or refine GovTrack’s count when queried directly, but those confirmations are not present in the supplied snippets [4] [2].
5. Synthesis, transparency and caveats for readers
The most direct answer that the assembled trackers provide in these excerpts is that GovTrack credits Al Franken as primary sponsor of four enacted bills and cites the Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act vehicle as one example, while also documenting the broader counting rules that produce that total [1] [7]. Congress.gov and BillTrack50 are the authoritative bill-status resources for verifying enacted measures by sponsor, but the specific Congress.gov and BillTrack50 snippets supplied here do not list the enacted-by-Franken bills in full, so a definitive, itemized enumeration beyond GovTrack’s statement cannot be reconstructed from these sources alone without additional direct searches on those sites [2] [4]. Readers seeking an item-by-item confirmation should query Congress.gov for Franken as sponsor filtered to “Enacted” and then compare those results to GovTrack’s four-count and its methodological notes [2] [1] [7].