I had always thought it was a recording of EXACRLY what was said in Congress daily, much like a court reporter’s transcript. But then I’ve heard that this is not necessarily true…that it can be added to or deleted at later dates but I don’t know undr which situations. So how accurate is it?
Not very. Congress members can insert whole speeches that they never made or take out speeches that they did. I don’t know if a notation is made as to what is inserted or deleted.
Statements that are added are set apart with a special typeface. This page is the April 1st, 2004 House record. (warning; it’s a .pdf)
Congresscritters ask for permission to “revise and extend” their remarks that are made so that what they wish they said is reflected in the Congressional Record.
Robin
This is not accurate. Members of Congress may edit their remarks after they give a speech and before the CR is published, but they may not willy-nilly remove speeches from the Record.
There are procedures in the House in which case a member says something so offensive and inflamatory that “his words are taken down” – it’s a kind of serious admonishment, and I think that the speech is then removed from the CR. I believe there is a similar procedure in the Senate.
is that The Congressional Record isn’t that accurate if edits can be made after the fact. Can items just be inserted that never happened at all? In other words, HOW does the CR WORK? I’ve never actually read it; just always assumed that it was a word-for-word official record.
For the most part, it is a word-for-word record. There is a stenographer present who takes down every word that is uttered. However, as I said, Congressmen can ask to “revise and extend” their remarks, meaning they can insert statements and corrections after the fact, but before the CR is printed. Outright additions seem to be fairly uncommon.
Robin
The fun part of “revise and extend” is that a congresscritter can give a “two-minute” speech in the House chamber that says “A,” then revise and extend that to say “A+B+C+D+7.” Then he can show the good folks back home that he has been speaking out for their concerns, without doing any thing of the sort on the floor. 
More fun with politics.
The Record is not a transcript. It serves a couple functions.
First, it reports on debates that took place on the floor of either house. This is largely a transcript, but members can: 1) edit their remarks to correct misstatements (ie, a senator said “IFN treaty of 1989” but meant “INF Treaty of 1988,”) and 2) add material that they don’t have time to actually read aloud on the floor. This can be newspaper articles, tributes to local Boy Scout troops, or a fuller explanation of a vote.
(This is mostly a timesaver for members, and the chamber, as well - if every member of the House were to be given one minute to speak before a vote, that would be more than 7 hours of debate on a single amendment, bill, or whatever. God forbid a politican be limited to condensing his thoughts to a mere 60 seconds!)
A member of Congress can insert matter into the Record by, if he is in the House, asking permission to revise and extend his remarks, or, if in the Senate, asking for unanimous consent to insert material.
Matter that is inserted is clearly labeled as such in the Record. It appears with bullets next to an inserted speech, or in a section of the House part of the CR entitled “Extensions of Remarks,” or if supporting material (like newspaper articles referred to in a speech) is inserted, by a title that reads “Exhibit One” or somesuch.
Also, it is the authoritative record of the proceedings of each house. Votes, committee reports, and certain types of announcements (like the names of nominees received in the Senate) are placed in the Record so that anyone in the world can see them. It’s like a daily bulletin board of announcements.
If this, along with the other good responses, don’t clear up your questions, try actually looking at an issue of it to get a better feel of what its purpose is. You can find it at thomas.loc.gov or in paper at any good-sized public library. If you see the layout of the paper version, it becomes somewhat more apparent that it is not simply a transcript.
I don’t know about current practice, but in the late 70s/ early 80s it was actually rather common for Congress(wo)men to insert speeches that were never made, and to begin them with remarks (thanking the Speaker, or the previous Congressperson, etc.) to create the impression that the remarks were made from the floor.
This was often reported in the media, but if you read ‘serious’ magazines (and I don’t think Time and Newsweek generally qualify), you probably already knew. Reader’s Digest did trigger an occassional ruckus by bringing it up, but most of the largest magazines downplayed it.
Back then the chambers were almost empty during almost all “debates” (and the few in attendance might be sleeping, working on other things, or conferring quietly on other business) as anyone who visited the gallery knew. Alas, you typically had to get the tickets from your own congressperson’s office, rather than at entrance, and feww bothered. Incidentally, when CSPAN was first proposed, by far the greatest objection outweighing all others is that the cameras might see all this. [This was noted in quite a few independent accounts during the months around their recent anniversary celebration ] It was finally agreed that the cameras would be permitted ONLY if they remained pointed at the (speaking) floor and didn’t pan the chamber
The rule has been bent quite a bit since then, and I don’t know if it’s still formally in place today, but I remember the barely contained (and barely coherent) outrage of many Congressmen that their proceedings might be televised. The incoherence came from the fact that -in theory- anyone could get a ticket to watch a day’s debate in person and the Congressional PR machine liked to trumpet this “access”, so there really weren’t many sensible reasons to keep TV cameras out.
While there have been revisions and reforms to the way the Federal Register and Congressional Record are compiled, the actual changes to the rules have been fairly modest. “Current custom and practice” have always dictated the contents far more than the hard rules did. Small loopholes were often wildly abused.
I think CSPAN helped, though a few channels covering both houses and all the separate committee hearings hardly constitutes full surveillance, it did gradually change the attitudes of the members of Congress about how "best’ to perform their duties. (‘Best’ often being largely defined with an eye to the next election)
I worked in the Senate, so I can only speak to what I observed:
After my boss made a speech, the stenographer would come over and ask for the written copy of that speech. One time my boss handed him the notes I had given him (he always spoke off-the-cuff and only wanted written notes or a brief outline). The next day in the Congressional Record there was his speech, then afterwards there was the outline I had prepared. Apparently the stenographer thought this was part of the “revision and extension of remarks.”
After any speech, a staffer had the ability to go to a room in the Capitol to edit that speech for the Record. In theory, you could have changed the whole text. This opportunity only existed for a few hours after the speech, though.
To insert material never spoken by a Senator, all you had to do was write up an insert in the proprer format, get the Senator’s signature on the back (which, of course, was always from the auto pen), and hand it in to a little desk off the Senate floor. As noted above, an insert of this kind is set off by bullets, but there is no other notation that it wasn’t given on the floor.
If I recall correctly, in the late 1980s and early 90s, Newt Gingrich took advantage of this rule by giving speeches in which he make baseless accusations against other representatives and then called upon them to answer for it – of course, since the chamber was empty, no one was there to respond. And he went on, acting as if the person he just accused had declined to defend himself. After that, I believe, Speaker Thomas Foley (D-Wash.) ordered that the cameras pan across the chamber every so often to show that it was indeed empty.
I remember that story, but I believe it was Tip O’Neill who was outraged by the practice and had the cameras pan to show up Newt. (Newt at the time was a rookie senator, it was quite interesting to read Tip singling him out as a jerk well before he really got his jerk traction going.)
Ah, you’re right. It was O’Neill: