Franklin High School Model Senate

1. Get to know your Senator

http://www.senate.gov
This is one of the best sites for researching the Senate. Look for the links to your Senator's personal page and to the committee pages.

Newspapers:
Search newspapers online: http://www.newspapers.com to find a newspaper for current information.

Senate Research:
http://www.rollcall.com : "The newspaper of Capitol Hill since 1955."
http://www.hillnews.com/ : Another Capitol Hill newspaper.
http://www.c-span.org/ : C-SPAN website.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ The Washington Post.

Know where the senator's money is coming from: http://www.opensecrets.org/1998elect/index.htm
http://www.tray.com/fecinfo/
http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/index.asp : Index of PACs.

Look up voting records for floor votes for every Senator: http://www.senate.gov/activities/rollcall.html
Vote Smart: Find everything here. This is an excellent site to see how your elected officials are performing in their jobs, and also useful for our purposes. http://www.vote-smart.org/index.phtml
Voter Information Services: http://www.vis.org/

Political Parties:
http://www.democrats.org : Democratic National Committee (DNC)
http://www.rnc.org : Republican National Committee (RNC) 

ALSO: Call your Senate offices, and talk to the people that work for them. They can send you bios and also talk to them so you get an idea of the personality of your Senator. Watch C-SPAN2. It's the live broadcast of the Senate. It gives you an idea of the personality of the Senator, which helps you play your Senator.


2. Get to know your committee's bills

Model Senate Bills Online

*Many thanks to Goucher College from where much of this information
has been liberally borrowed.