Track provisions, not bills.

§The premise

Bills are vehicles. Provisions are cargo.

Two percent of bills become law. The ideas inside them keep moving. Across those twelve Congresses, two in three provisions were introduced in more than one Congress. Half of all laws began as a bill that died.

A vehicle arrives or it does not. The cargo, the ideas and provisions inside it, gets reloaded. Prism reads the cargo.

§How Prism reads Congress

Prism does not ask a model to read Congress and reason about it. It reads Congress first.

Every provision is placed in the landscape by where it sits, not what it says: what it costs, how hard its language binds, what it enforces, how far it reaches, how long it runs. Two provisions with different words and the same position are neighbors. What happened to the neighbors is the first evidence.

Every provision is then traced. Backward: the same cargo in earlier bills, earlier Congresses, other vehicles, and what became of it each time. Forward: into the section of law it would change, and how that section reads on the evidence date. The connections are drawn before any judgment is made.

The tracing runs on the record, not on a search. Prism holds the bills, the Code they would change, the hearings and committee reports, the floor debate, the votes, and the White House statements. What a brief quotes was read from that record on the evidence date.

The verdict comes from that structure: clear, narrow, or blocked. It is read from what became of provisions that sat where this one sits. A number stands behind each reading. The map is the verdict. It is not a forecast of whether the bill passes. Two percent of bills do, so a model asked that question learns that everything fails and is right almost every time. Terrain is read at the provision, and it is not an absolute. It is the ground ahead. Where a path exists, the brief shows it. The narration is written after the verdict and checked against it. Where a reading and the evidence disagree, the evidence stands.

Every brief states the date its evidence runs through. What happened after that date is not in it. When a brief reports that something is absent, that is a finding: Prism looked, on that date, and did not find it. A brief is a reading at a date, not a feed.

§The record

The calls are made before the vote. Then the vote happens.

The FY27 appropriations rider record was created 2026-08-31 and is not edited. That version is the one graded in December, against enacted text.

§What Prism is not

Not a political consultancy. Not a lobbying firm. Not a polling service. Not a score on a bill. Not a guarantee.

Every provision is given a terrain: a map of the ground ahead of the idea it carries as it moves through Congress. The map is drawn from what happened to provisions that sat where this one sits today, across twelve Congresses. It is relative to that position and that date. The future is not settled. Patterns break. A map is not a guarantee.

§Who

Built by one person, since 2024. The idea is older.

I was floor leader of the Oklahoma Intercollegiate Legislature. Hundreds of bills came in each session and most never reached the floor. The ones I placed sat in a region of law the chamber could accept, could be amended without breaking, and read as a change to the law that existed rather than as a page of text.

Prism does that as a function. It reads the intent of a law in its provisions, not its bill, and follows each one from drafting to the floor.