Academic

I decided to see how often the Internal Revenue Code and Immigration and Nationality Act have been amended of late.  And, as you probably expected, nothing beats the IRC for congressional tinkering.  Here's the number of sections of the code amended since 2001:

For a little comparison, here's the number of sections of the INA over the past few years:

Both huge statutes, both big issues - but man, Ways and Means stays involved in our tax affairs.  The DHS oversight people and Tom Tancredo have nothing on those guys.

Of course, the methodology employed here might be suspect.  Here's what I did, and I'd welcome your comments about what I did wrong.  I downloaded the credits for each section of each act from Westlaw.  That gave me a massive text file.  Then I used Concordance to give me a frequency count for each time a year was cited in the credit sections.  And voila, a hit for each year that the GPO recorded an amendment for each section.  Of course, I'm sorta depending on the GPO or whoever to accurately record amendments, but I'm not really sure how else I could do it.  Thoughts?