4. OLRC has tons of power over how the law is presented to outside audiences.

In other ways, however, enacted findings and purposes are different from other statutory language. For example, they are drafted by political staff who are much more closely connected to members of Congress than nonpartisan drafters from Congress's Offices of Legislative Counsel, who often draft the more technical provisions of statutes.8 In fact, Legislative Counsel explicitly discourage the inclusion of findings and purposes in bills, advising Congress that those materials are best left to committee reports.9 Despite this admonition, Congress continues to frequently include them in statutes. Findings and purposes are prominently placed at the beginning of statutes and are written in plain language that is intelligible to members of Congress and their high-level staffs, and so they may be the statutory language that members of Congress and their high-level staffs are most likely to read. Members of Congress generally engage with legislation at a relatively high level of abstraction, and it may be that enacted findings and purposes, rather than the much more voluminous *673 unenacted legislative history, best reflect members' understanding of why a bill was drafted and what it was meant to accomplish.

Another notable difference between findings and purposes and other statutory text is in the way they are codified. Although findings and purposes are valid law published in the Statutes at Large, which contain the law as passed by Congress and signed by the president,10 it is common practice for a bill to be stripped of its findings and purposes before the rest of the statute is placed in the main text of the US Code.11 Findings and purposes most commonly end up in notes to the Code, where they can be difficult to locate and identify as enacted text because they are often placed far from much of the rest of a bill's text and often appear similar to other unenacted editor's notes. Even more surprisingly, findings and purposes are sometimes left out of the Code altogether.12 The decision of where to put findings and purposes in the Code, or whether to leave them out altogether, is made by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel (OLRC), an unelected body within Congress that is responsible for the codification process. These technical organizers of the Code have significant power over how (and in some cases, whether) courts, litigants, and the public see the law, but their role has gone unnoticed by scholars and judges. It is peculiar, to say the least, that this office regularly hides away in notes some of the most salient text that Congress *674 enacts, and does so in ways that are inconsistent and based on institutional practice that is not accessible to outsiders. This codification process is a potential explanation for the scant attention enacted findings and purposes have received from courts and scholars.