“The Open Courts Act would make electronic court records freely available and mandate the judiciary to develop a new website to access them. It had already advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on a bipartisan vote in December 2021….
Despite the committee’s endorsement and fact that the U.S. House of Representatives passed similar bill to make PACER free in the prior Congress in 2020, the legislation had lingered as the federal judiciary raised concerns about funding….
But the PACER bill was ultimately left out of the 4,155-page omnibus spending measure that Democratic and Republican negotiators released on Tuesday morning, leaving its path to passage in the current Congress unlikely….”