A committee of the U.S. House of Representatives voted on Thursday to reverse President Bush’s executive order that gives former presidents the power to withhold their papers from historians and the public, even though U.S. law regards the documents as public records.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform approved the measure on a voice vote, and the bill is expected to be considered by the full House next week, according to the Reuters news agency.

The measure, introduced by Rep. Henry Waxman of California, the committee’s chairman, and several other lawmakers, would nullify the 2001 executive order and “restore public access to presidential records,” the bill’s summary says.

The executive order is the subject of a pending federal lawsuit filed by historians, and the dispute has become intertwined with the proposal to open a George W. Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University, with critics saying it is inappropriate to welcome such a monument to a president who has frustrated efforts by scholars to study documents, some of them decades old.