united-states-congress 0.0.13

Public domain data collectors for the work of Congress, including legislation, amendments, and votes.

## unitedstates/congress

Public domain code that collects data about the bills, amendments, roll call votes, and other core data about the U.S. Congress.

Includes:

• A data importing script for the [official bulk bill status data](https://github.com/usgpo/bill-status) from Congress, the official source of information on the life and times of legislation.

• Scrapers for House and Senate roll call votes.

• A scraper for GPO FDSys, the official repository for most legislative documents.

• A defunct THOMAS scraper for presidential nominations in Congress.

Read about the contents and schema in the [documentation](https://github.com/unitedstates/congress/wiki) in the github project wiki.

For background on how this repository came to be, see [Eric’s blog post](http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/08/20/a-modern-approach-to-open-data/).

### Setting Up

This project is tested using Python 2.7.

System dependencies

On Ubuntu, you’ll need wget, pip, and some support packages:

`bash sudo apt-get install git python-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libz-dev python-pip `

On OS X, you’ll need developer tools installed ([XCode](https://developer.apple.com/xcode/)), and wget.

`bash brew install wget `

Python dependencies

It’s recommended you use a virtualenv (virtual environment) for development. The easiest way is install virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper, using sudo if necessary:

`bash sudo pip install virtualenv sudo pip install virtualenvwrapper `

Create a virtualenv for this project:

`bash mkvirtualenv congress `

And activate it before any development session using:

`bash workon congress `

Finally, with your virtual environment activated, install Python packages:

`bash pip install -r requirements.txt `

### Collecting the data

The general form to start the scraping process is:

./run <data-type> [–force] [other options]

where data-type is one of:

• bills (see [Bills](https://github.com/unitedstates/congress/wiki/bills)) and [Amendments](https://github.com/unitedstates/congress/wiki/amendments))

• votes (see [Votes](https://github.com/unitedstates/congress/wiki/votes))

• nominations (see [Nominations](https://github.com/unitedstates/congress/wiki/nominations))

• committee_meetings (see [Committee Meetings](https://github.com/unitedstates/congress/wiki/committee-meetings))

• fdsys (see [Bill Text](https://github.com/unitedstates/congress/wiki/bill-text))

• deepbills (see [Bill Text](https://github.com/unitedstates/congress/wiki/bill-text))

• statutes (see [Bills](https://github.com/unitedstates/congress/wiki/bills) and [Bill Text](https://github.com/unitedstates/congress/wiki/bill-text))

To scrape bills, resolutions, and amendments from THOMAS, run:

`bash ./run fdsys --collections=BILLSTATUS ./run bills `

The bills script will output bulk data into a top-level data directory, then organized by Congress number, bill type, and bill number. Two data output files will be generated for each bill: a JSON version (data.json) and an XML version (data.xml).

### Common options

Debugging messages are hidden by default. To include them, run with –log=info or –debug. To hide even warnings, run with –log=error.

To get emailed with errors, copy config.yml.example to config.yml and fill in the SMTP options. The script will automatically use the details when a parsing or execution error occurs.

The –force flag applies to all data types and supresses use of a cache for network-retreived resources.

### Data Output

The script will cache downloaded pages in a top-level cache directory, and output bulk data in a top-level data directory.

Two bulk data output files will be generated for each object: a JSON version (data.json) and an XML version (data.xml). The XML version attempts to maintain backwards compatibility with the XML bulk data that [GovTrack.us](https://www.govtrack.us) has provided for years. Add the –govtrack flag to get fully backward-compatible output using GovTrack IDs (otherwise the source IDs used for legislators is used).

See the [project wiki](https://github.com/unitedstates/congress/wiki) for documentation on the output format.

### Contributing

Pull requests with patches are awesome. Unit tests are strongly encouraged ([example tests](https://github.com/unitedstates/congress/blob/master/test/test_bill_actions.py)).

The best way to file a bug is to [open a ticket](https://github.com/unitedstates/congress/issues).

### Running tests

To run this project’s unit tests:

`bash ./test/run `

### Who’s Using This Data

The [Sunlight Foundation](http://sunlightfoundation.com) and [GovTrack.us](https://www.govtrack.us) are the two principal maintainers of this project.

Both Sunlight and GovTrack operate APIs where you can get much of this data delivered over HTTP:

• [GovTrack.us API](https://www.govtrack.us/developers/api)

• [Sunlight Congress API](http://sunlightlabs.github.io/congress/)

## Public domain

This project is [dedicated to the public domain](LICENSE). As spelled out in [CONTRIBUTING](CONTRIBUTING.md):

> The project is in the public domain within the United States, and copyright and related rights in the work worldwide are waived through the [CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication](http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/).

> All contributions to this project will be released under the CC0 dedication. By submitting a pull request, you are agreeing to comply with this waiver of copyright interest.

[](https://travis-ci.org/unitedstates/congress)