The purpose of this project is to provide an interface where Congressional bills can be queried for particular types of information. This information can be helpful in determining which Congressmen choose to sponsor bills that concern particular topics and who the top corporate and industry donors are behind each bill and for each Congressman.
To make this data more accessible, it is possible to search for each bill by topic or by sponsor and to search for each member of Congress and see all of the bills that they have been involved with.
Each bill will be presented with the top industry and corporate donors among the sponsors and authors of the legislation.
It's also possible to get a comprehensive list of all bills that have originated since the swearing in of the 112th Congress in plain-text or XML by clicking on the "Bill" link above
.
Basically, what this means is that you can search for bills based on the following criteria:
- Who wrote, sponsored, or co-sponsored them
- Keyword search (Lucene Full-text)
And you can look up Congressmen based on the following criteria
- Name
- Bills Sponsored
- Donor
Hopefully, what will be returned to you - via the magic of xQuery and the kindness of House.gov and Opensecrets.org - will contain the following information in a readable format:
- For Bills:
- Some introductory information about who wrote the bill, who sponsored it, and the status that it's currently in.
- The top 5 campaign donors behind each bill, calculated as such:
- The top 5 donors from each Congressman affiliated with the bill will be queried and the top 5 out of that list presented to you, after aggregating any duplicates.
- Links to the profiles of any Congressmen involved in the legislation.
- For Congressmen:
- A profile of the requested person containing their campaign donation history (Corporate and Industry).
- Links to the bills that they have sponsored or co-sponsored.
- For Donors:
- The names of the Congressmen they have donated to
Note: This is a work in progress and intended to contain more material as the project progresses past the scope of this class. More information about this can be found under the About menu item in Future Plans.