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It's not so much summarizing the text of bills, but having an API to query just the text of bills would be really nice. Even better would be some kind of diff/g
by mbreese 5y ago
It's not so much summarizing the text of bills, but having an API to query just the text of bills would be really nice. Even better would be some kind of diff/git blame log of changes. I would love to know who voted for which amendments, or how a particular bit of text got into a law.
But, realistically, that would never happen as it's not information that I think people would be comfortable providing.
- showerst 5y agoThat's all available, fairly easily. At the federal level it's at congress.gov, including redlines for (some) amendments and versions. To be fair not every single amendment vote is available, but that's a quirk of how the legislative process works. At the federal level, the US has a great bulk api from GPO/FDSys, including full bill text in plain, pdf, and XML. At the state level Openstates.org does it, including with an API. A lot of us in the space have mess with various "git diff" type solutions, but unfortunately the way bill text changes doesn't lend itself to this.