Congressional Documents

Currently, this project covers recent documents in the House Committee Repository.

The information is sourced from the bulk data at github.com/unitedstates. Feel free to open a ticket with any bugs or suggestions.

Methods

All requests require a valid API key, and use the domain:

https://congress.api.sunlightfoundation.com

/congressional_documents/search

This collection contains documents from from Congress that are produced through the course of hearings, reports etc. Currently the collection only contains House Committee documents. We hope to add Senate documents and other types of congressional documents in the future.

Fields

document_id
A unique id for each document.

document_type
Document types are taken from the House document type code-

{
	"CV": "Committee vote",
	"WS": "Witness statement",
	"WT": "Witness truth statement",
	"WB": "Witness biography",
	"CR": "Committee report",
	"BR": "Bill",
	"FA": "Floor amendment",
	"CA": "Committee amendment",
	"HT": "Transcript",
	"WD": "Witness document",
}

“other” is used for all other documents.

chamber
House or Senate

committee_id
Acronym a committee is associated with the document.

committee_names
Full names of the committees associated with the document.

congress
Session of Congress.

house_event_id
Unique ID for each hearing, assigned by the House.

hearing_type_code
This describes if the meeting is a “markup”, “meeting” or “hearing”.

hearing_title
Title of the hearing associated with the document.

published_at
Date and time of publication.

bill_id
Bill ID associated with the document.

description
Description of the hearing.

version_code
The short-code for what stage the version of the bill. See GPO for explanations of the version code.

bioguide_id
Unique identifier for a member of Congress if they are associated with the document.

occurs_at
Date and time of a hearing associated with the document.

urls
The original link to the document. The permalink is a link to a copy of the document hosted by the Sunlight Foundation.

text
Extracted text from the document.

text_preview
A preview of the text.

witness
Information about a witness associated with a document.

{
  "position": "Director",
  "witness_type": "Government - State",
  "first_name": "Steve",
  "organization": "Texas Department of Public Safety",
  "middle_name": null,
  "last_name": "McCraw"
}