Congress Votes

First, pick a year:

About this project: This lets you score members of Congress on how they voted on bills. The data on how they voted is available at the Office of the Clerk of the US House of Representatives, and to provide some context I pulled information from interest group scorecards. If you'd like to see more interest groups listed here, send me a link to their congressional scorecard! (my email is on my home page)

Note that this may not be too accurate, as there are all sorts of things that are done in committee that aren't being accounted for. Similarly cosponsoring a bill is significant but not tracked here.

I used this project to teach myself Haskell, so the style of the code probably isn't great. The nice looking table of scores uses the Yahoo! UI Library (YUI) (sorry the table doesn't scroll on IE - had trouble getting that to work). Here are my source files:

cgiHandler.hs - main CGI script
VotesUtil.hs - utilities for handling the parsed votes
ParseVoteRecord.hs - does the work of computing scores, etc.
downloadvotes.hs - utility for downloading the XML files for the roll-call votes.
Makefile - Makefile for the Haskell files.
makeSimpleVotes.py - Python utility for converting the XML files to a colon-delimited format.
processInterestGroups.py - Python utility for parsing my raw interest groups file into a more friendly format (example)
gregcommon.js - common Javascript file.
congressvotesjs.js - Javascript file that does the requests and displays the votes and scores.