It comes in two formats: One is a text document with with column size restrictions that makes it very hard to read, worse than the text version of an IETF RFC. The second is a machine readable XML document which itself isn't easily read.
Are there any good tools for viewing these? I did find GovTrack.us but it seems to be down so I'm not sure if it solves this problem.
[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1/text
Note: it could be worth checking the issues at https://github.com/usgpo/bulk-data/issues as some of those contain fixes and formatting improvements.
There's excellent documentation on the formats and how to access all the data.
Yeah, it's naive thinking, and I'm well aware the obfuscation is sometimes the point.
But I digress... My main takeaway here is that we should be considerate of what problems adding AI to the equation may cause. I'm old enough to have seen how "the new big thing" ends up getting applied to every problem space, without really thinking about the consequences.
Best guess?
1) These are actual laws so they carry all the legal thoroughness
2) Like managers, they don't write the actual code (they don't do the actual writing of the bills). So managers don't really care just how awful the code can be (or in this case, just how intractable the bills are)
3) No one is code reviewing (the public is to uneducated to even do so)
This leads to these things being drafted in the dark of night and passed in the dark of night. I'm open to AI in this case simply to even begin having insight.
Oh and on the topic of party politics, Bill Clinton was the one who had them put things online in the first place with the GPO Electronic Information Access Enhancement Act, and Barack Obama and the Democrats expanded it via American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 - not the do-nothing Republicans.
Congress.gov, originally THOMAS.gov, was a product of the Republican Contract with America take-over of Congress in the mid 1990s. Republicans in Congress, including Rep. Issa for example, were helpful in expanding the information that Congress publishes publicly. In the last 15 years, efforts to make Congress publish more and better-structured information have been relatively bipartisan and, mostly, led by nonpolitical staff. I would not describe Democrats as having been the ones to have exclusively created the access to congressional information that we have today, although Democrats in recent years have led on government transparency and accountability issues generally, beyond the Legislative Branch.
Changes that have required legislation have, as far as I'm aware, not really been influenced by the President, other than being signed into law, since they are Legislative Branch concerns and not Executive Branch concerns.
seems to be broken on the "Big Beautiful Bill" right now though :(, I'm taking a a look to see what's going on
OP may have been unlucky on the timing. The site isn't usually down. Here's the link to the text of H.R. 1 on GovTrack: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/119/hr1/text
We automatically add links to U.S. Code and other citations. In this case Congress.gov is missing rich formatting which we have (I'm not sure why they are missing it for this bill, normally they have it). GovTrack also allows making diff-like comparisons between bill versions and between bills (for example, you can see the last-minute changes made ahead of the vote on this bill).
Source code is available on GitHub if anyone wants to try making GovTrack better, although it's quite complicated because Congressional information is complicated and there's no real money behind this: https://github.com/govtrack/govtrack.us-web/
If anyone has particular thoughts on what would be helpful when viewing bill text --- within the realm of the information that is actually freely available --- I am all ears.
It need not be shared , think more like a public notion/ share point document with comments visible . I.e experts(users) can create their own individual annotated versions and share with others .
As long as there is no single version of the annotations , moderation is not needed
https://www.congress.gov/119/bills/hr1/generated/BILLS-119hr...
beej71•8mo ago
Except that it's a government thing so the parser's probably not going to be little. :)
Edit: The thing's basically XHTML without any kind of header. UTF-8 encoding, it looks like. So a conversion tool would just need to wrap it up and add styling.
Edit: Despite hints that it's XHTML, it's not valid XHTML.
Edit: Stick this at the top of the file:
--------------------- 8< ---------------------
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
</head>--------------------- 8< ---------------------
And add this to the bottom of the file:
--------------------- 8< ---------------------
</html>
--------------------- 8< ---------------------
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to write a script to do that. Automatically extracting the bill title should be Fun.
gabrielsroka•8mo ago
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...