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Ask HN: Any good tools for viewing congressional bills?

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Re: Ask HN: Any good tools for viewing congressional bills?

#21

Post by joshdata »

Hi. I run GovTrack.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Any good tools for viewing congressional bills?

#22

Post by joshdata »

a5huynh wrote: post #7

Side-note, if anyone wants to really dig into all the data available about bills (including votes, attachments, etc.), this is a great place to start: https://github.com/unitedstates/congress There's excellent documentation on the formats and how to access all the data.

I did much of that so I appreciate you saying that the documentation is excellent. :)

Re: Ask HN: Any good tools for viewing congressional bills?

#24

Post by skadamat »

joshdata wrote: post #21

Hi. I run GovTrack. 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 ma…

I would love a Genius.com / annotation layer on top of these bills too. Just a dream I'm sharing out loud for no particular reason :) love govtrack in general otherwise!

Re: Ask HN: Any good tools for viewing congressional bills?

#26

Post by joshdata »

thuanao wrote: post #18
jasonthorsness wrote: post #10

Paste the entire thing into the LLM! Maybe people can stop relying on unreliable partisan sources to interpret bills if they have tools to grok the dense weird language in them themselves. I say this even though I was embarrassed yesterday when the LLM misinterpreted something and I posted it - read the reference text behind any summary :/

Government Publishing Office and Library of Congress provides XML formatted bills and all their amendments and a feed of all changes to every bill. 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…

That's not really the right picture.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Any good tools for viewing congressional bills?

#27

Post by joshdata »

skadamat wrote: post #24
joshdata wrote: post #21

Hi. I run GovTrack. 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 ma…

I would love a Genius.com / annotation layer on top of these bills too. Just a dream I'm sharing out loud for no particular reason :) love govtrack in general otherwise!

Without commenting on the merits of that idea, I'll just say that I do not want to be the one who has to moderate user generated content.

Re: Ask HN: Any good tools for viewing congressional bills?

#28

Post by justanything »

beart wrote: post #12
ivape wrote: post #9

There should at least be an AI sidebar on congress.gov. I think Americans would learn a whole lot with such a thing, but who wants to foot the bill for this one.

It's easy to imagine a non-technical user asking the AI a question and implicitly trusting the response as factual, without understanding anything about hallucinations.

How do you figure out if the whole or part of the response is a hallucination?

Re: Ask HN: Any good tools for viewing congressional bills?

#29

Post by manquer »

joshdata wrote: post #27
skadamat wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love a Genius.com / annotation layer on top of these bills too. Just a dream I'm sharing out loud for no particular reason :) love govtrack in general otherwise!

Without commenting on the merits of that idea, I'll just say that I do not want to be the one who has to moderate user generated content.

Only if it is shared annotations is it a problem.

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

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