Experiments with Congress.gov API

September 11, 2022 - 2 minutes read - 334 words

This September Congress.gov released a neat new API!

Congress.gov shares its application programming interface (API) with the public to ingest the Congressional data. Sign up for an API key from api.data.gov that you can use to access web services provided by Congress.gov. To learn more, view our GitHub page.

It is possible to experiment with the API by signing up and then entering the key in the authorization dialog at the top of the page. From there, you will see cURL commands made for example:

curl -X GET "https://api.congress.gov/v3/bill?format=json&api_key=KEYHERE" -H "accept: application/xml"

Example Bills api call response:

{
  "bills": [
    {
      "congress": 117,
      "latestAction": {
        "actionDate": "2022-09-09",
        "text": "Placed on the Union Calendar, Calendar No. 354."
      },
      "number": "1456",
      "originChamber": "House",
      "originChamberCode": "H",
      "title": "Peace Corps Reauthorization Act of 2022",
      "type": "HR",
      "updateDate": "2022-09-12",
      "updateDateIncludingText": "2022-09-12T17:15:22Z",
      "url": "https://api.congress.gov/v3/bill/117/hr/1456?format=json"
    },
    [CONTINUED...]

My experiment

I wanted to create a simple application that would retrieve a list of bills and then show a summary of that particular bill. In a later edition, I made it so you could click through the list of bills.

The Github Repo for this whole project is here.

The parts of the Express JS server that does the work with the API looks just like this:

app.get('/bill/:offset', (req, res) => {

    if (req.params.offset){
        var offset = 20 * req.params.offset;
    }

    request(
        { url: 'https://api.congress.gov/v3/bill?format=json&api_key='+ process.env.KEYSTOCONGRESS + '&offset=' + offset },
        (error, response, body) => {
          if (error || response.statusCode !== 200) {
            return res.status(500).json({ type: 'error', message: err.message });
          }        
          res.json(JSON.parse(body));
        }
      )
});

app.get('/summary/:congress/:type/:number', (req, res) => {
    request(
        { url: 'https://api.congress.gov/v3/bill/'+ req.params.congress + '/'+ req.params.type + '/'+ req.params.number + '/summaries?format=json&api_key='+process.env.KEYSTOCONGRESS },
        (error, response, body) => {
          if (error || response.statusCode !== 200) {
            return res.status(500).json({ type: 'error', message: err.message });
          }        
          res.json(JSON.parse(body));
        }
    )
});

Deployment example

I created a REPL.co deployment of my project which anyone can view and fork:

Conclusion

I really enjoyed experimenting with this API. I share this hopeful that it will help someone else experiment.