Capitol Stats

Stat pages for every member of the U.S. Congress: what they vote on (attendance only, never positions), the bills they sponsor, and where their campaign money comes from.

Setup

npm install
cp .env.example .env.local   # then paste your api.data.gov key
npm run dev

Data sources

• Members, terms, committees: unitedstates/congress-legislators
• Roll-call votes (House and Senate): Voteview bulk CSVs
• Legislation: Congress.gov API
• Campaign finance: OpenFEC API

Upstream responses are cached on disk in .cache/ (ignored by git) so the rate-limited APIs aren't hit on every request.

Keeping the feeds fresh

The Latest Votes strip, Top Stories, vote pages and Supreme Court data are tagged as live data (lib/live.ts). While the site is visited they refresh at most every 30 minutes and are never served more than a day old. GET /api/refresh refreshes all of it immediately and rebuilds the home page; vercel.json calls it daily at 08:00 UTC, shortly after Voteview publishes its daily update. In production set CRON_SECRET, which the cron sends as a bearer token.

Presidents page totals

Totals for finished presidential terms are saved in lib/data/presidency-stats.json, so the Presidents page doesn't have to gather every law since 1969. When a term ends, or if the law categories change, start the dev server and run npm run update:presidents (set PORT if it isn't on 3000), then commit the file. A finished term missing from the file is computed live until then.

Bill Tracker and map

The tracker (lib/sources/pipeline.ts) lists the current Congress's bills and joint resolutions. Congress.gov has no stage field, so stages come from the enacted-law list, recorded floor votes and each bill's latest action text (lib/billStage.ts). Bill pages read the full action history, which is more accurate. The map's state shapes are saved in lib/data/us-map.json; npm run update:map regenerates them.