api.congress.gov
api.congress.gov copied to clipboard
Ability to perform a text search for members by name
trafficstars
REQUEST - Ability to perform a text search for members by name.
I.e., search ‘leahy’ returned list of members including patrick leahy Ability to search/filter based on any combination of:
- Congress - i.e., members in the 117th congress
- Chamber - i.e., members in the senate
- State - i.e., members and representatives from Alaska
- Party - i.e., all republican members who served in the house in the 115th congress
- Committee Seniority - Per term per committee - member’s seniority rank
- Senate-wide Seniority - Per term - Committee membership information - i.e., list of committees that member belonged to during each term served
(October 2021)
LOC ASSESSMENT - The text search change is a big one because the API is architected as a hierarchical browse; not a search API. The API is implemented as a RESTful read API.
ALTERNATE APPROACH - Search could happen in local API callers databases.
Names can be problematic to get the spelling right. How about start with enum lists
- state
- party
Those should be cleaner to search for