List of roll calls available

[sbgraves237]

The "roll_call" function is great provided you know the issue you want. For this, the following would be useful:

1. Include a link in the documentation to where someone could get this information, e.g., "https://www.congress.gov/roll-call-votes".

2. A function, e.g., 'roll_call_issues(critter = c("house", "senate"), number, session = c(1L, 2L))', giving a summary table of all the issues with roll call votes in a given chamber [critter], congress and session number, as a data.frame similar to "http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2018/index.asp" and "https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/vote_menu_115_1.htm".

3. A function, e.g., 'last_roll_call(critter = c("house", "senate"), number, session = c(1L, 2L))', giving the most recent roll call vote.

4. Consider changing the defaults for "roll_call" to select the most recent, e.g., 'roll_call(critter = c("house", "senate"), number, session, rcall=last_roll_call(critter, number, session))'. If someone is expecting "session = 1L" by default, this change could break their code. However, I think this would be the default most people would want, so you could just say, 'roll_call()' to get the most recent roll_call vote in the US House and 'roll_call("senate")' or 'roll_call("s")' for the most recent roll_call in the US senate.

5. A search capability, e.g., ''roll_call_issue(issue, critter = c("both", "house", "senate"), number, session, maxVotes=10)', that would return a data.frame of votes sorted by the appropriate fuzzy criterion. For this, you'd probably want to use someone else's search engine like Google, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo restricted to the list of roll call votes.

6. Someone like Maplight scores the importance of each vote for each member of Congress, so members can vote with their constituents for the record when it doesn't matter and vote with their campaign contributors when it does. It would be good to integrate this with "roll_call".

7. Option for returning campaign contribution data with "roll_call". I've just manually merged campaign contribution data on net neutrality from Maplight or Opensecrets with the positions recorded by "BattleForTheNet.com". It would be good to have that all together: I'm writing code to analyze those kinds of data, but one needs the data before one can do the analysis.

Thanks, Spencer Graves