Congress in Context

Inspiration

Bills passed on Capitol Hill are long, confusing and boring to read through. Take this example:

(a) In General.—Subsection (b) of section 11 is amended to read as follows: “(b) Amount Of Tax.—The amount of the tax imposed by subsection (a) shall be 21 percent of taxable income.”.

You would have no idea what the original text of the section was before this law changed it. The bill could have raised taxes, lowered them, or shuffled around the tax brackets. (This example lowered the top corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, but you wouldn't know that just from the text).

The complexity of these bills makes it hard even for lawmakers to understand exactly what they're voting on. Having only 48 hours to speedread 500 page legislation is already hard enough; now do it when all the sentences look like the example above.

This also makes it hard for citizens to hold their elected officials accountable when the legislation they pass is very difficult to read.

What it does

Congress.gov has deep links to specific portions of the bill. Click on the "Share This" link on the right sidebar. Then paste this link in the "url/id" box, as well as entering some other information. In the example above, this would be entered as "hr1", "115", "https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1/text/enr#HBF2D5F8F694A4CF5A38C8AE87AED7655".

The web app then puts these bill changes into context, showing you exactly what portions of the US Code have been modified.

How we built it

We used two different API's to get the specific bill and the portion of US Law that the bill changes, then used machine learning to process what text to change/edit/delete.

Challenges we ran into

Bill text is long and not very well standardized, so we had to come up with creative ways to quickly get the text that we were looking for. Because many different lawmakers write these bills, the formatting, syntax and language used all differs slightly between different editions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to find a suitable method to parse through the different Congress bills, as well as extracting only the necessary text when taking from the complicated files, and then manipulating that text, into different inputs for our functions in our code.

What we learned

Parsing through mountains of text is trickier than it initially seems.

What's next for Congress in Context

We can hopefully create a version control system for the US Code. Additionally, we desire to create a better user interface for a more visually appealing look, as well as look for alternatives to our current system, such as an application/website/chrome extension.

Built With

• express.js
• html/css
• javascript
• node.js