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unitedstates
congress-legislators
Python2015–2026
unitedstates / congress-legislators

congress-legislators

Members of the United States Congress, 1789-Present, in YAML/JSON/CSV, as well as committees, presidents, and vice presidents.

Data & Databases
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
2Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Members of the United States Congress, 1789-Present, in YAML/JSON/CSV, as well as committees, presidents, and vice presidents.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year6 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-08-24 02:09:01 UTC to 2026-04-17 02:10:26 UTC.

0122015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

6 sources
danso·Dec 20, 2016
It's been awhile since I've used the FB API, but one thing that's nice about Twitter is that you have a lot of room to crawl networks of users; for example, I always like getting the list of accounts that U.S. congressmembers follow (based on the Twitter account list maintained by the unitedstates project [0]), as a proxy for such things as perceived political bent of media organizations. An example of the FB limitations I'm thinking about is how you can't query the graph API by username, e.g. http://graph.facebook.com/mark.zuckerberg There were other changes made before that, that's just one I remember in my latter days of using their API. Granted, I've always been impressed with the analyses you've done with FB data and have put it on my list someday to learn through your examples :). [0] https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legisla
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tors
In Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company
danso·Jun 1, 2016
I haven't looked at extreme edge cases, but you're right, Wikipedia tends to have the right alma mater, included situations in which someone has only attended classes but isn't reported as actually matriculating. It wouldn't require a big traversal of Wikipedia (though I imagine that would be easy enough)...the unitedstates Github repo, which is a semi-automated crowdsourced repo of Congress data, has all the historical Congressmembers as structured YAML, including their Wikipedia page (though I haven't counted to see how many have that attribute filled): https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legislators
In U.S. colleges ranked by number of affiliated Congressmembers
danso·Aug 24, 2015
For those unfamiliar with the Twitter API: the Streaming API pushes out notifications of when users who are eligible to show up in your timeline (i.e. users whom you follow) have deleted a message: https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/overview/messages-types#st... Politiwoops used monitored this to see which tweets it has previously collected were now deleted. You can peruse the Politwoops source code to see the details: https://github.com/sunlightlabs/politwoops-tweet-collector Twitter's complaint is that its terms of service forbids ignoring those deletion messages...but in the past, Twitter had turned a blind eye to what Politwoops was doing. Whatever the reason for the crackdown now, it doesn't mean you can't manually try to track these embarrassing tweets and then publish them under fair use protections...in fact, the Anthony Weiner sca
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ndal, in which a user noticed an accidentally posted DM, was what sparked Politwoops in the first place. It's just you can't do it on a wide-scale, automated basis via API. I'm kind of surprised Politwoops informal waiver lasted this long...or rather, that no one else has applied its open source code to the tracking of celebrities...if that had ever happened (say, as an informal service of TMZ or Gawker), I have no doubt Twitter would shut that down, as celebrities would be spooked by having their mistakes be essentially non-deletable...and their protests would carry a lot more notice than politicians'. edit: Another relevant link: the unitedstates/congress-legislators repo, which is a crowdsourced listing (augmented by a automated framework) of Congress social media accounts: https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legislators
In Twitter has killed Politwoops, which monitored politicians' deleted tweets

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