Congress

Congress is an app I built in under 24 hours early in 2019. It combines APIs like Propublica, Wikipedia, and others, to produce analytics and interactive visualizations that help you understand Congress by exploring their voting records, travel expenditures, recent statements, and more.

All of Congress – view and sort

View both the Senate and House. Sort by name, seniority, gender, and party.

Individual members – dig deeper

Learn more about individual members of Congress. Review their voting record, travel expenses and recent statements; connect with them on social media.

Voting record

The top row of this interactive visualization displays the member's individual votes. The next row displays the vote outcomes. The taller bars below display the distribution of votes.

Hover over any particular row to view individual votes. This displays a description of the bill, a summary of the vote itself, and a breakdown of the individual and total vote counts.

Green means yes, red means no, and black means they didn't vote.

Travel expenses

View a timeline of a member's individual travel expenses by quarter. Investigate travel and spending trends.

Recent statements

A gallery of each member's recent statements is also available. Get an overview of each member's official statements across time. Select a statement to read it.

Discipline, focus, constraint

I gave myself 24 hours to complete this app, meaning a good user-experience – no rough spots and bugs a user would immediately recognize as ugly or problematic.

The challenge then became to embrace the time limitations and remain disciplined about scope. It was fun to see what I could accomplish in such a short amount of time.