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Is there a way to get an electronic copy of the Congressional Record, or otherwise get information about all the speakers in Congress, what they said, when they said, the votes on all motions bills, the text of all bills and related information?
I was unable to find the Congressional Record going back more that 20 years or so, but I imagine that since it is printed, it must be available somewhere.
Anyone know where I can find it?
The Sunlight Foundation makes a lot of Congressional Record data available through its Capitol Words API:
http://capitolwords.org/api/1/
It's focused on speeches, and doesn't bring much order to chaos beyond that.
But you're also looking for votes, and bills, and bill text? Rather than plumb the depths of the Congressional Record, you can get that from this project:
https://github.com/unitedstates/congress
Which has various scrapers that assemble this from around Congress. This is the data that ends up in GovTrack and in the Sunlight Foundation's Congress API.
I would checkout govtrack.us. They make their datasets available as 'public domain'.
https://www.govtrack.us/developers
Any data files we make available from the Source Data page for which we own the copyright we release into the public domain.
I am not sure about electronic copy of congressional record, but what they said and the votes on all motions bills and other information can be easily be query using this online application iknow.io - you can try the data navigator to query congressman name.
FYI - They are using govetrack.us, but they are doing all heavy lifting so that any one can query information easily.
