Free congressional database?

March 4, 2005 1:29 PM

Is there such a thing as a freely available database of Congresspeople? Names, districts, party affiliations, etc. Preferably easily loadable into a MySQL database. You'd think with the success of grassroots politics on the web someone would be offering one, but everything I've found wants me to pay a significant amount of money for one.
posted by crawl to law & government (7 comments total)

Any of this useful?
posted by WCityMike at 1:32 PM on March 4, 2005

Wow, that was really fast. My Google Fu is weak. Thanks!
posted by crawl at 1:40 PM on March 4, 2005

Nah, already knew of it, no Google Fu involved. GovTrack.Us rocks.
posted by WCityMike at 1:44 PM on March 4, 2005

WCityMike--have you used their email update service? I've been wondering how well it works.
posted by MrMoonPie at 2:21 PM on March 4, 2005

Alternatively, you could talk to the people at Project Vote Smart, who have a bunch of information.

I don't know whether they'd be willing to share their raw data with you, but asking doesn't cost anything, and stripping the information out of a few queries wouldn't be hard to do in an afternoon.

If all you want is name, district, and party, that's here for the House and here for the Senate.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 3:07 PM on March 4, 2005

I *thought* all I needed was name, district, and party, but after seeing what GovTrack.us has, I realized I needed more ;-)
posted by crawl at 8:48 AM on March 5, 2005

Here's another one .
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 11:16 PM on March 5, 2005