use Perl

Maybe the US Congress or Library of Congress already have SOAP interfaces to their web sites, but I have not found them, and I spent a couple hours researching a couple of bills yesterday (HR 526: Telemarketing Relief Act and HR2239: Verifiable Vote Something or Other), and what I really wanted was one link that said "Download everything related to this bill" which would include the bill text, status report, co-sponsors (with contact info), related bills, and everything else.

use Congress; # just like big companies!
 
my $congress = Congress->new;
 
my $bill = $congress->fetch( 'HR2239' );
 
print $bill->text;
 
print "Bill has ", $bill->cosponsors->count, " cosponsors\n";
 
foreach my $related ( $bill->related )
    {
    print "Related: ", $related->title, "\n";
    }
 
$bill->approve() if int( rand 2 );

But let us go even further. We need to commoditize the legislative process.

Just imagine Congress as a web service like Amazon or Google. Imagine "A page that you made" but with pending legislation, including "People insterested in this bill were also interested in these" or "Senators who voted for this bill also voted for these". Hey, once we have that, we can have real-time popularity polls right on the congressional website. The congress members would then spend a good amount of their day checking their polls like some people watch the stock ticker. "Fitzgerald up 7/8th, Daschle down 500". Since I live in Chicago, I will need "Buy votes for this bill" and "Vote again (and again)" links.

So, Ziggy, where is it? It must be there somewhere and I just have not found it.