R Observatory: Metrics for congress version 0.1.0

Balamuta, James Joseph

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21843040

congress

0.1.0Package record

Access the Congress.gov API

0packages depend

8Kdownloads / year

99.5%test coverage

13/13flavors OK

Overview

About

Maintained by Christopher T. KennyCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗Website ↗Issues ↗

Download and read data on United States congressional proceedings. Data is read from the Library of Congress's Congress.gov Application Programming Interface (https://github.com/LibraryOfCongress/api.congress.gov/). Functions exist for all version 3 endpoints, including for bills, amendments, congresses, summaries, members, reports, communications, nominations, and treaties.

Changes in 0.1.0

Addresses changes in January 2024-May 2025 API changes (#22,#23,#24,#25,#26,#27,#28,#29,#30,#31,#32,#33,#34,#35,#36,#37,#38,#39)
Checks that all upstream updates did not impact auto-unlisting functions.
Adds support for item = 'summaries' in cong_bill()
Adds support for item = 'text' in cong_amendment()
Adds support for searching members by congress or state (and district) in cong_member()
Adds support for searching members by current status in cong_member()
Adds new cong_law() function to use the law endpoint.
Adds new cong_crs_report() function to use the crs-report endpoint.
Adds new (experimental) House vote function cong_house_vote().
Improves support for date time formats across the board
Fixes too aggressive processing in cong_bill() (#21)

From NEWS.md in the release

Install

R (CRAN)pak (dev)Ubuntu (r2u)Fedora (COPR)openSUSE (OBS)

install.packages("congress", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

Installs the current CRAN release. Prebuilt binaries on Windows and macOS.

if (!requireNamespace("pak", quietly = TRUE))
  install.packages("pak", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")
pak::pak("christopherkenny/congress")

Development version from christopherkenny/congress. Installs pak first if it is not already available.

Release

# enable cranapt (r2u) if it is not already set up, then install
grep -rqs r2u.stat.illinois.edu /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ \
  || curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_noble.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install -y r-cran-congress

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled. We list this channel from recorded r2u download activity rather than from a live index of the repository, so treat it as last known rather than guaranteed.

bspm (used by r2u) also needs make: sudo apt install make

# enable the iucar/cran COPR if it is not already present, then install
ls /etc/yum.repos.d/*iucar*cran*.repo >/dev/null 2>&1 \
  || sudo dnf copr enable -y iucar/cran
sudo dnf install -y R-CRAN-congress

RPMs from the iucar/cran COPR, rebuilt from CRAN.

For install.packages() integration in R, also: sudo dnf install R-CoprManager

# add the autoCRAN OBS repo (Tumbleweed) if it is missing, then install
zypper -q lr | grep -qi autoCRAN \
  || sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/R:/autoCRAN/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/devel:languages:R:autoCRAN.repo
sudo zypper install -y R-congress

RPMs auto-built from CRAN on openSUSE OBS (Tumbleweed). We list this channel from recorded autoCRAN download activity rather than from a live index of the repository, so treat it as last known rather than guaranteed.

Health

CRAN checks

13OK

CRAN check page ↗

Slowest check: 1.5 min · r-oldrel-windows-x86_64

Status changes

OK13 OK2026-08-05
NOTE12 OK, 1 NOTE2026-08-01
OK14 OK2026-03-10

Advisories

none known

How this is measured·How advisories are found

Documentation

In release 0.1.0

READMEYes · 336 wordsVignettesYes · 1 · dynamicNEWSYes · 100% structured · mentions 0.1.0Citation fileNoWebsiteYes · pkgdown

Help pages: 24
Examples that run: 96%23 run in a plain check (22 of them under a condition) · 1 never run
Exported functions with examples: 100%
Documented parameters: 100%
Return-value docs: 100%
Help pages citing references: 0%

Vignettes (1)

congress HTML

How these are measured

Downloads

8K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #5,951 · ~22/day · ~670/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

47130 days

1.4K90 days

8K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on92 r2u11 autocran

How downloads are counted

Repository

christopherkenny/congress ↗Account: christopherkenny

21Stars

1Forks

2Open issues

0Open PRs

1Releases

106Commits

1Commit identities

106 commits · Last activity 2026-06-26 · 0% stars, 30d · Default branch at 0.1.1, ahead of CRAN 0.1.0 (checked 2026-10-18)

Responsiveness

How these are sampled

PRs merged (all time): not measured
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed issues: 20
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed PRs: not measured

Stars over time

2025-08-08 · 162026-07-07 · 21

How these are measured

PracticesBeta

10 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 5 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/christopherkenny/congress on 2026-10-18.

Continuous integration (2)

GitHub ActionsR CMD check workflow

The R CMD check workflow runs on Linux, macOS and Windows, and on R-devel

Docs source (4)

README.Rmdpkgdown

GitHub Pages site last deployed 2026-06-26 · The repository has a site deploy workflow

pkgdown site last built 2026-06-26

Coverage (1)

Coverage reporting (Codecov)

CRAN release process (2)

cran-comments.mdCRAN-SUBMISSION

Show all practicesHide 1 practice

Lint, format, editor (1)

RStudio project

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v3 (2026-09-26)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

15 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Installing congress adds 25 packages (16 with compiled code, 20 MB of source tarballs). Heaviest: stringi 11 MB, openssl 1.1 MB, vctrs 1.0 MB.

Depends (1)

R >= 4.1.0

Imports (9)

cli dplyr glue httr2 purrr rlang stringr tibble tidyr

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (6)

httptest2 knitr rmarkdown spelling testthat withr

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

0direct

0indirect

Nothing depends on this yet.

How these are counted

Code & Tests

People & History

People (1)

Christopher T. Kenny

Author, Maintainer since 0.0.1 (2022)

Releases (3)

Pick two releases to compare their code metrics.

R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
0.1.0Latest
record
2025-09-02 · current release · diff ↗ ·
added 3 exports
cong_crs_report, cong_house_vote, cong_law
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
0.0.3
record
2024-01-09 · diff ↗ ·
removed 1 export
cong_communication

added 9 exports
cong_bound_record, cong_committee_meeting, cong_committee_print, cong_daily_record, cong_hearing, cong_house_communication, cong_house_requirement, cong_request_next, cong_senate_communication
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
0.0.1
record
2022-10-12
R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22

Package metadata

First published: 2022-10-12
Total releases: 3 / 4 yrs
License: MIT + file LICENSE OSI
Minimum R: ≥ 4.1.0
Download size: 136 KB

Cite

Cite this package

Run in R for the authors' preferred citation:

citation("congress")

Format

Kenny, C. T. (2025). congress: Access the Congress.gov API (Version 0.1.0) [Computer software]. https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.congress

This package has no citation file, so citation() returns this entry built from DESCRIPTION.

Cite the R Observatory

For a number measured here: a download total, a coverage figure, an archival date.

Format

APA

Balamuta, J. J. (2026). R Observatory: Metrics for congress version 0.1.0 [Data set]. HJJB, LLC. Data release v2026-10-22. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21843040

From data release v2026-10-22, which the citation names so these numbers can be found later. More on citing and the projects behind them.

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