Welcome to BICAM’s documentation!

BICAM is a Python package for downloading and working with the BICAM (Bulk Ingestion of Congressional Actions & Materials) dataset. It provides easy access to bills, amendments, members, committees, hearings, and more from official government sources.

Contents:

Quick Start

Install BICAM and start downloading datasets:

pip install bicam
bicam list
bicam download congresses

Features

  • 12 Comprehensive Datasets: Bills, amendments, members, committees, hearings, and more

  • Simple Format: CSV files for easy analysis with pandas, R, or other data analysis tools

  • Automatic Caching: Downloads are cached locally to avoid re-downloading

  • Command Line Interface: Streamlined CLI for quick access

  • Python API: Full programmatic access for analysis

Available Datasets

  • bills (~2.5GB) - Complete bills data with text and metadata

  • amendments (~800MB) - All amendments with voting records

  • members (~150MB) - Historical and current member information

  • nominations (~400MB) - Presidential nominations data

  • committees (~200MB) - Committee membership and metadata

  • committeereports (~1.2GB) - Full text of committee reports

  • committeemeetings (~600MB) - Committee meeting records

  • committeeprints (~900MB) - Committee prints and documents

  • hearings (~3.5GB) - Hearing transcripts and testimonies

  • treaties (~300MB) - Treaty documents and ratification records

  • congresses (~100MB) - Congressional session metadata

  • complete (~12GB) - All datasets combined

Example Usage

import bicam
import pandas as pd

# Download bills dataset
bills_path = bicam.download_dataset('bills')

# Load and analyze data using BICAM's loader
bills_df = bicam.load_dataframe('bills', 'bills.csv')
print(f"Total bills: {len(bills_df)}")

# Filter by congress
recent_bills = bills_df[bills_df['congress'] >= 115]
print(f"Recent bills (115th+): {len(recent_bills)}")

Support

Indices and tables