After seeing a reference in an XML.com “Hacking Congress” article, I finally spent a little time poking around GovTrack.us. Wow, this is really cool. Once you set up an account, you can track people or issues and receive updates by email. I set up to track my elected representatives and all bills about elections and voting.

Here’s an example of what gets sent:

Recent Events

Nov 17, 2004
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Senate Debate

Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions: Introducing S. 2989. A bill to amend the Controlled Substances Act to provide an affirmative defense for the medical use of marijuana in accordance with the laws of the various States, and for other purposes; to the Committee on the Judiciary.

Excerpt: “[Introducing S. 2989] Mr. President, I rise today with Senators LEAHY and JEFFORDS to introduce the Truth in Trials Act. This is a narrowly tailored bill that would allow defendants in Federal criminal trials regarding medicinal marijuana to introduce evidence that their marijuana-related activity was performed in compliance with State law…”

This event matches:

Sen. Richard Durbin [D-IL]

Nov 17, 2004
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House Debate

Tribute to Congressman William O. Lipinski

Excerpt: “Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for organizing this tribute to our friend, Bill Lipinski; and I am pleased to join with other members of the Illinois delegation to celebrate the outstanding career of Bill Lipinski and to wish him well on his retirement after 22 years in this body. When I was elected to Congress in 1998, I was fortunate to…”

This event matches:

Rep. Janice Schakowsky [D-IL]

So, with very little effor, I’ll know about just about everything my representatives do. Oddly, I just looked on the web site, and I don’t know why the tracker email didn’t also include Jan Schakowsky’s votes from the same day. It looks as though maybe you track votes separately and those alerts include the specific votes of the people you monitor as well as the overall result. At least, I turned that on; we’ll see if that starts coming in the mail.

There are many other cool features in there, such as, for each bill, a section, “Who Funded This Bill?” which shows you the major funders of a bill’s sponsor. (Perhaps not always reliable, but good to have that “at your fingertips,” so to speak. You can also set it up to “track” your blog, and include any items from your feed that reference bills. They also have lots of RSS feeds for just about everything, if you want to keep up by aggregator instead of email, or if you want to integrate the information into your own website.

Why not go sign up now and keep better tabs on whether your representatives are really representing you or not.