politiclaw_ingest_votes

• Label: Ingest recent congressional roll-call votes
• Group: Bills and votes
• Source file: packages/politiclaw-plugin/src/tools/voteIngest.ts

Description

Sweep primary roll-call sources and persist recent votes (plus per-member positions keyed by bioguide id) into the plugin-private DB. House: api.congress.gov /house-vote (tier 1, requires plugins.entries.politiclaw.config.apiKeys.apiDataGov). Senate: voteview.com /api/search + /api/download (tier 2, zero-key). Idempotent: unchanged entries (by update_date when available, by memberCount>0 otherwise) skip the detail fetch. Use chamber='Both' (default) to ingest both chambers in one call.

Parameters

Name	Required	Type	Description
chamber	no	"House" | "Senate" | "Both"	Which chamber to sweep. Defaults to 'Both'. House uses api.congress.gov (tier 1); Senate uses voteview.com (tier 2).
congress	no	integer	Congress number. Defaults to the 119th (2025-2027).
session	no	integer	Session within the congress (1 or 2). If omitted, no session filter is applied — the most recent votes across both sessions are returned.
limit	no	integer	Max usable roll-call entries to sweep per chamber (1-100). House ingest may trigger an extra detail+members fetch per vote against the api.data.gov 5000/hr quota. Senate ingest fetches the full /api/search response once then issues one /api/download per vote, plus up to 50 extra downloads past limit to skip Voteview's recent-detail tail (capped at 100 total downloads).
offset	no	integer
force	no	boolean	When true, re-fetch detail+members for every listed vote even when its update_date is unchanged. Use for schema backfills or to pick up Voteview corrections (Voteview does not expose an update timestamp).

Raw Schema

{
  "type": "object",
  "properties": {
    "chamber": {
      "description": "Which chamber to sweep. Defaults to 'Both'. House uses api.congress.gov (tier 1); Senate uses voteview.com (tier 2).",
      "anyOf": [
        {
          "const": "House",
          "type": "string"
        },
        {
          "const": "Senate",
          "type": "string"
        },
        {
          "const": "Both",
          "type": "string"
        }
      ]
    },
    "congress": {
      "minimum": 1,
      "description": "Congress number. Defaults to the 119th (2025-2027).",
      "type": "integer"
    },
    "session": {
      "minimum": 1,
      "maximum": 2,
      "description": "Session within the congress (1 or 2). If omitted, no session filter is applied — the most recent votes across both sessions are returned.",
      "type": "integer"
    },
    "limit": {
      "minimum": 1,
      "maximum": 100,
      "description": "Max usable roll-call entries to sweep per chamber (1-100). House ingest may trigger an extra detail+members fetch per vote against the api.data.gov 5000/hr quota. Senate ingest fetches the full /api/search response once then issues one /api/download per vote, plus up to 50 extra downloads past `limit` to skip Voteview's recent-detail tail (capped at 100 total downloads).",
      "type": "integer"
    },
    "offset": {
      "minimum": 0,
      "type": "integer"
    },
    "force": {
      "description": "When true, re-fetch detail+members for every listed vote even when its update_date is unchanged. Use for schema backfills or to pick up Voteview corrections (Voteview does not expose an update timestamp).",
      "type": "boolean"
    }
  }
}