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unitedstates / congress

Public domain data collectors for the work of Congress, including legislation, amendments, and votes.
https://github.com/unitedstates/congress/wiki
Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal
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Generate view-friendly diffs from various legislation #210

Open powellcj12 opened 7 years ago

powellcj12 commented 7 years ago

This was somewhat mentioned in #52 in the context of amendments (see https://github.com/unitedstates/congress/issues/52#issuecomment-15315092) but I didn't see anything explicitly tracking it and seemed worthwhile to do so.

I think it would be really useful to have a representation of what changes a piece of legislation would have on other pieces of legislation, be it amendments to a bill or bills amending existing laws. The way I think about it is if every bill/law was stored in a git repo, then other bills/amendments essentially generate a diff that can be viewed in the context of the existing legislation.

Take the 17th Amendment to the Constitution as a basic example. As originally written, Clause 1 of Article 1 Section 3 of the Constitution reads:

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof, for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.

The 17th Amendment made it so that now it reads:

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote.

This essentially generates a diff that looks like the following:

-The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof, for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote. +The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.

When presented visually (like in this gist), the diff allows you to view the changes in at least a couple different ways visually, having better context for what the changes actually do.

JoshData commented 7 years ago

The issues in this repo are best suited for bug reports related to the scripts in this repository (vs ideas).

I'll leave the issue open for a while if anyone wants to comment. My suggestion would be that you try to do this for Obamacare and report back what you figure out.

powellcj12 commented 7 years ago

I had seen other issues like "Document Foo", "CSV Output", etc. which made me think this was the right place - is there a better place to track and discuss this?

JoshData commented 7 years ago

The thing you're proposing working on is about 1000x harder than documentation and CSV output. (I'm not exaggerating.)

I don't know of (or can't think of) a better place to discuss it. Like I said, we can leave this issue open for a while.

mustyoshi commented 3 years ago

@powellcj12 A project I've been working on occasionally might interest you. https://github.com/Congress-Dev/congress-dev