Committee Meetings

This task fetches scheduled committee meetings for both the House and Senate.

Usage

To run the scraper for both chambers:

usc-run committee_meetings

Options

This task has several specialized options to control its behavior:

  • --chamber=<house|senate>: Restricts the scrape to a single chamber.

  • --load_by=<start_id-end_id>: For the House only, this fetches meetings by a specific range of House Event IDs instead of using the committee RSS feeds. This can be useful for backfilling historical data.

    Example: bash usc-run committee_meetings --chamber=house --load_by=115000-115100

  • --docs=False: By default, the scraper downloads associated documents for House committee meetings (e.g., witness statements, amendments). Set this to False to skip downloading these files and only fetch the meeting metadata.

Output

Unlike other tasks that create many small files, this scraper outputs one JSON file per chamber, containing an array of all found meetings.

  • data/committee_meetings_house.json
  • data/committee_meetings_senate.json

If the --docs option is enabled (the default), it will also download associated files to a structured directory:

data/committee/meetings/house/{folder}/{event_id}/