Historical Bills (Adler & Wilkerson)

To provide bill data for congresses not covered by modern electronic systems, this project includes a task to import data from the Adler & Wilkerson Congressional Bills Project.

This dataset covers bills (but not resolutions) for the 80th through 92nd Congresses.

Usage

To run the importer, simply execute the adler_wilkerson_bills task:

usc-run adler_wilkerson_bills

Process

The script performs the following steps:

1. Downloads the data zip file from http://congressionalbills.org/billfiles/bills80-92.zip.
2. Unzips the file in memory.
3. Reads the tab-separated data file (bills80-92.txt).
4. Processes each record, converting it into the project's standard bill JSON structure.

This task currently prints the processed records to standard output for inspection and does not write them to the data/ directory automatically.