chrissoria/congress-members

Members of the U.S. Congress

Everyone who has served in the U.S. Congress since 1789: when they entered, when they left, and the main facts about them. Two tables:

• members: one row per person (about 12,800), with the seat they hold or last held and their service added up.
• terms: one row per term served (about 45,500).

The two join on bioguide_id, the id the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress gives each member. The same id is used by federal-bills-active and federal-committees.

from datasets import load_dataset
members = load_dataset("chrissoria/congress-members", "members", split="train").to_pandas()
terms = load_dataset("chrissoria/congress-members", "terms", split="train").to_pandas()
serving = members[members["status"] == "serving"]

Where it comes from

• Names, birth dates, gender, terms, parties, websites, offices, phone numbers, leadership posts, social media accounts and the other ids come from congress-legislators, a public-domain (CC0) project that volunteers keep current from official records. This dataset reshapes it; it adds no facts of its own to those columns.
• race_ethnicity comes only from three lists published by the Office of the Historian of the U.S. House of Representatives, which cover both chambers: Black Americans in Congress, Hispanic Americans in Congress and Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in Congress. A person on a list gets its value ("Black", "Hispanic", "Asian or Pacific Islander"); a person on two gets both, separated by "; ". race_ethnicity_source names the list.

Read this before using race_ethnicity

• An empty value does not mean white. It means the person is on none of the three lists. No comparable official list exists of white, Native American, or Middle Eastern or North African members, so those members are empty too. The column can answer "which members does the Historian list as Black, Hispanic, or Asian or Pacific Islander"; it cannot give the racial make-up of Congress.
• Nothing is inferred. No value comes from a name, a photograph, a district or a caucus membership.
• The lists are the Historian's judgment, in the Historian's categories. They are updated some time after a member is sworn in, so the newest members may be missing for a while.
• A listed person is joined to this table by the Historian's own id where the legislators file records it, and otherwise by surname, a given name, state, chamber and the Congresses served. A listed person who cannot be matched to exactly one member is left out.

members columns

Column	Description
bioguide_id	The member's id in the Biographical Directory. The key.
name	The name the member goes by officially, or first and last name.
first_name, middle_name, last_name, suffix, nickname	The parts of the name.
birth_date	YYYY-MM-DD. Missing for about 540 members, nearly all of whom entered before 1900.
gender	"M" or "F", as the source records it.
race_ethnicity, race_ethnicity_source	See above. Empty for most members.
status	"serving" or "former".
position	"Senator", "Representative", "Delegate" or "Resident Commissioner", for the seat held now or last.
chamber	"House" or "Senate", for that seat.
state	Two-letter code of the state or territory.
district	House district; 0 for a seat at large, -1 where the source does not know it. Empty for senators.
party	As the source writes it: "Democrat", "Republican", "Independent", and about sixty historical parties.
caucus	For an independent, the party they sit with.
senate_class	1, 2 or 3: which third of the Senate the seat belongs to.
state_rank	"senior" or "junior", for a sitting senator.
first_entered	The start of the person's first term in either chamber.
last_exit	The end of the last term. Empty for someone now serving.
exit_timing	"end of a Congress" or "during a Congress". Empty for someone now serving. See the limits below.
current_service_start	For someone now serving, the start of their unbroken time in their present chamber. A gap of more than a month between terms breaks it.
n_terms, house_terms, senate_terms	Terms served, counting the present one and partial ones.
days_served	Days in office over all terms, up to the day the table was built.
leadership_position	A party or chamber leadership post held now, such as "Senate Majority Leader".
leadership_history	Every leadership post recorded, with its dates. The source covers 2003 onward.
website, contact_form, phone, office_address	For someone now serving only.
twitter, facebook, instagram, youtube, youtube_id, mastodon	Official accounts, for someone now serving only.
govtrack_id, icpsr_id, lis_id, wikidata_id, wikipedia, opensecrets_id, fec_ids, house_history_id	The person's ids elsewhere (ICPSR is the id Voteview uses; fec_ids is separated by ";").
updated	The day the row was last built.

terms columns

Column	Description
bioguide_id, name	The person.
term_number	1 for the person's first term, in order of time.
chamber, position	As above, for this term.
start, end	The first and last day of the term. For a term under way, end is the day it is due to end.
congress_first, congress_last	The Congresses the term spans (a Senate term spans three).
state, district, party, caucus, senate_class, state_rank	As above, for this term.
how	"appointment" or "special-election" where the source records that the term began that way. It does so for about 210 Senate appointments since 1913 and a handful of special elections, so an empty value says nothing.
days	Days served in the term so far.
serving	True for the term a sitting member is serving now.
url	The member's official website during that term, where recorded (from about 2003).

Limits

• Why someone left is not recorded. Neither source says whether a member lost, retired, resigned, was expelled or died. exit_timing says only whether the last term ran to the end of a Congress.
• Departure dates before about 1990 are often the scheduled end of the term. For many earlier members, mostly in the House, the source gives the day the term was due to end even when the member died or resigned before then. A check against the death dates in Wikidata found about 870 former members whose recorded last day is later than their death, all but four of them leaving before 1990. For those years last_exit, days_served and exit_timing overstate service, and "end of a Congress" is not evidence that the member served to the end.
• Before 1935 the source dates most terms from the day Congress first met, usually in December, not from March 4 when the term began in law. days and days_served are counted from the source's dates, so they run about nine months short for each of those terms.
• A delegate from a territory that later became a state has the state's code in the source and appears as a "Representative". Delegates from the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, the Virgin Islands, and the Dakota and Orleans territories, and the resident commissioners of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, are named as such.
• A member who changed party in the middle of a term has the later party on that term.
• Contact details, websites and social media accounts are kept only for sitting members. No email addresses are included, because members do not publish them; they are written to through contact_form or the website.

Updates

build_congress_members.py in cat-pol-datasets rebuilds both tables weekly. It refuses to publish if the number of sitting members is implausible or the table has shrunk, and it keeps the race_ethnicity values already published when the Historian's pages cannot be read.

world/members.json in this repository holds a few of these fields, for people who have served since the 113th Congress (2013), in the shape the member card of Capitol World reads.

Licence and credit

CC0 1.0, the licence of the congress-legislators project. The House Historian's lists are works of the U.S. government. If you use the data, please credit both sources.