Welcome to crec!
crec is a python tool built for retrieving, structuring, and enriching the Congressional Record, the official record of the proceedings of the United States Congress. crec wraps the GovInfo API — a product of the U.S. Government Publishing Office — with an intuitive and powerful API of its own.
With crec, generating a pandas DataFrame of speech data from the 116th Senate, for example, can be done in just a few lines of code:
>>> from crec import Record
>>> r = Record(start_date="2019-01-03", end_date="2021-01-03", granule_class_filter = ["SENATE"])
INFO:2023-11-13 21:50:14: getting granules with the following classes: ['HOUSE', 'SENATE', 'EXTENSIONS', 'DAILYDIGEST']; skipping granules with the following classes: []
INFO:2023-11-13 21:50:14: getting granules in zipped files in batch 1 of 1
INFO:2023-11-13 21:50:25: successfully got zipped files for 1 of 1 valid dates; there were 0 failures
INFO:2023-11-13 21:50:25: successfully got and parsed 103 of 103 granules; there were 0 failures
>>> r.passages.to_df()
granuleDate granuleId passage_id text speaker bioGuideId
0 2019-01-04 CREC-2019-01-04-pt1-PgE11-2 1 Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor Pastor Ke... Zoe Lofgren L000397
1 2019-01-04 CREC-2019-01-04-pt1-PgE11-3 1 Madam Speaker, I was not present for Roll Call... Robert J. Wittman W000804
2 2019-01-04 CREC-2019-01-04-pt1-PgE11-4 1 Madam Speaker, today is former Congressman Les... Thomas R. Suozzi S001201
3 2019-01-04 CREC-2019-01-04-pt1-PgE11-6 1 Madam Speaker, I regret I was unable to vote d... Lloyd Smucker S001199
4 2019-01-04 CREC-2019-01-04-pt1-PgE11-7 1 Madam Speaker, I was unavoidably detained due ... Fred Upton U000031
.. ... ... ... ... ... ...
320061 2021-01-01 CREC-2021-01-01-pt1-PgS8016 1 Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that th... John Boozman B001236
320062 2021-01-01 CREC-2021-01-01-pt1-PgS8016 2 Without objection, it is so ordered. The PRESIDING OFFICER None
320063 2021-01-01 CREC-2021-01-01-pt1-PgS8016-2 1 Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that wh... John Boozman B001236
320064 2021-01-01 CREC-2021-01-01-pt1-PgS8016-2 2 Without objection, it is so ordered. The PRESIDING OFFICER None
320065 2021-01-01 CREC-2021-01-01-pt1-PgS8016-3 1 If there is no further business to come before... John Boozman B001236
For an brief introduction to crec, check out our getting started guide. For an in depth overview of the package, check out the API documentation.