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About This Project

What is this?

Congress Network is an interactive visualization of cosponsorship relationships in the United States Congress. It shows which members of Congress work together across party lines by co-sponsoring each other's bills.

How does it work?

We pull bill and cosponsorship data from the Congress.gov API. For each bill, we look at who sponsored it and who co-sponsored it. When a member from one party co-sponsors a bill from a member of another party, that creates a cross-party edge in the network.

The visualization uses a force-directed graph (powered by D3.js) where each member is a node and each shared cosponsorship is an edge. The physics simulation naturally clusters members who work together, making partisan divisions — and bipartisan bridges — immediately visible.

What do the visuals mean?

Blue nodes = Democrats
Red nodes = Republicans
Purple nodes = Independents
Node size = number of cross-party cosponsorships
Edge thickness = number of shared bills between two members

Three views

The Isolation Chamber highlights members with zero cross-party cosponsorship — those who never reach across the aisle.
Bridge Builders spotlights the top bipartisan connectors.
Follow the Bill lets you filter by policy topic to see who works together on healthcare, defense, technology, and more.

Data freshness

Data is refreshed every 12 hours from the Congress.gov API. The current dataset covers the 119th Congress (2025–2026).

Embed this visualization

Journalists and bloggers can embed any page using an iframe:

<iframe src="https://congress.litigatech.com/bridges"
  width="100%" height="600" frameborder="0"></iframe>

Built with

Python/Flask backend · D3.js force-directed graph · Congress.gov API · Google Cloud Platform

Source code

github.com/NittanySeaLion/congress-network