[Peace] Re: [Prairiegreens] Another question

[Milt Epstein]

On Fri, 19 Oct 2001, John Wason wrote:

> Can anyone tell me where I might find, on the web:
>
> 1) A list of all the Senators and Representives, the states they're
> from, and their addresses, phone numbers, etc. in Washington DC?

John, if I've told you once, I've told you a thousands times, google,
man, google :-).  Entering "list senators representives" at
www.google.com led me to the following pages (among others that
weren't as useful):

http://www.northernwebs.com/senate/
  Senators' email addresses
  (When the cursor is over an EMAIL button the address is displayed in
  the status line at the bottom of the page)

http://www.senate.gov/
  The Senate home page
  There are links to list of senators, where it looks like you have to
  follow another link or two to get contact information, but there's
  also a "CONTACTING THE SENATE" link on the menu across the top of
  the page.

By extension, I then tried:
http://www.house.gov/
  It didn't look like there was a single link for getting all Reps
  addresses, so you may have to go to each one individually.  The
  "Member Offices" link on the top right might be a good starting
  point.

This was from just the first page of search results, I didn't really
look any further (not sure if the above will be sufficient for your
needs).  The last two should be the "horse's mouth" (no jokes, please)
sources.


> 2) A sort of summary of the bills our Congresscreatures have been
> voting on recently - not the entire bill, but a summary of what it
> enacts into law, what its status is currently (in committee, passed,
> signed by the President, etc.), and if the Senate and H. or R. voted
> on it, a tally of who voted for it and who voted against it.

The house page above has "This Week on the House Floor" and "Roll Call
Votes" which might be helpful for this.  Also,

http://thomas.loc.gov/

is a good source for this type of info.


> As an example, everyone has talked about Barbara Lee being the lone
> person to vote "no" on a certain bill that gave GW Bush some sort of
> power to wage war in Afghanistan.  But if I understand it correctly,
> it wasn't the War Powers Act they were invoking, but something else.
> I'm not clear on what exactly they voted on.

The way I found more info on this was by starting at the house page,
going to the member directory, going to Barbara Lee's page, and there
I noticed she had a link to a statement about S.J.Res. 23 (which I
believe stands for "Senate Joint Resolution).  I then went to the
senate page and entered "SJR 23" in a "BILL SEARCH" section they have
on the lower right of the page (I had to guess on the "SJR" part; just
entering "23" didn't work).  That took me to more information about
SJR 23 (which passed 98-0).  While poking around there (particularly
the "Bill Summary and Status File", and then "Bill Status"), I saw
reference to H.J.Res. 64 (similarly, I'm guessing that's short for
"House Joint Resolution").  *That's* the bill (but is it the same as a
bill?) that Barbara Lee was the lone nay vote on (the vote was 420-1).
But that bill was "laid on the table", and I guess, superseded by the
Senate one.  (This stuff is pretty confusing; any political scientists
out there?  I've forgotten my high school social studies stuff :-).


> There was another recent bill that passed with a vote of something
> like 534-2.  I have no idea what that bill was.

That vote total seems wrong.  There are about 430 reps, so it couldn't
be a house vote.  It's close to the number of senators and reps
combined (maybe a little too high), but do they ever joint vote on
anything?  I'm not sure how you might find this, except by searching
through some of the recent roll call votes (the Barbara Lee one was
342, they're up to 394 now).


> I realize that this is kind of a broad and open-ended question, but
> I have a feeling that a few of you will guide me unerringly to
> exactly what I'm looking for.  And I thank you in advance.

Well, I don't think I was unerring, but hopefully it's in the right
direction.

Milt Epstein
Research Programmer
Software/Systems Development Group
Computing and Communications Services Office (CCSO)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
mepstein at uiuc.edu