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Congress Receipts Documenting Foreign-Policy Votes and Statements.

Methodology

A bounded claim needs a bounded source.

Congress Receipts documents selected foreign-policy statements and roll-call votes by U.S. legislators. Every published record links to a public source, identifies what the source establishes, and avoids claims about motive or causation.

Publication method

  1. 01

    Define the claim

    Write one factual proposition that a source can prove. Do not begin with a verdict and search for support.

  2. 02

    Acquire the primary record

    Prefer the official roll call, enacted text, official transcript, or first-party statement. Record the publisher, date, URL, and relevant people.

  3. 03

    Verify the quotation or vote

    Check quote text character by character and match each vote to the exact roll-call question, date, and chamber.

  4. 04

    Describe limits

    Distinguish what the document establishes from interpretation. Multi-subject votes require explicit context.

  5. 05

    Run an adversarial review

    Look for omitted context, contrary evidence, stale office data, broken links, and language that implies motive or causation.

  6. 06

    Publish only after review

    There is no public placeholder state. Incomplete or unverified work stays outside the content collections and therefore outside the build and sitemap.

Source and language rules

  • Direct records first. Official government sources and attributable first-party statements are the default.
  • No causal shorthand. A contribution followed by a vote does not prove that the contribution caused the vote.
  • No motive claims. A vote or statement may be described; intent requires direct evidence and careful attribution.
  • No completeness claims. Publication is item-level. A partial dataset cannot support rankings, party comparisons, or absence-based conclusions.
  • Neutral vote presentation. Yea and nay are recorded outcomes, not positive or negative grades.

Scoring status

Retired from publication

The earlier scoring formula and leaderboard are not part of the current product. No profile has a score, no page ranks legislators, and the content schema rejects legacy scoring fields.

Data downloads

The published records are available as CSV files built from the same data as the pages. Each row links to its record page and original source. Coverage is selective, and a missing record means it is not included, not that it did not happen. Reuse is governed by the Terms of Use.

Each roll-call page also offers its own roster as a CSV file.

FAQ

Does Congress Receipts score or rank legislators?

No. Scoring and ranking are retired while the dataset is incomplete and the rubric is under review. Current pages are alphabetical and report only selected sourced records.

What does a recorded vote establish?

It establishes how a legislator voted on the stated roll-call question. For a large or multi-division measure, it does not by itself establish motive, support for every provision, or a preference for foreign spending over a domestic alternative.

Which sources qualify?

The launch product uses official Senate statements, Senate roll-call records, Congress.gov records, enacted-law text, and other direct government publications. A source must support the exact statement made on the page.

Is each profile complete?

No. Every profile is labeled as a selected record and includes an editorial review date. Absence from the dataset is not evidence that an event did not occur.

How are corrections handled?

When a source, quote, vote, or summary is wrong, the record is corrected at the data layer. The public corrections log identifies the affected page, what changed, why it changed, and the supporting source records.