Senate.gov XML services

active ●Ingestion health: delivering Legislative · Tier 1 · XML index · Secretary of the Senate (LIS)

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What this source is

The Senate's officially documented directory of XML files: roll-call vote menus and individual votes, the committee hearings/meetings schedule, the floor schedule, and nine nomination-status files (pending, confirmed, withdrawn, failed — civilian and non-civilian). The only machine source for Senate votes.

Identity and registry record

Registry id

senate-xml

Agency / parent organization

Secretary of the Senate (LIS)

Branch

legislative

Type

XML index

Status

active

Tier

1

URL (home)

https://www.senate.gov/general/common/generic/XML_Availability.htm (opens in a new tab)

URL (index)

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/vote_menu_119_2.xml (opens in a new tab)

Registered

2026-07-28

Registry notes

Gate 3 (2026-07-31, live through the identified client): the menu answers 200 text/xml, 123,670 bytes, and lists the WHOLE session — 217 <vote> elements from 05-Jan to 30-Jul, so ingestion sees 100% of the Senate's recorded votes but must bound itself (8 fell inside the 7-day lookback that day: 1 index fetch + 8 records = 9 requests). Two coverage limits, both disclosed rather than papered over: (a) vote_date carries NO YEAR ('30-Jul') and vote_tally is present but EMPTY on all 217, so the tally exists only in the per-vote record, which is why wants_article() is True; (b) 2 of 217 rows are en-bloc confirmations carrying no issue/question/result — their title alone identifies them. Per-vote URL pattern vote{congress}{session}/vote_{c}_{s}_{NNNNN}.xml verified by fetching vote_119_2_00217.xml (200, 28,745 bytes, all 100 member positions). The index URL names the current congress/session and must be advanced when session 3 opens. Complements congress-gov-api, whose roll-call endpoint is House-only.

How we ingest it

Channel

XML index

Method

Conditional GET of the current session's roll-call vote menu; the senate-votes adapter bounds enumeration to config.INDEX_LOOKBACK_DAYS and fetches one per-vote XML record per in-window vote. Stored under the VOTES collection (GUIDE §3 recorded votes), never AGENCYPR.

Adapter

senate-votes

Poll cadence

about every 60 minutes while the collector runs

Request budget

the agency class: at most 1,500 requests per day shared across every agency web source, counted from the fetch log (failed requests count too)

Politeness

robots.txt is honored as observed — including each host's crawl-delay, exactly — and every request identifies itself as fapd/0.1 (Free Agentic Publication Digester; +https://fapd.info/bot.html; contact: hustleyourcity@gmail.com); a refusal is recorded, never evaded

Capture and hash

captured raw content is hashed (SHA-256) into the day's committed provenance manifest, hash-chained day to day (PROVENANCE.md)

Ingestion health

●Ingestion health: delivering 8 item(s) in the last 14 days; most recent 2026-07-31; 0 of 130 request(s) to www.senate.gov returned no content.

This label has held since 2026-08-03T18:46:01Z (UTC) and was last re-checked 2026-08-03T19:51:47Z (UTC).

Counts are of our own requests, retries included. A 4xx or 5xx is the server declining to return content — that may be load, maintenance, on-demand generation, or a limit the publisher sets, and we cannot tell which from outside. Nothing here is a measurement of the publisher.

Ingestion statistics

These figures describe this project's ingestion of this source — items we recorded and requests we made — and nothing else. They are not a measurement of the publisher.

Last 24 hours

Last 14 days

All time

Last 30 days, day by day