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the committee hearings/meetings schedule, the floor schedule, and nine nomination-status files (pending, confirmed, withdrawn, failed — civilian and non-civilian).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 3,000 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 15 item(s) in the last 14 days; most recent 2026-09-28; 0 of 369 request(s) to www.senate.gov returned no content.

This label has held since 2026-09-15T00:13:06Z (UTC) and was last re-checked 2026-09-29T10:51:00Z (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

Each day runs midnight to midnight on Eastern time (Washington, D.C.), the publication day the digests use; the stored request stamps remain UTC.

Our ingestion assessment