For the last week or so I’ve been working on a way to keep up with all the Members of Congress I see on TV as the government remains closed. I wanted to have a way to see all the Members in one place and catch up on them quickly. What I’ve got so far I’m calling Congress Corral ( https://localsearchamerica.com/cc/ ). This isn’t a final location but I know some people wanted to use it and I wanted to have a live version to use myself.

Congress Corral loads an enhanced (via Wikipedia) dataset of members of Congress. The listings are filterable by state and party, but also occupation and religion. The listing results have a little information; you’ll find the real goodies in the detail card. Click on a listing to get the detail card.

You’ll find it has three sections:

Overview: basic information about the Member of Congress, including birth date, religion, and contact information. There’s also a link to a number of external resources, from social media accounts to campaign finance transparency sites.

Latest YouTube Videos: Loads Member’s latest videos from YouTube RSS feeds when available. Videos are embedded and viewable from the section unless prohibited by the YouTube channel.

News Radar: Runs the Gossip Machine tool to find Wikipedia page view spikes from January 2017 to present. Presents the dates in a timeline with most recent first. Each listing contains a Google News search bounded for that date. It’s amazing how easy this section makes it to catch up on politicians you haven’t heard from in a while (or maybe have never heard from at all!)

Right now my plan is to add a section to set up local news searches for each legislator. If I can successfully bolt that on without everything blowing up, I’m going to add a local university search and then go back and start polishing (News Radar needs about a million filtering options.)
Still, as it is, it’s rough but it works! Give it a try and let me know how it does.