Another Bridge Built: Tracking Congress
I've built a new custom RSS-Bridge that provides real-time feeds for actions on any bill on Congress.gov.
Hey folks,
I've just added a new tool to my public RSS-Bridge instance that lets you create a real-time RSS feed for any bill in the U.S. Congress.
You can now head over to https://rssbridge.sij.law, select the "Congress.gov Bill Actions" bridge, and plug in a bill's details—like "119th Congress, House Bill, 4422"—to get a feed of its complete legislative history. This is a great way to programmatically track a bill as it moves from introduction through committee and onto the floor.
This one was a bit more challenging to build than the White House bridges. The congress.gov website uses Cloudflare's anti-bot protection, which immediately blocks the simple web requests that RSS-Bridge normally uses. To get around this, the bridge is designed to work with another open-source tool called FlareSolverr. It acts as a proxy, using a real browser engine to solve Cloudflare's security challenges before fetching the page. This two-part setup allows the bridge to access the data reliably.
Because the bridge requires this extra FlareSolverr dependency, it's not a candidate for the main RSS-Bridge project. But for those of you running a similar self-hosted setup, the code is fully available for you to inspect or use yourself.
• Try it out: https://rssbridge.sij.law
• See the code: https://sij.ai/sij/rss-bridge