About The Capitol Wire

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Why is this free?

Because I'm not trying to sell you a $20,000 subscription. The data is public, the hosting is cheap, and I had time on break to make it.

🛠️

Why I built it

It honestly blew my mind there wasn't already an automated system to parse this instantly. We shouldn't have to manually hunt for information that is digitally available.

A Force Multiplier

I don't want this bot to replace the Legislative Assistant. It's here to keep you from drowning.

Reading a bill and understanding its political impacts are different things. AI is great at reading 800 pages in 30 seconds. This tool gives you time to focus on strategy.

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Automated Policy Briefs

I’ve prompted the model to look for specific "staffer" concerns: effective dates, appropriations triggers, and procedural rules.

Crucially, it also generates a Verification Guide with specific page numbers for every claim. Never trust what AI or someone else tells you about a bill before telling your boss about it—verify it.

How It Works

Hover over a step to see the architecture

1

Monitor

Dual-source polling every 60s.

Technical Specs

  • Polls docs.house.gov (XML) and majorityleader.gov (HTML) simultaneously[cite: 14].
  • Uses Redis to calculate cryptographic hashes of the schedule, allowing detection of minute changes compared to the previous state[cite: 31].
2

Analyze

Gap analysis & Parsing.

Technical Specs

  • Performs Gap Analysis between Leader's schedule and Clerk's feed to flag "Advance Notice" items[cite: 15].
  • Parses "Added" timestamps to force new items to the top[cite: 17].
  • Drills down into sub-tables to find hidden committee reports[cite: 21].
3

Deliver

Alerts, IDs & Sync.

Technical Specs

  • Generates stable Database IDs for deep-linking[cite: 26].
  • Broadcasts via AWS SES with a custom rate limiter (~13.8 emails/sec) to avoid throttling[cite: 32].
  • Upserts final state to Supabase[cite: 28].

— Zachary Florman

zach@thecapitolwire.com