Now that they’ve been sworn in, all members of the 112th Congress are now available in our Congress API.

All members are now added along with their ids on other sites (Project Vote Smart/FEC/bioguide/etc.) but we’re currently (as of 1/5/2011) working on getting some of the contact information as house.gov and senate.gov have just updated. We’ll be working on these today and tomorrow and expect that all contact information will be available today and social media accounts will be up to date within a week.

A few small changes

We’re taking the opportunity to make a few small changes.

As of today we’ve officially deprecated the email and eventful_id fields. Both of these fields will remain in responses, but are set to be empty strings going forward. We will likely remove these fields in the future after some notice.

The email field has been blank for all but about a dozen members for some time, and several of them have announced on their websites that they are disabling their email account unfortunately (it seems that the email addresses get flooded with non-constituent communication, which is why they prefer the webform approach).

We have also added a ‘chamber’ field that will be ‘house’ for Reps/Delegates/Resident Commissioners and ‘senate’ for Senators. This is a convenience for those that do not wish to make the distinction between the various types of House members.