Retrieve and Process Congressional Record Speeches

Queries the Congressional Record collection for a given session and date range, retrieves speech text and associated metadata from granules, and processes the information into a structured tibble. Supports limiting the number of speeches collected.

Usage

get_congressional_records(
  API_KEY,
  max_results = NULL,
  date_from = NULL,
  date_to = NULL,
  congress_session = 117
)

Arguments

API_KEY

Character string. Your API key for accessing the govinfo API.

max_results

Integer (optional). Maximum number of speeches to retrieve. If `NULL`, retrieves all available speeches.

date_from

Character string (optional). Start date (YYYY-MM-DD) for filtering records. If `NULL`, determined by session.

date_to

Character string (optional). End date (YYYY-MM-DD) for filtering records. If `NULL`, determined by session.

congress_session

Integer. Congressional session number (default is 117).

Value

A tibble where each row corresponds to an extracted speech, including columns for URL, date, title, speaker, and speech text.

Examples

if (nzchar(Sys.getenv("GOVINFO_API_KEY"))) {
  # Retrieve your govinfo API key from environment
  api_key <- Sys.getenv("GOVINFO_API_KEY")

  # Retrieve Congressional Record speeches from the 117th Congress (2021-2023)
  speeches <- get_congressional_records(
    API_KEY = api_key,
    max_results = 5,
    congress_session = 117
  )
  head(speeches)
}