Summary

Goes past bill metadata into the text of the bill itself, indexed locally so you can find the clause rather than the document.

Most congressional data tools hand back the same API records everyone else has; the distinctive part here is the local full-text index, which turns "where in the NDAA is the icebreaker funding" into a section id you can retrieve. It also flags whether a hit lands in operative or quoted text — the difference between what a bill enacts and the language it strikes, which is exactly where a fast reading goes wrong.

What it is

A local server over the free Congress.gov and GovInfo APIs, grouped into seven toolsets, with full bill text fetched and indexed on your own machine.

What you get

Bills end to end: search, details, actions, text, amendments, cosponsors and subjects, with natural-language identifiers like HR 1234 accepted
Members located the way people ask for them — by name, by state, by district, by Congress — plus their sponsored and cosponsored legislation
Committees browsed or searched, with the bills referred to them, their reports, communications and nominations
House and Senate votes, roll calls and presidential nominations
The Congressional Record, hearings, committee prints and CRS reports
Enacted public and private laws for a Congress, and treaties with their actions, committees and text alongside bill summaries
Full bill text you can actually search: the bill XML is parsed locally into a per-version index, so you get ranked, addressable sections with snippets instead of multi-megabyte XML
A navigation tree for a bill and retrieval of any section by id, with a byte cap on what comes back
Search results that mark whether a match sits in operative, quoted or header text, so amendatory language that a bill is removing is not mistaken for what it enacts

Requirements

A free Congress.gov API key set as CONGRESS_API_KEY — the same key covers GovInfo, so full bill text needs no second key. Published on PyPI as congressmcp and normally launched with uvx over stdio; a streamable-http transport is available for URL-based clients such as ChatGPT and Claude.ai, and it has no authentication of its own, so anything beyond localhost belongs behind a proxy, tunnel or VPN. The bill-text index is written to a local cache capped at 500 MB by default and administered from the command line rather than through a tool.

Setup effort

One command plus a key — uvx congressmcp, then supply credentials