Our Approach to Sourcing and Trust

Members of Congress, bills, and committees come from the official Congress.gov API. Roll call votes come from the chambers themselves — the Office of the Clerk of the House (via the Congress.gov API) and the Senate's own published vote records — including how every individual member voted. News headlines come from public RSS feeds, linked back to the original reporting. Hearings, official statements, and cross-branch activity aren't wired to a live, fabrication-free source yet, so those sections are empty rather than invented — see the banner at the top of every page for when this was last refreshed. The data-access layer (src/lib/store.js) is the only place pages read data from, so swapping in Congress.gov, House.gov, Senate.gov, WhiteHouse.gov, SupremeCourt.gov, federal agency feeds, and news/RSS APIs means rewriting the service layer, not the app. Real news stories never get an auto-generated "What We Know / What's Disputed / What Both Sides Are Saying" write-up — that takes a human editor's judgment, and inventing it would be exactly the kind of fabrication this page rules out.

These sections are extracted, never written. Nothing in them is composed, summarized, paraphrased, or characterized by The Record or by any AI.

What Both Sides Are Saying is built only from passages that were already inside quotation marks in the original reporting and already attributed there to a named speaker. The words are copied character for character, credited to the speaker the article itself named, and linked back to that article so you can check them in context. Where the speaker is a sitting member of Congress, their party comes from the official member record — which is what decides the column a quote appears in. Where we can't confidently identify the speaker, the quote still appears, just without a party or a profile link. Anything ambiguous is dropped rather than guessed at: a quote with no clear speaker never runs.

What We Know is not our summary of a story. It is the official action history of whatever legislation the story formally cites, copied word for word from Congress.gov, with a link to that record. Only formal citations ("H.R. 1234") are followed — a story that merely describes a bill in prose is never linked to one, because picking which bill was meant is a judgment call.

The trade-off is deliberate: this approach under-fills rather than over-fills. Plenty of stories will show nothing here at all, and that's the intended failure mode. A thinner page costs you a little context; putting words in someone's mouth would cost the thing this whole app is for.

Elected officials aren't the only people shaping how a story lands, and most commentary gets read one side at a time. The Voices page pulls what commentators across the spectrum are publishing right now — from their own public YouTube, podcast, and newsletter feeds — and puts it side by side.

Each item is the title, date, and description the commentator's own feed published, plus a link to the thing itself. The Record does not transcribe, summarize, rate, rank, or fact-check any of it. The left/right/independent grouping is a shelving label, not a score: it reflects how each person self-describes or is routinely described, and exists only so you can read across the aisle instead of down one side of it.

X, TikTok, and Instagram are linked but not pulled from. None of them offers a free public feed and all three block automated readers, so filling that space would mean scraping guesses or inventing posts. Those profiles link out instead.