| Actually, you wouldn't.
This is the US code, not the legislative info :) I actually tried to create this once (with a team behind me, in fact) with what's available or possible with the legislative info. THOMAS theoretically published in XML, but it's missing a lot of info. Not only is this info not published, it's not even stored.
They still are literally passing bills around to each other in some cases. You'd have to sit in on committee markup hearings, etc. Even the small amount that is published from markups or whatever doesn't tell you who did it, only that it was done. Some committees were willing to give more info. None were willing to essentially publish the in-flight staff attorney or other versions that would tell you for real who changed something. Remember also that hg/git diff does not display what really happened. It is displaying "how can i produce version B from version A using some minimal or near-minimal set of changes", converted to a line (or sub-line) based set of changes. This does not tell you history, only one possible set of changes. THOMAS does publish some in-flight versions of bills, but again, it's not really enough to do what you really want to do. I can tell you a bill changed between introduction and markup, and was different again when it got back to the floor. I can even, in some cases, tell you what was amended/deleted.
I can't tell you who did it. (Well, i can tell you with some percentage accuracy, because we built a machine learning model, but ..) |
In most Parliamentary democracies you can only propose amendments from one of the two chambers, so any amendment can always be traced to the Parliamentarian who moved it.