One of the frustrations I’ve had in keeping tabs on what my Congress-critters were doing was that I was pretty much dependant on news outlets to keep me abreast of the action in Washington.  For one thing I didn’t know anyone who had the time to wade through all the information unless their job pays them to do so.  For another, until the advent of the web you had to subscribe to the Federal Register to access all of the info, and even after the web came along it was a tedious process to go and browse the online information.

Now thanks to a project called OpenCongress you can subscribe to RSS feeds dedicated to any Representative or Senator and have their every action sent to you as it’s updated.  I just added the feed for Virginia Foxx to my Netvibes page and now I can see how she’s been voting recently, and in the future I’ll be able to see her votes as soon as they happen.  Even better, OpenCongress has pages that pull together information, including descriptions of the bills, articles about the bills and other data on each bill in one easy to read page.  So here’s one of the recent feeds for Madame Foxx:

Rep. Virginia Foxx [R, NC-5] voted ‘Nay’ on the question: On Passage: H R 1362 Accountability in Contracting Act regarding H.R.1362 Accountability in Contracting Act

If you click on the link to the Act you can read all about it which makes it easy to see how my representative voted and to determine if I agree with her.  Since I think she’s a dingbat I doubt I’ll agree with her much, but at least with this tool I’ll be able to make my judgements based as much on her votes as for her less than appealing public appearances.