Contacting Congress
Researching your Members of Congress
A good start to doing successful advocacy work is to research your representatives record on your issue before talking to them. It is not always an easy task to find reliable information on political candidates. Here are several very good sources that we found make researching members of Congress much easier. Some of these are also excellent resources for researching potential congressional candidates.
Thomas
The most comprehensive website with voting records, legislative sponsorship
records, text of congressional debates and so forth is maintained by the
Library of Congress - it's called Thomas (after Thomas Jefferson). Though
it's a bit tricky to maneuver at first, it's worth the time. http://thomas.loc.gov
LAWG Scorecard
Don't forget to use the LAWG scorecard, which ranks every member of Congress
on their voting records on key Latin American issues. The scorecard is
issued every year, and we have them on the web going back to 2000.
Project Vote Smart
One source is Project Vote Smart, which contains a wealth of information
on elected officials at various levels of government as well as information
to help citizens track what's going on in Congress. www.vote-smart.org.
Open Secrets
The Center for Responsive Politics also maintains a website at www.opensecrets.org on financial
information for elected officials and those currently running for office.
The site includes a list of Presidential candidates, as well as detailed
breakdowns of financial contributions to elected officials, Political
Action Committees, and more very useful information.
