Include Senior vs Junior seat for senators about congress-legislators

[JoshData]

Oh and despite my initial reaction I'd love to have it also.

It's stateRank here:
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS_MEMBER/cvc_member_data.xml

In addition, I'd like us to think about a generic way to handle rank. Imagine that we assign numbers consecutively from the 1st Congress to each term (in a smart way), so that at any given point in time you could compute the rank of all Members of Congress by sorting them by this rank value. It would be interesting to then see if it lines up with e.g. http://www.rollcall.com/politics/houseseniority.html

Junior/senior should be computable by comparing the ranks of the two senators. Though I'd be OK with storing that separately in the DB anyway, especially in case our algorithm doesn't match the senate's algorithm.

[dwillis]

We should definitely have it for senators, but there's (always) a catch; junior/senior status can and does switch. If Kerry is confirmed as Secy of State, Elizabeth Warren becomes the senior senator from Massachusetts. Brian Schatz was junior senator from HI when he was sworn in after Christmas, but by virtue of that he's now senior senator. If all we care about is the "final" status of senators in a Congress, then it's easier.

In terms of House seniority, it's also easier if we pick an approach that can account for people leaving the House and returning later.

[JoshData]

Seniority resets, right? (if people leave and return)

[dwillis]

In my experience, seniority is what leadership says it is. Some people, like Lautenberg, demanded that his seniority be restored as a condition of running again. So it should reset, but doesn't always.

[GPHemsley]

According to Wikipedia, seniority is determined by the following factors (in order):

1. Length of continuous service
2. Former U.S. senator
3. Former U.S. representative
4. Former president
5. Former vice president
6. Former Cabinet member
7. Former state governor
8. Population of state based on the most recent census when the senator took office
9. Alphabetical by last name (in case two senators came from the same state on the same day and have identical credentials)

According to that article, Lautenberg has not actually received his previous seniority (because that wouldn't comply with these criteria) and is listed at 35th.

[konklone]

That reference in Wikipedia is to an unlinked Hill article, but it might have been early. This Hill article from 2006 says he got a post he otherwise wouldn't have gotten, as does this one from 2010.

Because of this, if we were to list rankings, I'd much rather list them from an official source if possible. The House provides such a list (PDF), but I think with the Senate it's limited to the "official algorithm" + "undocumented leadership fudging".

Josh, that XML is awesome. Is it from the Capitol Visitors Center?? What page is it linked from?

[JoshData]

It's from the Senate: http://www.senate.gov/general/common/generic/XML_Availability.htm. It's one of the recently improved files. (But stateRank might have been there for a while.)

In light of the fudging, nevermind my idea.

[konklone]

Just "assigned" myself to the issues I'm planning on doing. A feature I haven't really used before, but helpful purely for my own reference in which of the growing number of issues I'm on point on. :)

[konklone]

In the middle of tackling this now.

[konklone]

Done - just used the source above to get both state_rank (on individual terms, set to "junior" or "senior"), and their LIS ID (which we were only missing for freshmen senators). Merged cleanly with Josh's manual update.

[konklone]

Oh, and to clarify - this is done in the same senate_contacts.py script, no new script was added.