About the project
About Bill Commons
Bill Commons is a free, public, nonpartisan search engine for state legislation across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It exists because finding out what your state legislature is actually doing — which bills are moving, who sponsored them, how they voted, what changed between drafts — is harder than it should be, and often locked behind inconsistent or paywalled state systems.
The project provides a public website, a free REST API (60 requests/minute, no key required for the anonymous tier), and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server so AI assistants can search and cite legislation directly and honestly — with real source links, freshness timestamps, and explicit warnings when coverage for a jurisdiction is still thin.
Open source
All original Bill Commons code is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Third-party data licenses and attribution notices (including Open States’ public-domain data and, where used, LegiScan’s CC BY 4.0 data) are preserved in full — see methodology. No GPL-licensed scraper code is vendored into this repository.
Repository: github.com/GDACS-droid/billcommons (placeholder — repo publishing in progress)
Contact
For questions, corrections, or to report a data issue, see the contribution and security policies in the repository (CONTRIBUTING.md, SECURITY.md).