cicada.guide plugin docs
Tools and data
The plugin connects to the hosted cicada.guide MCP server. Every tool reads legislative data, and the server accepts anonymous callers.
Tools
Claude picks the tools for you, so this list is for reference. The set grows as tools are added.
Bills
search_bills
Search bills by number, topic, subject, status, sponsor, session, or state. Hosts that support MCP Apps also show the results as a card.
get_bill
Full record for one bill.
get_bill_dossier
Bill card data: resolved sponsors, documents, and the first page of floor votes.
show_bill
Show a bill as a card with floor votes, sponsors, documents, and an assistant-written headline and summary.
get_latest_bill_document
Newest attached document, with its text.
get_documents
All documents attached to a bill.
read_pdf_bytes
Stream a large legislative PDF in chunks.
Legislators
search_people
Find legislators by name or party, or batch-resolve up to 100 ids.
get_person
Name, party, and contact details for one legislator.
show_person_record
Show a legislator's record: seat, voting history with session, vote, and subject filters, and sponsored bills.
show_official
Show a legislator's contact card: photo, seat, contact options, district map, and recent votes.
Votes
get_rollcalls
Floor-vote summaries for a bill.
get_rollcall_breakdown
One roll call's counts, per-party tally, and every member's name, party, and vote.
get_votes
Individual positions on a roll call.
get_person_votes
One legislator's voting history, with bill context joined.
Jurisdictions and sessions
list_states
Available jurisdictions.
list_sessions
Legislative sessions within a jurisdiction.
Data model
A Division holds many Sessions, and a Session holds many Bills. A Bill accumulates Documents as it is amended, and may be put to zero or more Rollcalls. Each Rollcall contains one Vote per legislator who was recorded.
Division
The top-level jurisdiction: the 50 states and the District of Columbia. "State" is the everyday word; Division is the modeled term because DC is not a state. Coverage varies by state and session.
Session
A bounded sitting of a Division's legislature. A Bill belongs to exactly one Session.
Bill
One piece of proposed legislation within one Session.
Document
A text artifact attached to a Bill: introduced, engrossed, an amendment. "The bill text" means the most recent Document.
Rollcall
A single recorded floor vote on a Bill, with aggregate yea, nay, absent, and not-voting counts. The dataset does not record whether the measure carried.
Vote
One legislator's individual position within a Rollcall.
Two distinctions that matter
- A Rollcall is not a Vote. The aggregate floor result is a Rollcall; only an individual legislator's recorded position is a Vote.
- A bill number alone never identifies legislation. It is unique only within its state and session, and the same number recurs across states and years.
Limits
- Rate limit. Anonymous callers get 60 calls a minute, counted per IP address. Past that, a call fails with "Rate limit exceeded. Retry in 60 seconds."
- Paging. List results come in pages fitted under 25,000 characters, and long bill text comes in parts. Claude pages on from where it stopped.
- Votes are always narrowed. Individual votes are retrieved for a roll call, a bill, or a person, never surveyed in bulk.
Using another MCP host
The endpoint is a standard Streamable HTTP MCP server. Any host that supports remote MCP servers can connect to it directly, with no credentials:
https://public.cicada.guide/mcp-anthropic
Without the plugin, the host gets only the raw tools, not the skills and agents that tell Claude how to use them.
