Detect when bill is sitting in a committee

[curleypg]

Description

Most bills, before they are voted by the general assembly, are vetted and researched thoroughly by organized committees whose members are supposed to have expertise or interest a specific domain. It serves as a mechanism of QA for bills and distributes the workload evenly since hundreds of bills are proposed each session.

Detect and scrape if a bill is currently in committee. You will find this information in the History table. You will need to understand the bill status abbreviations in order to properly determine when a bill enters and exits a committee (or is never referred to one). You can find the list of abbreviations on the NCGA website: https://www.ncleg.net/Legislation/abbreviations.html

We want to record the last known status of the bill. It is possible that a bill never enters committee. It is possible that bill enters a committee and never exits. It is possible that a bill enters and exits the same committee multiple times.

Deliverables

• Add a new field to Bill item. Call it in_committee.
• Update the bills spider to determine if the bill is currently in committee or not. This will be a Boolean field.
• Update the bills spider unit test (tests/TestBills.py) to check that the in_committee value is correct for the unit tests.

Help!

• Start simple and build your logic. Look at a few sample bills and determine there is a general pattern of common keywords.
• Consider that the default History table is in chronological descending order. Also consider that a bill's life begins not in committee and there must be an action to refer it to one.