Real Politic

Most people learn how American government works from headlines and short clips built to provoke a reaction, not to explain a system. My goal for Real Politic is to put the actual mechanics (the statutes, the bills, the money, the votes) in one place, laid out plainly enough that understanding them doesn't require panic or picking a side. If people can see the information themselves, they can draw their own conclusions instead of borrowing someone else's.

There's a more specific hope behind it, too. South Carolina, like a lot of states, has real gaps in public access to legal information: people who need to understand a law or a vote often have no easy way to find it. If this ever gets real traction, I'd like to think something built this way (clear, sourced, and taking no side) could be worth the state legislature's attention someday, or at least prove that the model works.

It's also meant to show what AI can responsibly do in this space: not replace legal judgment or generate a slant, but do the unglamorous work of finding, checking, and organizing primary sources at a scale one law student couldn't manage alone, under direction, with citations, and openly disclosed. The rest of this page covers exactly how that works.

Real Politic is built and maintained using Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic. I (a law student) directed every part of it: what to build, which sources to trust, how to frame it, and what to cut, and Claude did the research, writing, and coding under that direction. Nothing here is Claude's own opinion or a Claude-generated take on the law; it's AI-assisted research, checked against the actual primary sources cited throughout the page.

• Research

  Claude searches and reads primary sources directly: the U.S. Code, Congress.gov, agency sites like the FEC, court opinions, and reporting from outlets like OpenSecrets, rather than relying on its own training knowledge for anything time-sensitive. Every citation on this site is meant to be independently checkable; if you find one that doesn't check out, that's a bug, not a feature, and I'd want to know about it.

• Drafting

  The summaries, statute descriptions, and profiles are written by Claude from that research, then reviewed by me before publishing. I set the tone (neutral, no editorializing) and the structure (search, filter, citation-first).

• Quality controls & human oversight

  Before anything is published, Claude runs its own checks: code syntax, a full click-through of every tab, and screenshots in both light and dark mode to confirm the page renders correctly, and I review the content and sourcing before it goes live. That said, there is no independent human fact-checker combing every line beyond my own spot review, and I can't guarantee 100% accuracy. Always check the underlying source before relying on anything here.

• The weekly update

  Since September 2026, an automated Claude process re-checks the tracked bills, votes, and FEC status every week and republishes the site with anything that's changed, shown on the Updates tab either way, including weeks with no changes. That tab always reflects just the most recent version, not the site's full history; that process runs with the same instruction the rest of the site follows: verify before publishing, and never guess at a status.

Treat this site as a well-sourced starting point, not a final authority. AI-assisted research is faster and can cover more ground than one person alone, but it can still make mistakes: a misread statute, a stale status, an update the weekly check missed. Despite the quality controls and human review described above, I cannot guarantee the content is 100% accurate, so always check the cited source for yourself before relying on it. This is not legal advice, and nothing here should substitute for reading the actual statute, bill, or opinion yourself, or for talking to a licensed attorney about your specific situation. Every tab links back to its primary sources for exactly this reason.

Real Politic does not collect any personal information from visitors. There are no accounts and nothing built into this site's own code to track you. The site is hosted on Cloudflare, with Cloudflare also managing its DNS. Like any host, Cloudflare's network automatically logs standard request data (things like IP address and request metadata) to run and secure the site; that logging happens at Cloudflare's infrastructure level, not in this site's own code, and we have not added Cloudflare's optional visitor-analytics product on top of it. See Cloudflare's own privacy policy for the specifics of what they collect and retain.

This site does, however, link out constantly to official government sources and other third-party sites — uscode.house.gov, scstatehouse.gov, FEC.gov, Congress.gov, OpenSecrets, and dozens of others catalogued on the Sources tab — because getting you to the primary source is the point of the site. Once you click through, you're on that site, not this one, and Real Politic has no visibility into and no control over what any of those sources collect, log, or do with your visit. We cannot promise that the government agencies, news outlets, or other organizations this site links to don't collect information about you; that's between you and them, and it's worth checking a source's own privacy practices yourself before you click through if that matters to you.

If that ever changes on this site itself — for example, if a future feature like a newsletter signup needs to collect something — this policy will be updated to say plainly what's collected and why before that feature goes live.

If you find a citation that doesn't check out, a stale status, or anything else on this site that looks wrong, I'd want to know about it: commoncoded@gmail.com. This inbox is checked by the person who maintains the site.