In February of 2009, second-term congressman Bruce Braley of Iowa announced the formation of a new Congressional Member Organization in the House of Representatives: the Populist Caucus. A year later, the Populist Caucus has grown from 23 to 30 members and has built a record through mission statements, advisory letters and a “Blueprint for Recovery” [...]

Yesterday we released our new report, “Call and Response,” which covers the extent of reciprocation in the House of Representatives in 2009. To measure reciprocation, we tabulated patterns of sponsorship and cosponsorship for the 4,412 substantive “H.R.” bills introduced to the House that year. A bill’s sponsor is the legislator whose office authors a bill [...]

Today That’s My Congress publishes “Call and Response,” a new report regarding the give and take of legislating in the U.S. Congress in 2009. For the report’s analysis, we tabulated patterns of sponsorship and cosponsorship for the 4,412 substantive “H.R.” bills introduced to the House that year. For each of the 435 Representatives in the [...]

If you’ve been following Rep. Michele Bachmann in the news, you’re not alone; the Minnesota Republican has a way of grabbing media attention by doing things like calling for the revival of the McCarthy Hearings or telling her followers to slit their wrists. But Bachmann is hardly the only active member of Congress out there: [...]

Who are the most intriguing members of Congress? One way to answer that question might be to look for the members of Congress most commonly mentioned in the newspapers or on TV, but that only tells us who journalists find to be compelling, either because of what those members of Congress do or perhaps because [...]

The following are the Top 10 Absentee Senators in the U.S. Senate during 2009: 1. Democrat Robert Byrd of West Virginia – absent for 159 of the 397 roll-call votes in the Senate during the year 2009 2. Democrat John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia – absent for 58 Senate roll-call votes 3. Republican [...]

In the first seven months of the 111th Congress, 251 organizations in the House of Representatives registered formally with the Committee on House Administration as Congressional Member Organizations. Known informally as CMOs or caucuses, these organizations serve various purposes — to bring together members of Congress to work on legislation together, to hold informal hearings [...]

On October 11, tens of thousands of Americans marched through the streets of Washington, DC demanding equal protection under law for gay and lesbian people and for same-sex couples. The National Equality March clearly succeeded in attracting media attention, as wire services and newspapers and television cameras recorded and reported on the event. But the [...]

We’re preparing for this busy season of legislative battle on Capitol Hill with a new redesign of That’s My Congress, aimed at making the scope of recent articles easy to browse quickly, so that you can get what you want.