The habit of voting along with the Republican Party has not made Brad Ellsworth a more successful member of Congress.

The beginning of a new month marks a good time to look back at the old. And so, with an update of our LGBT Equality Caucus Report, let’s consider what members of one of the largest caucuses on Capitol Hill were up to in January of 2010.
In the month of January, 3 new bills [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

In March of 2009, we reviewed the congressional activity of the-members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The Congressional Progressive Caucus is a coalition of liberals in the House of Representatives, one that has been characterized by the right wing as relentless in their pursuit of Red Army extremism. We found that, despite conservatives’ [...]

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 [...]

Whenever a Democratic member of Congress is running for election, the most common line of attack by Republicans is to label that Representative or Senator as a “hardcore liberal,” or “one of the most liberal members of Congress.” In 2004, Senator John Kerry was unsurprisingly labeled as the “most liberal Senator” by the RNC, [...]

Let’s put the news that Alabama Representative Parker Griffith has switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in its proper context: that of his policy behavior in the House of Representatives. In his consequential voting and cosponsorship behavior, it’s clear that Parker Griffith switched over to the Republican Party long ago.
To his [...]

In the immediate wake of the National Equality March, some momentum for equal rights legislation was apparent. But that momentum seems to have come crashing to a halt. Senator Carl Levin had promised in October to hold a hearing on reform to the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell law, a law that codifies military [...]