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 [...]

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’ characterization of [...]

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: [...]

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, and [...]

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 anti-gay discrimination. [...]

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 [...]

Number of days since Rep. Tammy Baldwin introduced H.Res. 417, a bill declaring “that President Barack Obama should immediately work to reverse damaging and illegal actions taken by the Bush/Cheney Administration and collaborate with Congress to proactively prevent any further abuses of executive branch power”: 140 Number of bill cosponsors: 0 Action taken on H.Res. [...]

As part of our ongoing series of legislative reports, we at That’s My Congress regularly update our LGBT Equality Caucus scorecard to reflect the performance of members of the LGBT Equality Caucus in supporting bills in the caucus’ own slate. As you might expect for a set of representatives choosing to affiliate themselves with the [...]