About
About this project.
What this is
Project Curia is a long-form essay about American democracy together with a tool for looking up where your senators and representative stand on seven reforms most Americans say they want. The essay makes the argument; the tool shows you where your own representatives land on it.
The paper begins with a question: putting aside partisanship, what would we like our politics to be? It then takes three claims democracies make about themselves: that every citizen has an equal political voice, that voters choose their representatives, that representatives are beholden to the people who elected them. It asks, in seven specific cases, whether the United States is delivering on those claims. On each of the seven, the country has known what it wants for decades, by majorities of 65 to 86 percent. Congress has not acted.
The reforms are not partisan. Most have legislation written with sponsors from both parties. What blocks them is coordination. About 175,000 voters choosing differently in 2024 would have flipped every House race decided by less than five points. The people who want these reforms have not yet acted together at the ballot box on what they share rather than separately on what divides them.
The site does not tell anyone how to vote. It shows the record: sponsorships, cosponsorships, discharge-petition signatures, prior-Congress positions. Readers draw their own conclusions about who is moving these reforms and who is not.
How members get scored
Every member of Congress carries one of three labels on every reform. Those labels are Supports, Opposes, and Unknown.
Supports
A member is labeled Supports under any of three conditions. The first is that they sponsor or cosponsor one of the bills currently carrying the reform in the 119th Congress. The second is that they have signed a discharge petition trying to force one of those bills onto the floor over committee objection. The third is that they cosponsored a prior version of the same reform in a previous Congress and are still serving today. A senator who cosponsored the For the People Act in the 117th Congress and is still in office falls in that last category.
Cosponsor evidence comes from api.congress.gov. Discharge petition signers come from clerk.house.gov, which only publishes them as HTML, so the site scrapes the page.
Opposes
Not yet in use. Marking someone as opposing would require a floor vote against the bill, a cosponsorship of a competing weaker version, or a documented public statement. Roll-call vote integration is next on the roadmap.
Unknown
A member with no public cosponsorship of the listed bills and no discharge petition signature lands here. They may support or oppose the reform privately. There is no documented signal either way. Most members of Congress never cosponsor most bills they would actually vote for, so Unknown is the most common label rather than a damning one.
Which bills count
A bill is counted toward a reform only if it does what the reform's paper section calls for. Several bills in the 119th Congress touch the same problem areas without meeting the literal criterion: a stock-trading bill that only requires disclosure rather than divestment, a foreign-lobbying bill that covers only five adversary nations rather than all foreign governments, a redistricting bill that adds public-comment requirements without mandating an independent commission. Those bills appear on each reform page under Related bills not counted, with a one-line reason each. Their cosponsors are not credited toward the reform.
Where the 119th Congress has no bill that meets the reform's criterion at all, the reform page says so plainly. Member scoring on that reform draws on cosponsorship of prior-Congress bills that did match. Foreign-lobbying is in this position today: the two 119th bills sometimes labeled as foreign-lobbying reforms cover only a slice of the problem. The vehicles the paper endorses, the Congressional and Executive Foreign Lobbying Ban Act and the Fighting Foreign Influence Act, are both 117th Congress bills awaiting reintroduction.
What the scoring misses
Cosponsorship is a high bar. Many members will vote for a reform at floor stage without ever publicly signing on. The site cannot mark anyone as Opposes today because no floor-vote data is currently wired in.
Several reforms have bills carried almost entirely by one party. That makes the headline percentage a measure of cosponsorship on those specific bills, not a measure of underlying agreement with the reform. A 0% figure for one party often means “has not cosponsored this vehicle,” not “opposes the reform.” A Republican who would vote for the Democracy For All Amendment if it reached the floor but has not signed on as a cosponsor will show as Unknown.
When a reform has both a House version and a Senate version, cosponsoring either one counts as full support. The site does not require both.
Data sources
Members of Congress come from unitedstates/congress-legislators, a community-maintained roster used by the Library of Congress. Bill cosponsors, sponsors, and CRS summaries come from api.congress.gov, the Library of Congress API.
Member portraits come from unitedstates/images, a public-domain headshot collection. New members sometimes have no portrait posted yet, so the site falls back to a generic silhouette in those cases.
Map geometry uses the U.S. Census Bureau 2024 Cartographic Boundary Files for congressional districts and us-atlas for state outlines. ZIP code lookup runs through Geocodio, which handles the case where a single ZIP code touches more than one congressional district.