About
About this project.
What this is
Project Curia is a long-form essay about American democracy, together with tools for looking up where your own senators and representative stand. Two tools sit alongside the essay. Reforms tracks seven specific changes most Americans say they want. Issues is broader, and shows where members stand on the issues Americans care about most, starting with health care.
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, and 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 site does not tell anyone how to vote. It shows the record. Readers draw their own conclusions about who is moving these reforms and who is not.
The reforms
The seven reforms are the heart of the essay. Every member of Congress carries one of three labels on each reform. Those labels are Supports, Opposes, and Unknown, and they are drawn from the public record of what a member has signed onto, not from a floor vote. The Ranking page sorts all 535 members by how many of the seven they support.
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.
Opposes
Not yet in use on the reforms. Marking someone as opposing would require a floor vote against the bill, a cosponsorship of a competing weaker version, or a documented public statement. The reforms rarely reach a floor vote, so for now their scoring stays with cosponsorship. The Issues section, below, does use floor votes where they exist.
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. When a reform has both a House and a Senate version, cosponsoring either one counts as full support.
What the reform scoring misses
Cosponsorship is a high bar. Many members will vote for a reform at floor stage without ever publicly signing on. Several reforms also have bills carried almost entirely by one party, which makes the headline percentage a measure of cosponsorship on those specific bills, not of underlying agreement. A 0% figure for one party often means it has not cosponsored this vehicle, not that it opposes the reform. A Republican who would vote for the Democracy For All Amendment if it reached the floor, but has not signed on, shows as Unknown.
The issues
The Issues section starts from what the public says matters, then follows it to the bills before Congress. Each issue shows a short, curated set of measures, and unlike the reforms it leans on the actual voting record where one exists.
How the bills are chosen
We pick the bills by a plain rule. First, we include every bill on the issue that actually did something, meaning it got a floor vote, passed a chamber, or became law. That part is not a judgment call. Second, we round out the set so both parties' main approaches are on the page and the real range of positions is visible, from market and consumer ideas to subsidies, price controls, and single-payer. To make sure nothing significant slips through, a sweep reads every bill in the Congress and flags any that reached the floor but are not yet shown.
How a member's position is shown
Each measure is tracked across its House and Senate versions, because a senator cannot cosponsor a House bill and a representative cannot cosponsor a Senate one. Where a bill got a recorded floor vote, we show how each member voted. Where it did not, we fall back to cosponsorship. A member is judged only on the version their own chamber could act on, so a senator is never shown as declining a House-only bill. For each measure we also show how much of each party, in each chamber, got behind it, so you can see where a member lands relative to their own side.
A bill's place here is not an endorsement. Each one marks a distinct position, and every claim links back to the record on congress.gov.
Data sources
Members of Congress come from unitedstates/congress-legislators, a community-maintained roster used by the Library of Congress. Bills, sponsors, cosponsors, and CRS summaries come from api.congress.gov, the Library of Congress API. Discharge-petition signers come from clerk.house.gov.
House roll-call votes come from the Clerk of the House. Senate roll-call votes come from the Senate's public records, matched to members through the congress-legislators roster. To make sure no significant bill is missed, a sweep reads the full bill list from the GPO's bulk data.
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. 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 district.