How it works

The Curia grade

Each member of Congress with enough record to grade carries one letter, A through F. Members who are too new to grade or have no finance record do not receive a letter. It asks two things. Do they represent the people who elected them, and do they conduct themselves cleanly? Three things go into it, all from public records.

Trading also caps the letter. Fifty or more disclosed trades cannot go above a C, and one late filing under the STOCK Act cannot go above a B. Attendance appears on each member’s page but is not graded. Almost everyone in Congress votes almost all of the time, and the variation is mostly new babies, illness, and campaigns for other offices.

The letter is curved against all graded members and redrawn each morning, so a B places a member in the second band of members with grades.

Alignment is measured against each member’s own party’s voters: Democrats on what Democratic voters want, Republicans on what Republican voters want. So an A says a member represents the people who elected them. It does not say that two members holding the same letter cleared the same bar. Within a party the letters compare cleanly. Across parties they are looser than they look.

The grade page has the full method, the measures behind the alignment share, and what the letter cannot see.

The seven reforms

Seven specific changes that majorities of both parties’ voters have wanted for years: overturning Citizens United, disclosure of dark money, open primaries, an end to gerrymandering, a ban on congressional stock trading, a longer cool-off period before a member can lobby, and a stop to foreign lobbying.

These bills almost never reach a floor vote, so there is no roll call. What the record holds is cosponsorship, and that is what the site uses.

The catalog keeps all seven reform records visible. The public tally covers the six reforms with a current bill. A matching prior-Congress cosponsorship can count for one of those six, but the foreign-lobbying reform has no current vehicle and is not placed in the denominator.

So there is one recorded state: cosponsored. A member has either signed on to a bill or there is nothing either way. There is no opposes value, because signing registers a yes and nothing registers a no. Congress does not vote these bills down; it mostly does not vote on them.

A member counts as having cosponsored a reform in any of three ways:

• They sponsor or cosponsor a current bill that carries the reform.
• They signed a discharge petition to force one of those bills onto the floor over a committee’s objection.
• They cosponsored a prior version of the same reform in an earlier Congress and are still serving.

Where a reform has both a House and a Senate version, cosponsoring either one counts in full.

Which bills count

A bill counts toward a reform only if it does what the reform actually calls for. Several bills in the 119th Congress touch the same problem without meeting the criterion: a stock-trading bill that requires disclosure rather than divestment, a redistricting bill that adds public-comment requirements without mandating an independent commission. Those appear on each reform page as related bills, not counted, with a one-line reason for each. Their cosponsors are not credited.

One of the seven has no current bill to cosponsor: stopping foreign lobbying. Its prior-Congress cosponsorship record remains visible, but it is marked as historical and never counted in the six-reform tally as though a member had declined a live bill.

What cosponsorship misses

Signing on is a decision about one bill, not about the idea behind it. Members skip bills they agree with because the sponsor is a rival, because they are writing their own, or because nobody asked. No recorded position is the most common state on these seven, and it usually means little.

Issues

Issues uses the voting record. It follows six subjects down to the specific measures in front of Congress. Where a measure got a recorded floor vote, the page shows how each member voted. Where it did not, it falls back to cosponsorship.

How the measures are chosen

Every bill on the issue that did something is included: took a floor vote, passed a chamber, or became law. The set is then filled out so both parties’ main approaches appear on the page instead of one side’s. A sweep reads every bill in the Congress and flags anything that reached the floor and is missing.

Each measure is tracked across its House and Senate versions, and a member is judged only on the version their own chamber could act on. A senator cannot cosponsor a House bill, so no senator is shown turning one down. A bill appearing here is not an endorsement of it.

Bills

When Congress takes a vote that matters, we read the bill and write down in plain language what it does. Every claim in a decode ties back to a section of the bill text or to the recorded vote.

Decodes also flag the votes that were not one bill but several unrelated measures bundled together, because a single yes can hide what a member was voting for.

This began in July 2026 and was backfilled to the start of the 119th Congress in January 2025. New votes go up as they happen.

Trading

Members of Congress disclose their individual stock trades under the STOCK Act, and this lens shows what they reported buying and selling. A member who reported none is shown as trading nothing, not left blank.

Of 539 members, 294 have disclosed no trades at all, while the ten most active account for 50% of every transaction on the record.

A trade is flagged when it lands in an industry overseen by a committee the member sits on. That is an apparent conflict, not proof of one, and not an allegation of insider trading. In eleven of the twelve sectors tested, sitting on the relevant committee did not predict trading in that sector.

Members have forty-five days to report a trade, and the site shows when that window was missed. These are disclosures of transactions, not holdings: what a member reported doing, not what they own.

Financing

Where each member’s campaign money comes from, out of their FEC filings: small donors giving $200 or less, large individual donors, and political action committees.

A campaign funded by a handful of large donors and PACs answers to different people than one funded by thousands of small ones. Neither is hidden and neither is illegal.

None of it captures money that never passes through a campaign account. Outside spending routed through nonprofits, where nobody has to say who gave it, is absent from every finance number here.

Lobbying

Firms that lobby Congress file quarterly reports naming the bills they worked, and separate reports naming the members they gave money to. This lens joins the two: which firms named which bill, which committee that bill was referred to, and how the giving lines up against who sits on that committee.

A bill is only measured once enough firms named it and enough giving stands behind it; smaller bills are left out rather than shown as zero. The giving itself is never attached to one bill. Firms report what they gave over a filing period, not what a bill cost, so the site reports it as a concentration against a committee’s ordinary share of all lobbyist giving, never a price.

It is also not a total. A firm reaches a bill only by naming it in a filing’s free text, so a bill with no row has not been shown to be unlobbied. The page carries a second universe beside the join: what clients paid their lobbyists across a year, split by sector, so a reader can see who buys lobbying in the first place. What a client pays its lobbyists and what a firm gives to members are two separate disclosures, and the page never adds them together. The whole thing lives at Lobbying, both for the sitting Congress and for the completed 118th.

Travel

Members of Congress and their staff can travel on someone else’s money. The someone is a private organization, not a foreign government, and each trip is filed under the House and Senate gift rules, naming the sponsor, the traveler and where the trip went. This lens reads those filings: House gift travel filings and Senate travel reports, each trip placed in a Congress by the day it left.

A destination is a place, never the payer. No country on either map paid for anything, and nothing here may be read as saying a country flew anybody anywhere. A trip with several stops files a row for each of them, so a trip that touched two countries is counted under both and the country totals add to more than the number of trips.

Senate travel is filed on paper and read by machine, and a row whose destination could not be made out, or whose filed place no table could match, is left out of the maps rather than guessed at. Both numbers are printed on the page. The whole of it lives at Travel, for the sitting Congress and for the completed 118th, and each window states its own completeness rather than being set against the other.