Principle #3. Representatives are beholden to their constituents

A senator and a representative both hold seats they were given on the condition of acting on behalf of the people that put them there. The Constitution made the House popularly elected from the start, and the 17th Amendment did the same for the Senate in 1913, replacing selection by state legislatures with selection by voters. Madison's case for the design, made in Federalist 57, was that the aim of every constitution is "first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust." The precautions he named were short terms in the House, regular elections, and the prospect of going back to live under the laws one had a hand in writing.

This is the third premise of the American system. Voters choose members of Congress, and those members answer to the voters who chose them. Edmund Burke, in his 1774 speech to the electors of Bristol, made the case for a softer version of the principle. A representative owes his constituents his judgment, not his obedience, Burke argued. The Burkean trustee is still answerable to those he serves, but he is allowed to disagree with them on the way to serving them well.

Members of Congress vote against the wishes of their districts and states often enough that Burke's tradition gets cited in their defense. Take that defense at face value and the question becomes whose interests they are voting for instead. Four constituencies have a plausible claim today. Donors and organized interests pay for the campaigns. Primary voters decide whether the next nomination happens. Personal investment portfolios sit on the other side of the legislation members vote on. And after the seat is given up, an industry the member used to regulate is often waiting with a job. Each is worth taking seriously on its own.

Out of Stock

In 2011, the journalist Peter Schweizer published Throw Them All Out, a book documenting how members of Congress had been buying and selling stocks in industries their committees regulated. The underlying academic research found that senators' purchases beat the market by roughly twelve percentage points a year, and House members' by about six.¹ CBS News followed in November of that year with a 60 Minutes segment on the same practice, naming specific trades by specific members.²

Until then, members of Congress had not been clearly subject to insider trading law. Their access to nonpublic information through committee briefings and pending legislation was not treated as the kind of fiduciary relationship that triggered Section 10b of the Securities Exchange Act, and a bill to clarify that it should be, first introduced in 2006, had been reintroduced and stalled three times.

After the 60 Minutes segment aired, that bill picked up 84 House co-sponsors in five days. President Obama called for its passage in his 2012 State of the Union. It was signed into law in April of that year as the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, or STOCK Act.³

The STOCK Act did two things. It made explicit that members of Congress and their staff are subject to federal insider trading laws when they trade on nonpublic information acquired through their official duties, and it required disclosure of any individual trade above $1,000 within 45 days of execution. It did not ban members from owning or trading individual stocks. An amendment passed quietly in 2013 removed the requirement that disclosures be machine-readable in a searchable, sortable, downloadable database, the form in which they had been most useful to journalists and the public. What remained was the disclosure regime as it now exists. Members file periodic transaction reports listing the asset, the date, and a wide value bracket like "$1,001 to $15,000" or "$500,001 to $1,000,000." Late filings carry a $200 fine.⁴

Because the passage of the STOCK Act didn't prohibit trading, it continued. In February 2020, Senator Richard Burr, then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, sold between $628,000 and $1.7 million in stocks across 33 transactions on February 13. He had been receiving classified briefings on the coronavirus in his capacity as committee chair in late January and early February. A week after his sale, the Dow began a slide that wiped out roughly 30 percent of its value over the following month.⁵

The FBI seized Burr's phone, the SEC opened a parallel investigation, and the Justice Department closed the criminal case in January 2021 without filing charges. A 2020 affidavit from the FBI investigation, unsealed in 2022, estimated that Burr's February trades had produced more than $164,000 in profits and avoided $87,000 in losses. He served out his term and retired from the Senate in January 2023.⁶

Burr's case is the most documented but it is not unusual. Each year since the financial-tracking firm Unusual Whales began publishing annual analyses of congressional trading, dozens of members have outperformed the benchmark S&P 500.⁷ To make the comparison concrete, imagine three Americans putting $10,000 into the market at the start of 2021. The first follows the S&P 500. The second mirrors the aggregate trades of Republican members of Congress. The third does the same for Democrats.

Across the five years, Democrats and Republicans alike outperformed the market. Although the three moved roughly together in the first year, the gap opens in 2022, when the S&P fell roughly 18 percent and the average American with money in the market lost a fifth of it, while Congress, on the whole, finished the year roughly where it had started. From there it compounds. The Republican aggregate beat the index by about eighteen percent, and the Democratic aggregate beat it by thirty-two percent.

A defender of the practice might point to what Speaker Pelosi said in 2021, when she was asked whether members of Congress should be allowed to trade individual stocks. "We're a free-market economy," she replied. "They should be able to participate in that."⁸ Some members of Congress may be good investors; some may even have been lucky. The gap is not, on its own, evidence of anything illegal. The pattern that breaks the defense is what they are trading.

In September 2022, the New York Times published an investigation that mapped three years of congressional trades against committee assignments. The reporters, drawing on Periodic Transaction Reports filed under the STOCK Act, identified 97 members of Congress whose trades intersected with the work of the committees they served on. The investigation covered more than 3,700 such trades and split almost evenly along party lines, with 49 Democrats and 44 Republicans.⁹

A third of the members of the House Environment subcommittee traded oil-field services stocks. A quarter of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee bought or sold ExxonMobil or Chevron. Eight members of the Armed Services Committee traded defense or aerospace stocks while they were writing the budgets that determined how much those companies would earn from federal contracts. Representative Bob Gibbs, an Ohio Republican on the House Oversight Committee, bought shares of the pharmaceutical company AbbVie in 2020 and 2021, while his committee was investigating AbbVie and five rivals over high drug prices. The wife of Representative Alan Lowenthal sold Boeing shares one day before a committee on which he sat released damaging findings on Boeing's handling of its 737 Max jet. In 2025, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene purchased up to $300,000 in stocks hours before President Trump announced a pause on tariffs against most U.S. trading partners. The markets soared on the announcement.¹⁰

Whether any individual trade was legal is the wrong question. The trade may be legal. The information may be public. The vote may be consistent with the member's stated position. Whether the member is voting on behalf of constituents or on behalf of a portfolio is a question the system asks the member to answer for themselves, and is content with whichever answer they provide.

A 2025 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, conducted by researchers at the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego, ran a controlled experiment in which Americans were shown nonpartisan reports on congressional trading and then asked about their views of Congress. Participants who saw the trading data were significantly more likely to describe Congress as corrupt and less legitimate, and significantly less willing to comply with the laws Congress passed. The effect held across party lines. As Tage Rai, a co-author, put it, what damages public trust is not whether the trades are profitable or even illegal. It is the perception that lawmakers are using their power for personal gain. Even the attempt is enough.¹¹

Friends With Benefits

Campaign donors have a different kind of claim on a member of Congress than stocks do. Campaigns cost money, and the money has to come from somewhere. The pattern worth examining is what happens when a member's stated reason for a position is technically defensible but the underlying driver is a long-running financial relationship with the interests on the other side of the legislation.

Carried interest is one such seam. It is a provision in the tax code that lets private equity executives and hedge fund managers pay capital gains rates on their fee income, rather than the higher ordinary income rates that apply to wage earners. Three consecutive presidents, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, have called for its closure. It has survived all of them.¹²

In 2017, as Congress wrote the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the largest rewrite of the tax code in three decades, the carried-interest loophole was on the table. Trump had campaigned on closing it, calling hedge fund managers "getting away with murder."¹³ Gary Cohn, the chair of his National Economic Council, said publicly that the White House tried twenty-five times to get the provision removed and Congress refused.¹⁴ What Congress did instead was extend the holding period required for carried interest to qualify for capital gains treatment from one year to three years, a change that did not affect most private equity firms because they typically hold investments longer than three years anyway.¹⁵

The architect of the Senate's tax legislation was Mitch McConnell, then Senate Majority Leader. In 2014, Blackstone, the world's largest private equity firm, had spent $217,000 to help re-elect him. By the end of 2017, Blackstone employees had given another $212,000.¹⁶ Across Blackstone, Carlyle, and KKR combined, private equity money to GOP lawmakers in 2017 alone reached $1.31 million, more than three times what those same firms gave Democrats.¹⁷

In 2022, the carried-interest provision came up again, this time inside the Inflation Reduction Act. The proposed change would have closed it for an estimated $14 billion in revenue over a decade, money earmarked for climate and health spending.¹⁸ Kyrsten Sinema, the freshman Democrat from Arizona whose vote was decisive in the evenly divided Senate, refused to support the bill unless the carried-interest provision was removed. So, it was removed.¹⁹

Between 2018 and the August 2022 vote, Sinema received more than $2 million from the securities and investment industry, outraising the Senate Banking Committee's Democratic chair over the same period.²⁰ In the months leading up to the vote, executives across the private equity industry contributed more than $500,000 to her campaign.²¹ After the bill passed without the carried-interest provision, Lloyd Blankfein, the former chief executive of Goldman Sachs, posted on Twitter, "Hats off to the P/E lobby!"²²

The two outcomes were produced by different people, in different parties, in different years, but the structure of what happened was identical. A tax preference that three presidents had called for closing, that polled poorly across the political spectrum, that no constituency outside the industry's executive ranks defended on its merits, was kept in the tax code because the people writing the legislation were responsive to the people who funded their campaigns. Neither Kentucky nor Arizona is home to a meaningful private equity industry; both senators were defending an interest that had almost no presence among the people they were elected to represent.

Representatives are supposed to answer to the people they represent. What McConnell and Sinema showed is that they often answer to their donors instead. Donors aren't the only people a member of Congress has to keep happy. There's a second group with the power to end their career, and most of their actual voters aren't part of it.

Job Security

The most reliable predictor of whether a member of Congress will be in office next year is whether they are in office this year. House incumbents seeking reelection have won at rates above eighty-five percent in every cycle for sixty years and above ninety percent on average for the past decade.²³ In 2022, every single one of the twenty-eight senators who sought reelection won, the first time that had happened in the history of the chamber.²⁴ These are not the numbers of a workforce facing meaningful evaluation. In fact, they are the numbers of a workforce that has been substantially insulated from it.

The insulation has several layers. The first is geographic. After the redistricting work described earlier, most congressional districts are no longer competitive. The Cook Political Report rates only nine percent of House seats as competitive in 2026, meaning roughly nine in ten are decided before any voter casts a ballot in November.²⁵ The Senate is somewhat more contested by design, since statewide constituencies cannot be drawn around partisan lines the way House districts can, but the picture is broadly similar. Of the thirty-five Senate seats on the 2026 ballot, the Cook Political Report rates six as competitive.²⁶

The second layer is financial. Incumbents raise money on a different scale than the people running against them. In the 2022 cycle, the average House incumbent raised $2.8 million; the average challenger raised $308,000. The average Senate incumbent raised $29.7 million; the average Senate challenger raised $2.1 million.²⁷ Political action committees concentrate their giving with a discipline that reflects the underlying math. In 2022, eighty-six percent of all PAC contributions to congressional candidates went to incumbents.²⁸ Donors are paying attention to the same reelection statistics everyone else is, and they are placing their bets accordingly.

The third layer is the voters themselves. Americans used to split their tickets at meaningful rates. They would vote for one party for president and another for Congress, or pick a familiar incumbent regardless of national mood. That pattern has largely disappeared. Both parties have moved away from the political center since the 1970s, and the voters who turn out for each have sorted along with them. In the 2024 election, only sixteen of the 435 House districts split their ticket, voting for one party for president and the other for House.²⁹ When voters consistently pick the same party up and down the ballot, the partisan lean of a district becomes the dominant predictor of the outcome. A district that leans Republican by ten points used to be competitive in a strong Democratic year. Today it is not.

The same sorting has happened inside Congress. Political scientists track this with a measure called overlap, which counts the share of House members whose voting record places them between the two parties. A Republican is in the overlap zone if their voting pattern is more liberal than the most conservative Democrat. A Democrat is in the zone if their voting pattern is more conservative than the most liberal Republican. In other words, overlap measures whether there is anyone in the chamber whose votes give the other side a natural partner. In the early 1970s, more than half the House sat in that zone.³⁰ By the mid-1980s, after a collapse, it was around one in ten. By the mid-1990s it was under one percent. Since 2003, when the last two Republicans whose voting records crossed into Democratic territory left office, the overlap has been zero.³¹

The fourth layer is the one that matters most for the principle at hand. When a seat is safe in November because of the district lines, the money advantage, and the voters' own party loyalty, the only voters who can plausibly end a member's career are the ones who show up for the primary. A general election in a congressional district draws Republicans, Democrats, and independents. A primary draws only the voters of one party. That smaller group sits further from the political center than the district as a whole, and the candidates it favors do too. An incumbent in a safe district who answers to the primary voters is answering to a group of constituents further from the center than the district they were elected to represent. And they have no electoral reason to answer to anyone else.

The principle being tested here is that representatives are beholden to their constituents. The reality is that representatives are beholden to a much smaller and more partisan subset of their constituents, and only when those constituents are sufficiently aroused to vote in a primary. The other constituents, the ones whose preferences sit closer to the district's center, are an afterthought by the time November arrives.

Exit Interview

When a member of Congress leaves office, the most likely next job is one that lobbies the colleagues they left behind. This was not always true, and it is not how things work in comparable democracies. It is, however, how things work in Washington, and it produces a kind of representation problem the earlier sections did not address. While in office, a member is the target of lobbying. After office, they often become the lobbyist.

Billy Tauzin spent nearly twenty-five years in the House, the last several as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees the pharmaceutical industry.³² In 2003 he was the chief architect of the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill, the legislation that created Medicare Part D.³³ The bill prohibited the federal government from negotiating drug prices and barred the reimportation of cheaper drugs from abroad.³⁴ Both provisions were worth billions of dollars a year to pharmaceutical companies. Tauzin announced his retirement from Congress shortly after the bill passed. The day after his term ended in January 2005, he began work as president and CEO of PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry's lobbying arm, at a reported salary of roughly $2 million a year. By 2010 he was earning $11.6 million.³⁵

Tauzin maintained then and since that there was no connection between the bill and the job, and he broke no laws.³⁶ The point of the story is that the member who chaired the committee that wrote the most consequential pharmaceutical legislation in a generation moved directly from writing it to representing the companies that benefited from it. When he was writing the legislation, was he representing the interests of his constituents in Louisiana, or the interests of the pharmaceutical industry?

Dick Gephardt's case shows the same pattern across a different kind of issue. Gephardt served in the House for twenty-eight years, fourteen of them as Democratic Leader.³⁷ While in Congress he was a public supporter of recognizing the Armenian genocide, the systematic killing of more than a million Armenians by the Ottoman government beginning in 1915. In 2000 he wrote to Speaker Dennis Hastert urging immediate floor consideration of the recognition resolution, stating that "this issue requires little if any additional deliberation by the House."³⁸ He left Congress in 2005 and founded a lobbying firm.³⁹ In 2007 the firm signed a contract with the government of Turkey worth $1.2 million a year.⁴⁰

Turkey's central foreign-policy priority in Washington was, and remains, defeating the same Armenian Genocide recognition resolution Gephardt had championed. According to filings under the Foreign Agents Registration Act and reporting in the Washington Post and New Republic, Gephardt's firm arranged meetings between Turkish officials and House Democratic leaders, helped the Turkish ambassador secure an audience with Speaker Pelosi, and circulated a booklet denying that what happened in 1915 was a genocide.⁴¹ Gephardt did nothing illegal. He simply represented one set of constituents while in office and a different one after.

When we zoom out, we find that these aren't rare occurrences. Public Citizen found that nearly two-thirds of former members of the 115th Congress who entered the private sector took jobs designed to influence federal policy.⁴² An academic study tracking House and Senate members from 1976 to 2012 found that the share of departing members becoming registered lobbyists rose steadily over the period, and that the members most likely to make the jump were committee chairs and members of the most powerful committees.⁴³

On the executive branch side, a 2023 Senate report found 672 former government officials, military officers, and members of Congress working as lobbyists, board members, or executives for the top twenty federal defense contractors in 2022.⁴⁴ The largest hirers were Boeing, Pfizer, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin. Pfizer's place on the list reflects the wave of federal contracting tied to pandemic-era vaccine procurement, but the other four are the same names that dominate every other measure of the defense industry.⁴⁵ These are the most regulated industries in the country, and the people who used to write the rules now work for the regulated.

What makes this a representation problem rather than a corruption problem is that it does not require any individual member to be acting in bad faith. A member of Energy and Commerce in 2025, weighing a vote on drug pricing, knows what Tauzin's path looks like and knows what kind of record keeps it open. A member of Armed Services knows that the board seats and executive positions exist, that they pay well, and that they are not offered to people who spent their committee years making the contractors' lives difficult. None of this needs to be conscious to do its work. The future employer is a presence in the room while the current vote is being cast, and the constituent who will never offer a board seat or a managing director title is not.

Stocks, donors, primary voters, and future employers are four different audiences a member of Congress can be representing at any given moment. None of them is the median voter in the district they were elected from. The principle this section opened with was that representatives are beholden to their constituents. The reality is that they are beholden to whoever will most plausibly end or extend their career, and the people who can do that are mostly not the people who voted for them.

Footnotes

1. Peter Schweizer, Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011). Alan J. Ziobrowski et al., "Abnormal Returns from the Common Stock Investments of the U.S. Senate," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 39, no. 4 (December 2004): 661–676 (Senate findings); Alan J. Ziobrowski et al., "Abnormal Returns from the Common Stock Investments of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives," Business and Politics 13, no. 4 (2011) (House findings). ↩

2. Steve Kroft, "Congress: Trading Stock on Inside Information?," 60 Minutes, CBS News, November 13, 2011. ↩

3. The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, Public Law 112-105, was signed into law by President Barack Obama on April 4, 2012. Office of Government Ethics STOCK Act materials at https://www.oge.gov ↩

4. The 2013 amendment removing the searchable-database requirement was S. 716 (113th Congress), enacted as Public Law 113-7 and signed by President Obama on April 15, 2013. https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2013/04/16/177496734/how-congress-quietly-overhauled-its-insider-trading-law and https://campaignlegal.org/update/how-congress-hides-stock-holdings-plain-sight ↩

5. Robert Faturechi and Derek Willis, "Senator Dumped Up to $1.7 Million of Stock After Reassuring Public About Coronavirus Preparedness," ProPublica, March 19, 2020. https://www.propublica.org/article/senator-dumped-up-to-1-7-million-of-stock-after-reassuring-public-about-coronavirus-preparedness ↩

6. Dan Mangan and Dan Diamond, "Unsealed FBI Docs Reveal a Flurry of Calls and Stock Trades by Sen. Burr in Early 2020," CNBC, September 6, 2022. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/06/unsealed-fbi-docs-reveal-a-flurry-of-calls-amid-burrs-stock-trades.html. See also https://www.rcfp.org/sen-burr-search-warrant-unsealing/ ↩

7. Unusual Whales, Congress Trading Reports (annual), 2022–2026. https://unusualwhales.com/politics ↩

8. Dan Mangan, "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Opposes Banning Congress Members from Owning Individual Stocks: 'We're a Free Market Economy,'" CNBC, December 15, 2021. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/15/house-speaker-nancy-pelosi-opposes-banning-stock-buys-by-congress-members.html ↩

9. Kate Kelly, Adam Playford, Alicia Parlapiano, and Brian M. Rosenthal, "Stock Trades Reported by Nearly a Fifth of Congress Show Possible Conflicts," The New York Times, September 13, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/13/us/politics/congress-stock-trading-investigation.html ↩

10. Same source. On the Marjorie Taylor Greene tariff trade, see Brian Schwartz, "Marjorie Taylor Greene Disclosed Stock Purchases on the Same Day Trump Paused Tariffs," CNBC, April 10, 2025. Clerk of the House Financial Disclosure database at https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov ↩

11. Raihan Alam and Tage S. Rai, "Knowledge of Politician Stock Trading Reduces Congressional Legitimacy and Compliance with the Law," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122, no. 21 (May 27, 2025): e2501822122. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2501822122. See also https://today.ucsd.edu/story/congressional-stock-trading-severely-undermines-public-trust-and-compliance-with-the-law ↩

12. Bipartisan Policy Center, "The 2025 Tax Debate: Carried Interest and Tax Breaks for Sports Teams," October 11, 2025; Alec MacGillis, "Despite Trump Campaign Promise, Billionaires' Tax Loophole Survives Again," ProPublica, November 3, 2017. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/the-2025-tax-debate-carried-interest-and-tax-breaks-for-sports-teams/, https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/warren_colleagues_letter_to_trump_recarriedinterestloophole.pdf, https://www.propublica.org/article/despite-trump-campaign-promise-billionaires-tax-loophole-survives-again ↩

13. Sarah N. Lynch, "Trump says tax code is letting hedge funds 'get away with murder,'" Reuters, August 23, 2015. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-26/trump-puts-a-serious-wall-street-issue-on-the-table-hedge-fund-carried-interest ↩

14. Tae Kim, "Gary Cohn: We 'tried 25 times' to cut hedge fund loophole in tax reform bill, but failed," CNBC, December 20, 2017. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/20/cohn-tried-25-times-to-cut-hedge-fund-loophole-but-failed.html. See also https://www.axios.com/2018/01/05/gary-cohn-blames-congress-for-carried-interest-loophole-1515110725 ↩

15. Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Public Law 115-97, signed December 22, 2017, Section 13309, codified at 26 U.S.C. § 1061. https://www.pionline.com/article/20171222/ONLINE/171229941/trump-s-carried-interest-pledge-sinks-as-mnuchin-cohn-split and https://nctr.org/taxing-carried-interest-as-ordinary-income-private-equity-fights-back-using-public-pensions-as-human-shields/ ↩

16. Charlie Gasparino and Brian Schwartz, "Money Talks: Blackstone, Carlyle, KKR dial up donations to key GOP lawmakers as tax bill protects carried interest loophole," Fox Business, December 20, 2017. https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/money-talks-blackstone-carlyle-kkr-dial-up-donations-to-key-gop-lawmakers-as-tax-bill-protects-carried-interest-loophole ↩

17. Same source. ↩

18. Becky Sullivan, "A tax loophole made fund managers rich. Closing it may help pay for the climate bill," NPR, August 3, 2022. https://www.npr.org/2022/08/03/1115218183/carried-interest-close-tax-loophole ↩

19. Brian Schwartz, "How Wall Street wooed Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and preserved its multibillion-dollar carried interest tax break," CNBC, August 9, 2022. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/09/how-wall-street-wooed-sen-kyrsten-sinema-and-preserved-its-multi-billion-dollar-carried-interest-tax-break.html ↩

20. Same source. ↩

21. Jake Johnson, "Sinema Received Over $500K From Private Equity Before Shielding Industry From Tax Hikes," Common Dreams, August 8, 2022. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/08/08/sinema-received-over-500k-private-equity-shielding-industry-tax-hikes. See also https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2022/08/15/kyrsten-sinema-has-many-friends-in-private-equity/ ↩

22. Schwartz, "How Wall Street wooed Sen. Kyrsten Sinema." Blankfein's tweet was dated August 7, 2022. ↩

23. Brookings Institution, Vital Statistics on Congress, Table 2-7, "House Incumbents Retired, Defeated, or Reelected, 1946–2012." https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Vital-Statistics-Chapter-2-Congressional-Elections.pdf. See also https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/reelection-rates ↩

24. Karl Evers-Hillstrom, "Incumbent Politicians Enjoy Record Reelection in an Aging Congress," OpenSecrets, October 26, 2023. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2023/10/incumbent-politicians-enjoy-record-reelection-in-aging-congress/ ↩

25. Cook Political Report, "2026 House Race Ratings." https://www.cookpolitical.com/ratings/house-race-ratings. See also https://fairvote.org/our-reforms/monopoly-politics-and-the-fair-representation-act/ ↩

26. Cook Political Report, "2026 Senate Race Ratings." https://www.cookpolitical.com/ratings/senate-race-ratings ↩

27. Evers-Hillstrom, "Incumbent Politicians Enjoy Record Reelection." ↩

28. Same source. ↩

29. Jim Ellis, "Only 16 Districts Split the Ticket," The Ellis Insight, January 23, 2025. https://www.ellisinsight.com/election-analysis/only-16-districts-split-the-ticket/. See also https://split-ticket.org/ ↩

30. Voteview, "House Polarization 1st to 113th Congresses," compiled by Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal. https://legacy.voteview.com/k7ftp/house_polarization46_113.txt ↩

31. Drew DeSilver, "The Polarization in Today's Congress Has Roots That Go Back Decades," Pew Research Center, March 10, 2022. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/10/the-polarization-in-todays-congress-has-roots-that-go-back-decades/ ↩

32. "Wilbert Joseph (Billy) Tauzin," History, Art & Archives, U.S. House of Representatives. Tauzin served from May 22, 1980 to January 3, 2005. https://history.house.gov/People/Detail/22705 ↩

33. Public Citizen, "Nearly Two Thirds of Former Members of 115th Congress Working Outside Politics and Government Have Picked Up Lobbying or Strategic Consulting Jobs," May 30, 2019. https://www.citizen.org/article/revolving-congress/ ↩

34. Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003, Public Law 108-173, signed December 8, 2003. https://sunlightfoundation.com/2010/02/12/the-legacy-of-billy-tauzin-the-white-house-phrma-deal/ ↩

35. Drew Armstrong, "Tauzin's $11.6 Million Made Him Highest-Paid Health-Law Lobbyist," Bloomberg, November 29, 2011. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-11-29/tauzin-s-11-6-million-made-him-highest-paid-health-law-lobbyist. See also https://billmoyers.com/story/the-man-who-made-you-pay-more-at-the-drugstore/ ↩

36. Bill Allison, "Tauzin aided drug firms, then they hired him," NBC News, March 22, 2006. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna11714763 ↩

37. Dick Gephardt served as the U.S. Representative from Missouri's 3rd district from January 3, 1977 to January 3, 2005. ↩

38. "Gephardt Reverses Prior Support for Genocide Recognition to Serve as Foreign Agent for Turkey," Armenian National Committee of America, May 11, 2007. https://anca.org/?p=15562. See also https://newrepublic.com/article/61335/final-resolution ↩

39. Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, "For Gephardt, a New Career in Lobbying — and a Lot More," Washington Post, July 31, 2007. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2007/07/31/for-gephardt-a-new-career-in-lobbying-and-a-lot-more/ ↩

40. Marc Tracy, "Final Resolution," The New Republic, July 23, 2007. ↩

41. Mary Beth Sheridan, "Armenia-Turkey dispute over genocide label sets off lobbying frenzy," Washington Post, March 4, 2010; Tracy, "Final Resolution." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/03/AR2010030303786.html and https://efile.fara.gov ↩

42. "Revolving Door Class of 2019: Nearly Two-Thirds of Former Lawmakers With Jobs Outside Politics Land in Influence Business," Public Citizen, May 30, 2019. https://www.citizen.org/news/revolving-door-class-of-2019-nearly-two-thirds-of-former-lawmakers-with-jobs-outside-politics-land-in-influence-business/ ↩

43. Jeffrey Lazarus, Amy McKay, and Lindsey Herbel, "Who walks through the revolving door? Examining the lobbying activity of former members of Congress," Interest Groups & Advocacy 5, no. 1 (2016): 82–100. https://doi.org/10.1057/iga.2015.16 ↩

44. Office of Senator Elizabeth Warren, "Pentagon Alchemy: How Defense Officials Pass Through the Revolving Door and Peddle Brass for Gold," April 2023. https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/DoD%20Revolving%20Door%20Report.pdf ↩

45. Same source, Table 1. ↩