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Date: 2025-02-13 Page is: DBtxt001.php txt00023457 |
US DEMOCRACY
WHO IS MY REPRESENTATIVE Democracy ... Who Is My Member of Congress? Here’s How to Find Out What Your Reps Have Been Up To. ![]() Representatives mill around the House floor after voting 220-207 to pass the Inflation Reduction Act. Credit:Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images Original article: https://www.propublica.org/article/who-is-my-member-of-congress-heres-how-to-find-out-what-your-reps-have-been-up-to Peter Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess | ||
Democracy
Who Is My Member of Congress? Here’s How to Find Out What Your Reps Have Been Up To.
Your representative is on the ballot in 2022 and your senator may be too. Here are some ways to see what your elected officials have been up to — as well as some background on how lawmaking works (and what it looks like when it doesn’t).
Written by Karim Doumar and Cynthia Gordy Giwa
Karim Doumar is an assistant editor at ProPublica. Cynthia Gordy Giwa was ProPublica’s Marketing Director. cynthia.gordy@propublica.org October 12th, 9 a.m. EDT https://www.propublica.org/article/who-is-my-member-of-congress-heres-how-to-find-out-what-your-reps-have-been-up-to Series:A User’s Guide to Democracy Congress Works For You. Here’s How to Be a Better Boss. Here’s a refresher how the lawmakers we elect are supposed to make laws.
But most of the time — as Derek Willis, former ProPublica reporter and current professor at University of Maryland’s journalism school (who’s been helping on this project), has taught me — that’s not how it works at all. Here’s a more realistic look at lawmaking: Congress does pass a lot of bills through the legislative process. But these are mostly noncontroversial bills that do things like bestow honors, rename a post office or erect statues. There’s no debate and no deliberative, committee-driven process required. When it comes to the legislation you do hear about — big, politically contentious things like the Inflation Reduction Act or the American Rescue Plan, both of which passed, or the Voting Rights Advancement Act, which did not — the process doesn’t always work as planned. OK, How Does Congress Really Work? One reason for the gridlock is that, these days, bills addressing big, national issues are written under the supervision of the Senate majority leader and the House speaker. (Currently, that’s Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, respectively.) They often receive guidance from only a small group of other congressional power brokers rather than the rank-and-file lawmakers who used to contribute to the process by working on legislation in committees. For example: The recent Inflation Reduction Act was mostly hammered out in secret by Schumer and Sen. Joe Manchin. After it became public, lawmakers made just a couple of changes to get other senators on board, and it passed. This has been slowly changing since the mid-2000s and has intensified during the past decade, according to a 2018 deep dive from ProPublica and The Washington Post. But the current Congress has been one of the most productive in years. How Do I Know if My Representative Is Doing Their Job? To evaluate your lawmakers in this new reality, you can look at what they are doing and which issues they’re spending their time on, either through lawmaking (on those topics that don’t necessarily grab headlines) or in public position statements. 1: Lawmaking: Is Your Rep Getting Things Done? One of the ways you can find out what representatives are up to is by checking out what bills they have sponsored. This is all public information, and ProPublica’s Represent app can help you navigate to the parts that matter to you. To understand your representative through their bills, you want to look for three things:
| The text being discussed is available at | https://www.propublica.org/article/who-is-my-member-of-congress-heres-how-to-find-out-what-your-reps-have-been-up-to and |
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