Website Information - Govtrack.us

In the post Congressional Efforts on Immigration I mentioned the website Govtrack.us. This is one of the more unique websites I have found for looking at the performance of our members of Congress. Information on the status of bills working their way through Congress can be found along with the text of the bills. In addition, profiles and report cards for each member of congress is available to help you evaluate if the person representing you is actually representing you.

Govtrack.us is the project of Civic Impulse, LLC and it's owner Joshua Tauberer, Ph.D. From their website GovTrack.us is

a completely independent entity which is wholly owned by its operator and receives no funding in any form from outside organizations. We have no financers, sponsors, investors, or partners, nor do we have any affiliation or relationship (financial or otherwise) with any political party, government agency, or any other outside group or persons.

Funding comes from advertising and crowdsourcing. With no outside influence Govtrack.us should be completely non-biased, which thus far I have found to be true. Civic Impulse, LLC is simply a liability wrapper for Mr. Tauberer.

Joe Donnelly is an Indiana Senator that is up for reelection this year, so I'm going to use him as an example. One of the more unique offerings of Govtrack.us is a graph showing how members of Congress fit in a comparison of leadership and ideology.

As you can see from the graph, although Senator Donnelly is a Democrat his ideology is actually to the right of center. The website indicates Senator Donnelly is actually the second most conservative Democratic member of the Senate. One the leadership scale he appears to be lower than one would like but part of that is how the leadership score is calculated. The leadership score of each Senator is calculated based each of their individual time in the Senate. Senators that have been in office longer should have higher leadership scores. An enhancement to this would be to allow the user to compare the Senators based on the length of time the Senator in question has been in office or for a given time frame. Although this may not be possible depending on the data available.

Leadership scores are based on the number of other Senators that cosponsor bills sponsored by Mr. Donnelly. The premise is that the more people that cosponsor your bill the greater leadership you have. It's not unlike your reputation on Steemit is enhanced by the number of upvotes received on your posts.

The Govtrack.us profile for Senator Donnelly includes ratings by different advocacy groups, committee memberships, enacted legislation he is responsible for, recent bills sponsored, the areas of interests that he sponsors bills in, and his voting record. Since being in office, Senator Donnelly has missed on 15 of 1622 roll call votes (0.9%) with the median of lifetime Senators having missed 1.5% of roll call votes, not bad.

Although most of the information on Senator Donnelly has been positive his 2017 report card from Govtrack.us has more information.

Category	Quantity	Rank
Number of bills cosponsored	140	13th percentile among Senate Democrats 40th percentile among all Senators
Received Cosponsors	79	13th percentile among Senate Democrates 20th percentile among all Senators
Committee Leadership Positions	2	24th percentile among Senate Democrats 20th percentile among all Senators
Bills out of Committee	4	52nd percentile among Senate Democrats 39th percentile among all Senators
Bills introduced	24	30th percentile among Senate Democrats 42nd percentile among all Senators

One interesting note about Senator Donnelly from his 2017 Report Card is that of the 140 bills cosponsored 66% were introduced by a Senator that was not from the Democratic Party. This level of bipartisanship places him in the 98th percentile of Senate Democrats and the 52nd percentile of all Senators.

With the help of Govtrack.us my conclusion of Senator Donnelly is that he is really a moderate Republican running under the Democratic party. Although he could be more active as a Senator introducing and cosponsoring more bills I wonder how much of this is due this being his first term as Senator and having to find his away around. I also wonder if, along with this being the first term, if his moderate ideology is impacting his ability to gain leadership roles on committees. It would be interesting if Govtrack.us gave us the ability to look at Senator Donnelly versus all other first term Senators or to look at the impact of ideology on committee leadership assignments. All and all it's a very helpful website and I'm sure as it continues it will only get better.