Methodology

One rule, no judgment calls

If a member of your delegation cast a recorded floor vote on a bill or joint resolution, that measure is in. That's the whole rule, and it's the same for immigration, taxes, healthcare, and everything else. Nobody at Civvie sits down and picks the bills that matter — the recorded votes of your own representatives decide what you see.

Why a recorded vote is the line

Civvie's entire question is ‘how did your rep vote on this.’ A recorded floor vote is the moment that question has an answer, so it's the natural entry point. Two things fall outside it, for structural reasons rather than editorial ones:

• Bills no one in your delegation voted on.There's no position to show, so there's nothing to put on the page.
• Housekeeping measures. The simple resolutionsCongress uses to run its own floor have no force of law, so they're left out.

How far a bill got

Every bill carries the stage it reached, read straight off the official record. Below are the distinct fates a bill can have, the same for every topic. It tells you what happened to a bill, not whether we think it mattered.

1. 01Became law. Passed both chambers and became law — the president signed it, let it become law without a signature, or Congress overrode a veto.
2. 02Vetoed. Passed both chambers, but the president rejected it.
3. 03Passed a chamber. Cleared the House or the Senate and is still moving.
4. 04Expired. Advanced part of the way, but its two-year Congress ended before it became law.
5. 05Failed its vote. Got a recorded floor vote and did not pass.

How much detail each bill gets

A bill that advanced — passed a chamber or became law — gets the full treatment: a plain-language description, the tradeoffs inside it, budget and tax analysis where it exists, and the story of how the vote played out. A bill that got a single vote and went nowhere has less on the record, so it shows a lighter card. That follows from how far it advanced — the same objective signal — not from a call about how important it is.

How retrieval filters bill types

Every measure is tagged from its official type and title as substantive, Congressional Review Act, naming, commemorative, procedural, appropriations, or other. Answers search substantive bills by default so routine naming and ceremonial measures do not crowd out policy text. One exception keeps spending bills honest: Congress often legislates through them, so a specific section of an appropriations bill that makes a real policy decision — a funding condition, a program extension, aid to a named country — can earn its own place in results. Once such a section is identified as substantive policy, questions can match it directly and the bill it belongs to appears with it; routine budget line-items stay out. Nothing is deleted: an explicit request for appropriations, CRA resolutions, or another class searches the complete corpus.

A separate 0–100 quality signal sends thin records to an internal review queue. It adds fixed points for cosponsors, text length, advancing past committee, recorded votes, and the presence of CBO or floor records. Bills below 35 are reviewed; the score never determines whether a bill is politically important and never removes it from the database.

The time window

Civvie covers the 118th and 119th Congresses, January 2023 to today. That's as far back as complete vote records reach for both the House and Senate, so it's where our coverage begins. A few older landmark laws from before the 118th Congress, like the Inflation Reduction Act, are available on Congress.gov and included here too.

We don't decide what matters

This is the point of the whole approach. Civvie does not select bills by what anyone thinks is significant, newsworthy, or politically interesting. The rule is mechanical on purpose: your representatives' recorded votes set the agenda, the official record sets the ranking, and the same process runs for every person who asks. That's how the same tool can stay neutral no matter who's using it.