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. So is any bill from the 119th Congress that a chamber passed without a recorded vote — a voice vote or unanimous consent is still the chamber acting, and the card says so rather than showing votes nobody cast. That second rule reaches the 119th only for now; a bill that passed that way in the 118th is not in yet. 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 floor record of your representatives' chambers decides what you see.

Why a floor passage is the line

Civvie's entire question is ‘how did your rep vote on this.’ A floor passage is the moment that question has an answer — either a recorded vote naming each member, or a chamber passing a bill by voice vote or unanimous consent, where the honest answer is that no individual positions exist. Both are on the record, so both are in — the voice-vote half for the 119th Congress so far. Two things fall outside it, for structural reasons rather than editorial ones:

• Bills still in committee. No chamber has acted on them, so there is no floor record to show. They are searchable separately, but they are not part of the voting record.
• 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. A spending bill can also be found by what happened to it — a bill that caused or ended a shutdown is findable by that history even when its own text is all routine funding. 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 voice-vote passages (each counts the same), and the presence of a CBO cost estimate. Bills below 30 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, along with earlier executive orders that a later order revoked.

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: the floor record sets 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.