What is Congress actually doing?
Five plain answers, each built from public records you can check. Nothing here is an opinion — every number links back to the vote, the bill, or the poll it came from. This is the 119th Congress, sworn in 2025.
We measure each member's position from how they actually vote, on a scale running from −1 (most liberal) to +1 (most conservative). The average Democrat in the House sits at -0.39. The average Republican sits at 0.52. The gap between them is 0.91, wider than 99% of all Congresses since 1857. Just as important: 0 members of the House now sit in territory the other party also occupies. The last time any did was the 107th Congress in 2001, when 4 did.
The last completed Congress, the 118th (2023–2025), passed 193 substantive laws, against an average of 265 across the 6 completed Congresses we have bill records for. The most productive was the 115th (2017–2019) with 346; the least was the 118th (2023–2025) with 193. “Substantive” excludes renaming post offices and declaring commemorative days, which make up a large share of the raw count.
In the 119th Congress John Cornyn has written 125 bills, 30 of which survived committee and 3 of which became law. That is the highest score of any member in either chamber. We rank by how far a member's bills travel through the process, not by how many they file — filing is free, and one member filed 606 nearly identical bills in a single Congress.
Since 2013, bills written by Republicans have become law 1,241 times and bills written by Democrats 911 times. That mostly reflects who held the majority: the majority party controls what gets a vote. Republicans filed 42,911 bills in this period and Democrats 48,806.
Gallup has asked the same question since 1974. So far in 2026, 15% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. The long-run average is 29%. The best year was 2001 at 57% — the months after the September 11 attacks. The worst was 2013 at 14%.
The 119th Congress at a glance
Each figure below is explained in plain terms. Nothing is a score we invented unless we say so and show the arithmetic.
222 Democrats and 227 Republicans, plus 1 other. 218 is a majority.
45 Democrats and 57 Republicans, plus 2 other. 51 is a majority.
The gap between the average Democrat and the average Republican in the House, on a scale where 2.0 would be the maximum possible. Higher means further apart.
Of 643 recorded House votes this Congress, 456 had most Democrats on one side and most Republicans on the other.
101 substantive, 3 commemorative. This Congress is still sitting, so the number will grow.
Share of Americans who say they approve of how Congress is handling its job, 2026 average. The long-run average since 1974 is 29%.
What does a number like 0.91 actually mean?
Political scientists score every member of Congress by looking at every vote they cast and asking: who else votes the same way? Members who vote together end up near each other on a line that runs from −1 to +1. By long convention −1 is the liberal end and +1 the conservative end. A member's score is not an opinion about them; it is a summary of their own voting record.
The “gap” is simply the distance between the two party averages on that line. If every Democrat scored −1 and every Republican +1, the gap would be 2.0 — the theoretical maximum. Today's House gap of 0.91 means the average member of each party votes almost nothing like the average member of the other.
This method is called DW-NOMINATE and comes from Voteview at UCLA. It is the standard measure used in academic work on Congress.