Analysis · October 21, 2026

Why party leaders score low on bills

The Speaker has cosponsored 3 bills this Congress; the House Majority Leader has sponsored one. Why congressional leaders' report cards look thin, and what that does and doesn't mean.

Some of the most powerful people in Congress have unremarkable report cards. Speaker Mike Johnson has a C−. House Minority Leader Hakeem S. Jeffries has a D+. Majority Leader Steve Scalise has a D. These are the members who decide what the House votes on, so their grades can look strange at first. The explanation says a lot about how Congress works and about what any report card based on public records can and can't measure.

The leaders' numbers

The pattern is striking. The House leaders have excellent attendance, but they sponsor and cosponsor far fewer bills than the typical member, who has sponsored about 22 and cosponsored about 257. That puts them near the bottom of the House on both bill scores, which together make up 60% of the grade.

Why leaders write so few bills

A party leader's job is to manage the chamber, not to push their own legislation. The Speaker and the majority leader decide which bills reach the floor and when, negotiate with the Senate and the White House, keep their party together on close votes and raise money for the party's candidates. The minority leader organizes the opposition and negotiates for it. Whips count votes and persuade wavering members.

That work happens largely out of public view and doesn't produce a paper trail of sponsored bills. When major legislation does pass, it usually carries a committee chair's name as sponsor, not the leader's, even when the leader negotiated the final deal.

There's also a strategic reason to sponsor little. A leader's name on a bill signals that the leadership is putting its weight behind it. Leaders tend to save that signal for the bills that matter most to the party. The one bill Scalise has sponsored this Congress, the Rescissions Act of 2025, is an example: it became law.

Why leaders cosponsor so few bills

The same logic applies to cosponsoring, even more strongly. A leader who cosponsors one member's bill and not another's can look like they are picking favorites among their own members. Staying off cosponsor lists keeps leaders neutral, and it keeps them free to negotiate changes to bills later.

The Speaker is a special case. By long tradition the Speaker presides over the House and rarely votes or cosponsors bills, acting in part as an officer of the whole chamber. Congress Report Card accounts for the voting tradition by not counting votes the Speaker skips against them, which is why Johnson shows 100% attendance. There is no similar adjustment for bills, so Johnson's 3 cosponsorships place the Speaker near the bottom of the House on that measure.

The Senate is different

Senate leaders' report cards look more ordinary. Majority Whip John Barrasso has a B, and Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin has sponsored 93 bills. Senators of every rank tend to sponsor more legislation, and the Senate's smaller size means leaders also take on more of the direct legislative work. Even so, Majority Leader John Thune has cosponsored only 42 bills, well below the Senate median of about 146.

Committee chairs

Some committee chairs face a related effect. Jim Jordan of Ohio, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, hasn't sponsored any bills this Congress and has cosponsored 17, giving a D−. On the other hand, Tom Cole of Oklahoma, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, has a B, largely because five of the government funding bills Cole sponsored became law. Whether a chair's work shows up in the record depends a lot on whether they personally sponsor the committee's major bills.

What this means for reading grades

Congress Report Card applies the same rules to every member, and it doesn't adjust grades for leadership roles. There are good reasons for that. Any adjustment would involve judgment calls about whose roles deserve special treatment and how much, and those judgments would be hard to make consistently or neutrally. Keeping one rule for everyone makes the grades simple to check and impossible to tilt.

But it does mean the grades capture one dimension of a member's work, and leaders are the clearest case where that dimension misses most of the job. A leader's C or D says that they rarely write or cosponsor bills, which is accurate. It doesn't say they are ineffective. If anything, the members who decide what Congress votes on are the most influential people in the building.

The same caution applies, in milder form, to every member. Committee work, oversight, constituent services and behind-the-scenes negotiation are real parts of the job that public data doesn't capture. The methodology lists these limits, and How to read a congressional report card explains how to use the separate scores to see what a grade is really made of.

Figures are from the Congress Report Card data as of October 21, 2026. Grades change as Congress votes, so the numbers on member pages may have moved since. How grades are calculated.