Methodology
How we turn official votes and bill text into issue tags, positions, and legislator alignment. Taxonomy version: 2026.07.4
Principles
- Outputs are fact-based and cite official sources only.
- No interpretive political framing beyond the sourced text.
- Issue categories use a versioned controlled taxonomy, Congress.gov subjects, and multi-label issue parsing (taxonomy rules + subjects + AI) that is human-reviewable.
- Each issue defines multiple impartial position clusters (not only for/against).
- Legislator nearest-position alignment uses roll-call Yea/Nay plus each bill's stance_map (which position a Yea vs Nay advances). Unmapped votes are shown as coverage gaps — never force-fit into a position.
- Every issue oversight metric drills down to contributing votes with chamber roll-call links.
- Independence: no third-party legislative aggregator in the ingestion pipeline.
- Product brand: Legislative Oversight. Metrics are not partisan ratings.
- Bill summaries use plain, friendly English so non-experts can follow without jargon.
Data sources (official only)
- Congress.gov API (api.congress.gov via api.data.gov key)
- House Clerk roll-call pages (clerk.house.gov)
- Senate roll-call pages (senate.gov) when API coverage is incomplete
- Bill text from Congress.gov / GovInfo
- U.S. Census Bureau Geocoder for address → congressional district
Library of Congress / Congress.gov; U.S. House of Representatives; U.S. Senate; U.S. Census Bureau (geocoder). Independent civic project—not those institutions.
Coverage notes
- bills: Congress.gov bill endpoints — primary path for bills/actions/summaries/subjects.
- members: Congress.gov member endpoints keyed by bioguideId.
- house_roll_calls: Beta House roll-call endpoints (legislation-associated votes from 118th Congress).
- senate_roll_calls: Senate floor rolls from official senate.gov LIS XML (vote_menu_{congress}_{session}.xml + vote detail XML); member match by state+name; official .htm URLs stored on each roll.
- bill_text: Congress.gov text endpoints and/or GovInfo bulk/XML for RAG corpus.
Issues and positions
An issue is a policy topic (immigration, taxes, defense, and so on). Each issue has several impartial positions—clusters of stance, not party labels. New issues or positions are added when real votes cannot map cleanly to the catalog. Legislator “nearest position” uses vote history plus each bill's stance map.
Veterans Affairs
Bills primarily concerning VA benefits, veterans’ health research, survivors’ benefits, or other veterans-specific federal programs distinct from general Medicare/Social Security or broad healthcare reform.
- Expand benefits and access: Supports broader eligibility, faster claims, or new benefits for veterans and survivors.
- VA care quality and capacity: Focuses on VA medical capacity, specialty care, research (e.g. service-connected conditions), and delivery quality.
- Accountability and program integrity: Emphasizes fraud control, wait-time accountability, or oversight of VA administration and contractors.
- Community care and choice: Prioritizes private/community care options and veteran choice outside VA facilities when capacity or preference warrants.
- Constrain benefits scope or cost: Prefers limiting new eligibility expansions, counseling caps, or program growth to control cost or focus resources.
- Status quo / reject this change: Prefers prior veterans law or practice and opposes the measure's primary change on this issue.
Immigration & Border
Bills primarily concerning immigration law, border security, asylum, visas, deportation, or related federal enforcement. Categorization is public and versioned; not a political rating.
- Enforcement- and deterrence-first: Emphasizes stronger border controls, interior enforcement, and deterring unlawful entry or overstays as the primary federal response, with legal immigration changes secondary to enforcement capacity.
- Technology and operational capacity: Emphasizes surveillance, tunnels, UAS, inspection tech, AI sensors, or similar operational tools and reporting on counter-smuggling capacity without necessarily rewriting legal immigration status rules.
- Expanded legal pathways and asylum capacity: Emphasizes expanding or streamlining lawful immigration channels, refugee and asylum processing capacity, and reducing backlogs, treating enforcement as secondary to legal access and humanitarian processing.
- Comprehensive package (enforcement + legal reform): Supports combining enforcement tools with changes to legal status pathways, work authorization, or asylum rules in a single multi-title approach rather than one-dimensional bills.
- Incremental or status-quo oriented: Favors limited, targeted fixes (funding, staffing, narrow rule changes) without major redesign of statutes; prioritizes continuity of current frameworks.
- Minimal federal restriction / open-movement emphasis: Opposes most new or existing federal immigration controls and prioritizes free or near-open cross-border movement, large-scale lawful admissions, or deprioritizing enforcement and interior removal as a matter of principle rather than incremental reform within a controlled system.
- Status quo / reject this change: Prefers prior immigration law or practice and opposes the measure's primary change.
Education
Bills primarily concerning K–12 or higher education policy, curriculum transparency, federal education conditions, student privacy, or school governance—not pure appropriations without education substance.
- Transparency and parental rights: Emphasizes curriculum, foreign-influence, or school disclosure rules and parental access to information about school content and funding sources.
- Federal standards and equity programs: Supports federal conditions, civil-rights enforcement, or equity-oriented program rules in K–12 or higher education.
- Local control / limit federal role: Prefers reducing federal mandates or funding conditions so states and localities set education policy.
- Workforce and higher-education pathways: Centers student aid, accreditation, career pathways, or research security in higher education rather than K–12 culture debates alone.
- Sex-based athletics eligibility: Supports federal rules that define school sports eligibility by biological sex or similar sex-based criteria for federally funded programs.
- Gender-identity-inclusive participation: Opposes sex-based federal sports eligibility rules and prefers policies that allow participation consistent with gender identity or local discretion.
- Status quo / reject this change: Prefers prior education law or practice and opposes the measure's primary change on this issue.
Taxes & Government Spending
Bills primarily concerning federal taxes, appropriations, deficits, debt, or major spending authority. Impartial roll-call linkage only.
- Lower taxes and constrain spending growth: Prioritizes reducing federal tax burdens and/or slowing the growth of discretionary or mandatory spending to limit deficits and debt.
- Revenue for public programs: Prioritizes maintaining or raising revenue (rates, base, or loopholes) to fund federal programs, investments, or deficit reduction without large spending cuts.
- Targeted credits and industrial policy: Uses tax credits, deductions, or directed spending to shape specific sectors or behaviors (energy, housing, manufacturing) rather than broad rate changes alone.
- Budget process and fiscal rules: Focuses on appropriations process, debt-limit mechanics, caps, PAYGO-style rules, or transparency—how Congress budgets—more than a single tax rate philosophy.
- Disaster and tax administration relief: Targets filing extensions, postponements, or administrative relief for disasters and similar events rather than permanent rate or spending redesign.
- Status quo / reject this change: Prefers prior tax, spending, or budget rules and opposes the measure's primary fiscal change.
Energy & Climate
Bills primarily concerning energy production, climate programs, emissions, or related infrastructure funding.
- Accelerate clean-energy transition: Prioritizes emissions reductions, renewables, efficiency, and climate-related spending or standards as primary federal energy goals.
- Expand domestic fossil and all-of-the-above production: Prioritizes leasing, permitting, pipelines, and production of oil, gas, coal, and/or nuclear to lower prices and increase supply, with climate measures secondary.
- Permitting and infrastructure speed: Focuses on faster permitting for energy and transmission projects of multiple types (clean and conventional) to reduce process delays.
- Grid reliability and affordability: Elevates reliability, baseload capacity, and consumer energy prices as the main criteria for federal energy policy choices.
- Status quo / reject this change: Prefers prior energy or climate rules and opposes the measure's primary change. For pure wildlife/ESA measures prefer public-lands-wildlife issue instead.
Healthcare
Bills primarily concerning health insurance, hospitals, public health programs (excluding pure Social Security cash benefits), or medical regulation.
- Coverage expansion and public programs: Emphasizes expanding insurance coverage through Medicaid, marketplace subsidies, public options, or similar mechanisms that increase who is insured.
- Market choice and cost competition: Emphasizes competition, HSAs, cross-border or association plans, price transparency, or deregulatory steps aimed at lowering costs via market structure.
- Provider payment and drug pricing: Targets hospital/physician payment rules, prescription drug negotiation or importation, or PBM practices as the main lever on prices.
- Public health and system capacity: Focuses on CDC/HRSA-type capacity, rural hospitals, workforce, preparedness, or quality programs rather than insurance eligibility alone.
- Status quo / reject this change: Prefers prior healthcare law or practice and opposes the measure's primary change.
- Restrict gender-transition medical interventions: Supports federal limits or prohibitions on specified gender-transition surgeries or puberty-blocking treatments, especially for minors.
- Protect access to gender-transition care: Opposes federal bans on gender-transition medical care and prefers clinical judgment or state/patient decision-making.
Housing
Bills primarily concerning housing supply, affordability, rental assistance, mortgage policy, or homelessness programs.
- Supply and barrier reduction: Stresses increasing housing supply by reducing federal, state, or local barriers (zoning-related conditions on funds, permitting, density) so more units can be built.
- Demand-side assistance and subsidies: Stresses rental assistance, vouchers, first-time buyer aid, or other subsidies that help households afford housing under current supply conditions.
- Housing finance and credit markets: Focuses on mortgage markets, GSE policy, down-payment rules, or credit access rather than construction volume or vouchers alone.
- Homelessness and emergency shelter: Prioritizes shelter capacity, continuum-of-care funding, and services for people experiencing homelessness, distinct from general market supply debates.
- Preserve local land-use control: Opposes federal pressure on zoning, parking minimums, or density rules and prefers local land-use autonomy.
- Status quo / reject this change: Prefers prior housing law or practice and opposes the measure's primary change.
Abortion & Reproductive Policy
Bills primarily concerning abortion, reproductive health policy, or related federal restrictions or protections. Fact-based categorization only.
- Federal restrictions or limited federal funding: Supports federal limits on abortion access, gestation limits, or restrictions on federal funding/facilities for abortion-related care.
- Federal protections for access: Supports federal statutes or funding that protect or expand access to abortion and related reproductive care across states.
- State primacy / federal non-interference: Prefers leaving primary policy to states, minimizing new federal mandates either restricting or guaranteeing access.
- Adjacent reproductive health without abortion focus: Centers contraception, maternal health, or family planning programs without primarily changing abortion legality or funding rules.
Criminal Justice & Public Safety
Bills primarily concerning federal criminal law, controlled substances, fentanyl and trafficking penalties, sentencing, or public-safety enforcement—not solely immigration or gun-specific titles.
- Tougher penalties and enforcement: Supports higher federal penalties, mandatory minimums, or expanded enforcement against trafficking, fentanyl, or violent crime.
- Sentencing reform and reentry: Emphasizes reducing mandatory minimums, expanding alternatives, or reentry supports while maintaining public safety goals.
- Treatment and prevention focus: Prioritizes substance-use treatment, prevention, and public-health approaches alongside or instead of penalty increases.
- Targeted tools and interdiction capacity: Focuses on investigative tools, interdiction technology, or narrow statute updates without a broad tough-vs-reform framing.
- Mandatory public records disclosure: Supports statutory deadlines or mandates to release investigative, prosecutorial, or custodial records to the public.
- Limit disclosure for privacy or security: Opposes broad mandatory release of sensitive investigative records, citing privacy, ongoing investigations, or national-security concerns.
- Status quo / reject this change: Prefers prior criminal law or justice practice and opposes the measure's primary change on this issue.
Regulation & Agency Oversight
Bills and joint resolutions primarily concerning Congressional Review Act disapprovals, nullifying agency rules, or changing federal regulatory process and administrative oversight across agencies.
- Disapprove or nullify agency rules: Supports CRA joint resolutions or statutes that strip force and effect from specific agency rules or block preemption waivers.
- Preserve agency rules and standards: Opposes CRA disapprovals or nullifications so published agency rules, standards, or waivers remain in effect.
- Process, transparency, and reporting: Focuses on how agencies report, certify, or consult (oversight process) rather than wholly eliminating or keeping a substantive standard.
- Broader regulatory burden reduction: Supports cross-cutting paperwork reduction, small-business regulatory relief, or structural limits on rulemaking beyond a single CRA target.
- Limit new reporting and disclosure mandates: Opposes new statutory reporting, disclosure, or certification duties on agencies or covered entities as unnecessary administrative burden.
- Status quo / reject this change: Prefers keeping prior regulatory or oversight rules and opposes the measure's primary change on this issue.
- Expand securities and market disclosures: Supports new SEC or market disclosure rules (e.g. multi-class shares, executive compensation, ownership) to increase investor transparency.
- Limit new securities disclosure rules: Opposes new SEC disclosure mandates as compliance cost without clear investor benefit.
Voting & Elections
Bills primarily concerning election administration, voter registration, ballot access, campaign process, or voting rights protections.
- Expand ballot access and participation: Prioritizes registration ease, early/mail voting options, language access, or federal standards that make casting a ballot easier for eligible voters.
- Election integrity and security controls: Prioritizes ID rules, chain-of-custody, citizenship checks, or other controls aimed at preventing ineligible voting and securing administration.
- Administration capacity and uniform standards: Focuses on funding election offices, equipment, cybersecurity, and clearer uniform procedures without a single access-vs-ID framing.
- Campaign finance and process rules: Centers campaign finance, disclosure, redistricting process, or related election-process rules rather than Election Day ballot procedures alone.
- Status quo / reject this change: Prefers keeping prior election or voting rules and opposes the measure's primary change on this issue.
Public Lands & Wildlife
Bills primarily concerning federal public lands, parks, Endangered Species Act listings/delistings, wildlife management, or land-use designations—not general energy production unless species/lands are the core.
- Delisting and active wildlife management: Supports ESA delisting, reissuance of prior delisting rules, state management of recovered species, or harvest/control authorities.
- Stronger species and habitat protections: Opposes delisting or reduced protections and prefers maintaining or expanding federal ESA/habitat safeguards and judicial review.
- Access and multiple-use public lands: Prioritizes recreation, grazing, energy access, or multiple-use on public lands alongside conservation.
- Conservation and preservation first: Prioritizes park integrity, wilderness, and preservation constraints over expanded extractive or development uses.
- Status quo / reject this change: Prefers prior public-lands or wildlife rules and opposes the measure's primary change.
Foreign Policy & Sanctions
Bills primarily concerning U.S. relations with foreign governments, sanctions, foreign aid conditions, diplomacy, or use of immigration tools as foreign-policy leverage—not domestic border operations alone.
- Sanctions and coercive pressure: Supports economic, travel, or visa sanctions and similar tools to pressure foreign governments, officials, or entities.
- Engagement, diplomacy, and conditioned aid: Prefers diplomatic engagement, alliances, or foreign assistance (often with human-rights or governance conditions) over pure coercive packages.
- Restraint and limited overseas commitments: Seeks to reduce new overseas obligations, funding, or interventions and narrow the scope of U.S. foreign involvement.
- Democracy and human-rights conditionality abroad: Centers free elections, human rights, or anti-corruption conditions in foreign policy without primarily being a trade or pure defense measure.
- Extend preferential trade access: Supports extending or renewing preferential tariff treatment, trade preference programs (e.g. AGOA-style), or similar market-access extensions.
- End or limit trade preferences: Opposes extending preferential trade programs and prefers letting them expire or tightening eligibility and market-access grants.
- Status quo / reject this change: Prefers prior foreign-policy posture and opposes the measure's primary change on this issue.
Defense & National Security
Bills primarily concerning the Department of Defense, military personnel and construction, national defense authorization, homeland security operations, or classified/national-security authorities distinct from civilian tax or energy policy.
- Force structure and readiness funding: Prioritizes end strength, readiness accounts, munitions, and operational capacity in defense authorization or appropriations.
- Acquisition reform and efficiency: Emphasizes procurement reform, cost control, program termination for overruns, or commercial acquisition practices inside DoD.
- Military personnel and quality of life: Centers pay, housing, healthcare access for service members and families, or personnel policy rather than weapons systems alone.
- Homeland and border-security operations: Supports DHS/DoD support roles, counter-tunnel, or other homeland-security operational authorities when framed as national-security operations.
- Reduce defense outlays or scope: Prefers lower topline defense funding, fewer new weapons programs, or narrower authorization scope than the measure proposes.
- Status quo / reject this change: Opposes the defense measure's primary change and prefers prior authorization or funding baselines.
Labor & Employment
Bills primarily concerning federal labor standards (wages, overtime, tipped workers), collective bargaining, workplace safety, or employment discrimination rules—not pure appropriations without labor substance.
- Stronger worker protections and standards: Supports higher wage floors, overtime expansions, tipped-worker protections, or stronger collective-bargaining rules.
- Employer flexibility and burden relief: Prefers reducing labor-regulatory burdens, preserving tip-credit structures, or limiting new federal employment mandates.
- Enforce existing labor law: Emphasizes enforcing current FLSA/NLRA rules and penalties without major new standards expansions or rollbacks.
- Status quo / reject this change: Prefers prior labor law and opposes the measure's primary employment-policy change.
Congressional Procedure
House or Senate rules, special rules for consideration, en bloc procedures, censure, or pure chamber process measures with little free-standing policy substance outside floor procedure.
- Adopt majority agenda and special rules: Supports special rules, package floor procedures, or rules packages that structure consideration to advance the majority's agenda.
- Protect minority rights and open deliberation: Opposes restrictive special rules or rules packages that limit amendments, debate, or minority procedural tools.
- Transparency and ethics process: Centers ethics, censure, disclosure, or similar chamber-process accountability tools rather than policy substance of referred bills.
- Status quo / reject this change: Prefers prior chamber rules or practice and opposes the procedural change.
Inflation & Cost of Living
Bills primarily framed around prices, inflation relief, consumer costs, or cost-of-living measures (distinct from general tax code when possible).
- Macro restraint (fiscal/monetary framing): Links cost-of-living relief to tighter federal spending, deficits, or policies argued to reduce aggregate demand pressures on prices.
- Direct household cost relief: Emphasizes rebates, targeted transfers, fee waivers, or temporary supports to offset high prices for households.
- Supply chains, competition, and price practices: Targets supply bottlenecks, antitrust/competition policy, or alleged price-gouging practices as the path to lower consumer prices.
- Sector-specific cost drivers: Addresses energy, housing, food, or healthcare costs through sector policy rather than a single economy-wide inflation narrative.
Gun Policy
Bills primarily concerning firearms regulation, Second Amendment–related measures, or federal gun safety programs.
- Stronger federal firearm limits: Supports expanded background checks, assault-weapon or capacity limits, red-flag-style tools, or other federal restrictions on acquisition or carry.
- Protect and expand lawful ownership rights: Supports national reciprocity, limits on federal or state restrictions, or other measures framed as protecting Second Amendment rights of lawful owners.
- Enforce existing law and prosecute prohibited persons: Emphasizes prosecuting prohibited possessors, straw purchasing, and enforcement of current statutes rather than major new national bans.
- Safety programs without broad bans: Favors safe-storage, training, school security, or mental-health adjacent programs while avoiding broad category bans on common firearms.
- Status quo / reject this change: Prefers keeping prior federal firearm law and opposes the measure's primary change on this issue.
How alignment to votes works
- Tag bills to issues. Bills can link to multiple issues using public taxonomy rules, Congress.gov subjects, and optional AI suggestions.
- Define positions per issue. Positions are stance clusters (for example “enforcement-first” vs “legal pathways”), not binary for/against the topic name.
- Summarize bills in plain English. Friendly, factual write-ups from official text—readable without Congress jargon, without partisan spin.
- Build a stance map per bill. For each related issue, the summary may say which catalog position a Yea tends to advance and which a Nay tends to advance. If no position fits, we flag needs-position-review rather than force-fitting.
- Record member votes from official House and Senate roll calls, with chamber URLs on each vote.
- Align: for each Yea/Nay on an issue-related bill, credit the position indicated by that bill's stance map. Present and Not Voting do not count.
- Unmapped is not “did not vote.” Unmapped counts are real Yea/Nay casts that lack a usable stance map or position slug (catalog/mapping gaps). They never imply the member skipped the roll call.
- Nearest position = the position with the most mapped votes for that legislator × issue × period. Ties are shown as ties. Confidence bands: none / low (1–2) / medium (3–9) / high (10+ mapped votes).
- Metrics appear on legislator and issue pages with drill-down to bills and official roll calls. Binary “Support % = share of Yeas on the topic” is not the product metric.