Year after year (in congress after congress) montanans have been blessed to be served by a very effective lawmaker, Senator Jon Tester. Jon has learned how to reach across the aisle to craft bipartisan solutions to the grave and complex problems facing America nationally and Montana in particular.
And don’t just take our word for it. The nonpartisan Center for Effective Lawmaking has crunched the numbers and proven that Jon gets things done (gets bipartisan laws passed) way better than the rest of the members of our congressional delegation (and way better than American lawmakers overall).
How Good Are Our US Senators and Representatives at Advancing Their Bills through the Legislative Process?
Effective representatives and senators are good at moving the bills they sponsor (research, negotiate, write, and introduce) through the legislative process to become laws. An analysis of the effectiveness of our current and recent US representatives and US senators is prepared every two years by the non-partisian Center for Effective Lawmaking. A summary of the methodology used by the Center is as follows:
“To calculate the Legislative Effectiveness Score for each member of the U.S. House and Senate, we draw on fifteen indicators that collectively capture the proven ability of a legislator to advance her agenda items through the legislative process and into law. More specifically, to calculate Legislative Effectiveness Scores for the House, we identify the number of bills that each member of the House of Representatives sponsored (BILL); and the number of those bills that received any action in committee (AIC), or action beyond committee (ABC) on the floor of the House. For those bills that received any action beyond committee, we also identify how many of those bills subsequently passed the House (PASS), and how many became law (LAW).”
Below is a table that presents the Center’s findings about Montana’s members serving in both the Senate and House of Representatives for the 114th through 117th congresses. (A lawmaking effectiveness rank of 1 means that all other members of the member’s party are less effective than the member ranked # 1.) For the mid-year results for bills (HR. and S.) for the current (118th) congress, we pulled “to-date” data manually from the government’s Library of Congress website, Congress.gov.
Congress | Number | Sen Tester (D) | Sen Daines (R) | Rep Rosendale (R) | Rep Gianforte (R) | Rep ZInke (R) |
| 118th 2023-2024 | ||||||
| No. of bills sponsored so far | 54 | 38 | 40 | 7 | ||
| No. that became law so far | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | ||
| 117th 2021-2022 | ||||||
| Rank within party | 2 | 25 | 22 | |||
| No. of bills sponsored | 63 | 50 | 26 | |||
| No. that became law | 13 | 0 | 2 | |||
| 116th 2019-2020 | ||||||
| Rank within party | 4 | 19 | 25 | |||
| No. of bills sponsored | 78 | 45 | 17 | |||
| No. that became law | 2 | 1 | 0 | |||
| 115th. 2017-2018 | ||||||
| Rank within party | 3 | 15 | 82 | |||
| No.of bills sponsored | 63 | 53 | 17 | |||
| No. that became law | 2 | 2 | 0 |
Who Is Our Only True “Lawmaking Workhorse” in Congress?
You guessed it. Senator Jon Tester is our most effective member of Congress. In fact, the Center recently ranked Jon second among all of the Democratic senators in lawmaking effectiveness in the 117th Congress. None of our other members of Congress were in the top ten of either party.
The Center also recently identified our Jon Tester as the senator with the longest streak (six congresses) of exceeding expectations in effective lawmaking.
Highlights from the New 117th Congress Legislative Effectiveness Scores
To be fair you will note that the Center’s definition of lawmaking effectiveness only covers being good at conceiving, researching, negotiating, and writing bills and making sure that those bills successfully become laws. It does not cover being good at preventing Congress from getting things done. For example, our Senator Steve Daines was almost successful at orchestrating a filibuster of Jon’s Honoring Our PACT Act, thereby preventing a vote on the final House version in the Senate. When Montana and other veterans rose up in anger in large numbers, the bill eventually became law. The law provides healthcare for all generations of toxic-exposed veterans (and monthly compensation for veterans whose injuries prevent them from making a living). The other members of our congressional delegation at the time (Sen. Daines and Rep. Rosendale) cynically bragged that they voted for the PACT Act, but they fought its passage tooth and nail until it was clear the bill would pass.
So, in many ways, the 2024 general election will tell us whether Abraham Lincoln was correct when he said “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”