Congress

Mitch McConnell’s decision to shorten the chamber’s August recess isn’t unprecedented. But in an election year – when a third of senators are on the campaign trail – it’s unusual.

Of the 73 regular and special Senate elections that have been held since 2013, 69 were won by candidates belonging to the party that won that state's most recent presidential race.

The U.S. House of Representatives has one voting member (435 in total) for every 747,000 or so Americans. That's by far the highest ratio of population to representatives of any industrialized democracy, and the highest it's ever been in U.S. history.

The vast majority of proposed amendments die quiet, little-mourned deaths in committees and subcommittees.

More members of the U.S. House of Representatives are choosing not to seek re-election than at any time in the past quarter-century.

About seven-in-ten women in Congress mentioned sexual misconduct in their official Facebook posts between Oct. 1 and Dec. 30, 2017, compared with 37% of men in Congress.

The most ideological members of Congress shared news stories on their Facebook pages more than twice as often as moderate legislators between Jan. 2, 2015, and July 20, 2017, according to a new Pew Research Center study that examined all official Facebook posts created by members of Congress in this period. The analysis included links […]

In the four decades that the current system for budgeting and spending tax dollars has been in effect, Congress has managed to pass all required appropriations bills on time only four times.

Doug Jones' victory in Alabama gives that state its first split Senate delegation in more than two decades. But delegations with two senators of different parties still are much less common than they used to be: With 14 split delegations, the current Senate is tied for the second-fewest in the past 50 years.

Political divides in the American news landscape do not end with Americans’ preferences for different news sources; rather, they extend to how members of the U.S. Congress communicate with constituents in the digital age.