A bill can be killed without anyone voting against it. It just never gets a vote. Since no vote happens, no names are recorded.
Everything below is legal. No rules are broken, which is what makes it hard to see. The rules have barely changed in 100 years. How often they are used to block bills has changed a lot, and we can measure it.
Cloture is a Senate vote to end debate so a bill can get a final vote. For fifty years it was rare. Now it is the normal way the Senate tries to pass anything, which also makes it the normal way bills are stopped. Nothing in the Constitution changed. A tool just started being used far more than its authors expected.
One
Confirmations became the way to make policy
Since rule changes in 2013 and 2017, confirming a judge or official takes a simple majority. Most bills still need 60 votes just to get a final vote. So the surest way to change national policy is no longer passing a law. It is confirming the people who rule on laws.
You can see it in our own data. Every vote in our courts subject is a confirmation vote, because that is where those decisions actually got made.
Two
Not acting is the tactic
A bill that never gets scheduled leaves no one on record. That is the point: it gets the result of a no vote without anyone having to vote no.
Of the 48 measures on our list, 19 have no recorded vote we can attach them to yet. For some, we have not finished looking. For others, Congress never voted.
Who held the scheduling power
| Congress | Speaker of the House | Senate Majority Leader |
|---|---|---|
| 2025–27 | Mike Johnson (R) | John Thune (R) |
| 2023–25 | Kevin McCarthy (R) then Mike Johnson (R) | Charles E. Schumer (D) |
| 2021–23 | Nancy Pelosi (D) | Charles E. Schumer (D) |
| 2019–21 | Nancy Pelosi (D) | Mitch McConnell (R) |
| 2017–19 | Paul D. Ryan (R) | Mitch McConnell (R) |
| 2015–17 | John Andrew Boehner (R) then Paul D. Ryan (R) | Mitch McConnell (R) |
| 2013–15 | John Andrew Boehner (R) | Harry Reid (D) |
U.S. House, Office of the Historian · U.S. Senate. Speakers are published back to 1789 and Senate leaders to 1889; shown here only for the years this board scores. No grade on this board is affected by anything in this table — holding an office is not a vote.
This is why voting alone does not fix it. Elections change who holds the seats. They do not change the 60-vote rule, who controls the schedule, or a chair’s choice to hold no hearing. If one leader can keep a bill from ever getting a vote, replacing the other 434 members does not fix that. A blocked process needs a change to the process.
We say this because we grade people on their votes. A scorecard that only points at individuals could teach you that individuals are the whole story. They are not. How someone votes is on them. Whether anyone got to vote at all is on the leaders who control the schedule.
So that is what we are building next: for each leader who has run a chamber, how many bills they let come to a vote and how many they did not. Blocking a vote is a choice made by people we can name, and they could stop at any time. When the count is ready it will name them, not as an accusation, but as a count.