How did your members of Congress vote on ICE funding? I will show you how to look it up.
Go to congress.gov and type in Secure America Act. This is the bill earlier this year that funded ICE with tens of billions of dollars. Click S-2 right there in the middle of the page. That’s the bill.
Go to All Actions. Once you click All Actions, it takes you to this page where you can scroll down and see all the specific votes.
Go to the most recent House vote, click that and then you can scroll down and see all Republicans voted for it. All Democrats and one independent voted against.
There were also four people who didn’t vote. If you want to know who those people are, you can scroll down and group by vote. So go down to Not Voting. Click that and you can see three Republicans and one Democrat were not present for the vote. Then you can pop back out.
And if you want to see how the Senate voted, you can hit back on your browser again. There you can see the vote total, hit Back, and then go to All Actions again. And then scroll down. And once you do that you go to the most recent Senate vote. Click that right there in the middle of the page. And that takes you to the Senate vote. You can scroll down right here. You can see all yeas and nays and one not voting that not voting when you group.
It was Michael Bennet who wasn’t there. And if you scroll up a little bit, you can see right there, Lisa Murkowski is the only Republican who voted against it. Otherwise it was a party line vote. So there you go.
You can do this for literally any bill. You just plug in the title and see how the House and Senate voted.
And you should do this regularly to see if your members of Congress are actually reflecting your interest. Because despite what they may say in town halls or on the campaign trail, there’s one way to look to make sure that they’re telling the truth.
Ben Sheehan is a political commentator and digital creator. He specializes in civics education, which is showcased in his latest book, What Does the Constitution Actually Say?: A Non-Boring Guide to How Our Democracy Is Supposed to Work. Check out his Substack, Politics Made Easy.
