Nine names run the House and Senate floors: the Speaker, the two chamber leaders, and the four whips who count votes for each party, plus their Senate counterparts. This audit holds all nine to one yardstick — floor attendance, bills personally sponsored that became law, the industries funding their campaigns, and anything on the public record — no matter which party they answer to. Reporting on documents, not legal advice.
The pattern
Republicans and Democrats land in almost the same place on this card — a 59 average for the five Republicans, a 67.5 average for the four Democrats — and that gap is explained entirely by attendance and bill counts, not by donors or scandal. The two cleanest records on paper, Thune and Clark, sit in different parties. The two most concentrated donor relationships, Barrasso’s energy money and Schumer’s Wall Street money, also sit in different parties. Nobody in either party is dirty by a wide margin, and nobody is clean by one either.
What the data does show clearly: donor concentration tracks committee assignment, not corruption in any provable sense. Barrasso is the nation’s #1 recipient of coal and mining money and sits on energy and public-lands committees; Emmer built the House’s crypto caucus and its biggest joint fundraising PAC pulled 80% of its money from a single pair of crypto executives. That correlation is worth printing. It is not, by itself, a crime.
The scored card
The usual warning: attendance percentages, bill counts, and donor dollar figures are measurements, each sourced to GovTrack, Congress.gov, or OpenSecrets/FEC filings. The final grade is not. It is the journal’s editorial blend of those measurements into a 0–100 judgment of the whole record: 100 for a leader with a strong record and no red flags, 0 for one actively compromised. We publish the inputs so you can argue with the math.
Scale: 85+ strong record, no red flags · 65–84 solid record, real but limited questions · 45–64 mixed — real conflicts alongside real output · 25–44 weak record, major concerns · under 25 actively derelict or compromised.
Mike Johnson (R-LA)
Speaker of the HouseMissed 3.5% of roll-call votes since 2017, worse than the House's 2.1% career median — though the Speakership trades floor votes for gavel-and-agenda power a raw attendance number doesn't capture. Of 74 bills he has personally sponsored, five became law, mostly pre-Speakership Louisiana measures. His top donor industry, oil and gas, has given his campaigns more than $330,000 over his career. In August 2025 the Campaign Legal Center filed a still-unadjudicated complaint alleging he used campaign funds to cover a Washington rent bill — an allegation, not a finding.
Steve Scalise (R-LA)
House Majority LeaderThe weakest attendance record on this card — 5.7% of roll-call votes missed since 2008, nearly triple the chamber median — though a share of that is his 2017 shooting recovery and a 2023 blood-cancer treatment, not absenteeism by choice. Top donor sectors are oil and gas (over $368,000 career) and health professionals (over $1 million in a single two-year cycle), and he has championed offshore-drilling expansion for Louisiana's energy sector throughout his tenure. No criminal charges or ethics findings turned up against him personally.
Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)
House Minority LeaderAttendance sits exactly at the House's 2.1% career median, and he has personally sponsored 11 bills that became law — a stronger raw legislative output than most of his leadership peers, including several in the majority. Securities and investment is his largest documented donor industry, at nearly $600,000 in a single cycle. No criminal charges, indictments, or ethics findings appear in the public record.
Tom Emmer (R-MN)
House Majority WhipA near-median attendance record (2.6% missed), but the number worth sitting with is this: the joint-fundraising PAC tied to Emmer's leadership operation took in $433,800 from the cryptocurrency industry — four-fifths of it from a single pair of donors, Gemini's Winklevoss twins — while Emmer personally authored the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act and helped shepherd the GENIUS Act through the House. That is as direct a line between donor money and sponsored legislation as exists anywhere in this batch. No criminal or ethics findings against him personally.
Katherine Clark (D-MA)
House Minority WhipThe best attendance record of the nine — 1.3% of votes missed, better than the House median — and seven personally sponsored bills signed into law, a solid output for a member without a gavel. No dominant donor industry or ethics/criminal finding turned up in the public record, which is itself notable in a field where every other leader here has at least one large, concentrated funding relationship.
John Thune (R-SD)
Senate Majority LeaderOne of the two best attendance records in this group — 0.8% missed, well under the Senate's 2.8% career median — and by far the most prolific legislator among the nine by raw count: 46 bills he personally sponsored have become law across two decades in office. Top donor sectors are securities/investment and lobbying. No criminal charges or ethics findings against him.
Chuck Schumer (D-NY)
Senate Minority LeaderTied for the best attendance record here (0.8% missed) and the single highest legislative output of anyone on this card — 64 personally sponsored bills signed into law. Set against that: no one else in this group has as large or as concentrated a donor relationship with one sector. Securities and investment firms have given his campaigns more than $10.4 million since 1989, led by Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase. He has also drawn Senate Ethics Committee and bar-grievance complaints — still unresolved — over 2020 remarks aimed at two Supreme Court justices that he retracted the next day.
John Barrasso (R-WY)
Senate Majority WhipMissed 3.5% of votes, worse than the Senate median, and was the second-most-absent senator with 10-plus years in office as of 2024. His donor profile is the most concentrated in this entire batch: OpenSecrets ranks him the #1 recipient nationally from coal mining, mining broadly, and natural-gas transmission, and the #2 recipient from oil and gas and electric utilities — while a quarter of the bills he personally sponsors fall under Public Lands and Natural Resources, and another 21% under Energy. No criminal or ethics findings against him.
Dick Durbin (D-IL)
Senate Minority WhipA better-than-median attendance record (1.7% missed) and the second-highest bill count in this group — 48 signed into law across a Senate career that ends with his 2026 retirement. Lawyers and the legal sector are a consistent top donor category across his career, though no single dollar figure could be independently confirmed. A 2013 complaint filed with the Senate Select Committee on Ethics, alleging he improperly pressured the IRS to scrutinize conservative nonprofit groups, was never adjudicated to a public finding.
A middling grade, and a fair one. Nobody on this card is clean of a large donor relationship, and nobody is buried by one either. The attendance gap between best (Clark and Thune/Schumer, under 1%) and worst (Scalise, 5.7%) is real, but so is the context behind the worst number on the list. This is a record of nine people doing a hard, compromised job with uneven amounts of both effort and entanglement — not a scandal sheet, and not a clean bill of health.
The last word
Two findings matter more than the number. First: donor concentration in this dataset consistently maps onto committee assignment, not misconduct — Barrasso and energy, Emmer and crypto, Schumer and Wall Street, Johnson and Scalise and Gulf-state oil and gas. That is Congress working exactly as its committee system was designed to work, for better and worse; it is not evidence of a crime, and we don’t print it as one. Second: not one of the nine carries an actual criminal charge or conviction. What exists instead is a handful of unadjudicated ethics complaints on both sides of the aisle — real filings, no findings, and we report them as exactly that.
Ubi non est lex, non est transgressio — where there is no law, there is no transgression. Grading Congress by an honest yardstick doesn’t require finding a crime on every desk. It requires printing what’s actually there, attributing it precisely, and letting the reader decide what a “conflict of interest” is worth at the ballot box.
This is the pilot entry in a new series. Individual-member audits will expand from here; the institutional Senate and House scorecards — graded against Article I itself, the same way the Grievance Audit was graded against the Declaration — are next.
Sources & methodology:
- Voting attendance and bills-enacted figures: GovTrack.us member report cards, retrieved July 2026
- Donor industry and dollar figures: OpenSecrets.org member profiles and industry breakdowns; FEC.gov filings
- Campaign Legal Center complaint against Speaker Johnson: Campaign Legal Center
- Ethics complaints regarding Sen. Schumer’s 2020 remarks and Sen. Durbin’s 2013 IRS-related complaint: contemporaneous reporting, Senate Select Committee on Ethics filings
- The grades are the journal’s editorial judgment; every underlying factual claim above is independently sourced as cited.