House Members Ranked by Effectiveness: The CEL Data, July 2026 Roster

One ruler for 435 members

The Legislative Effectiveness Score is the closest thing to a batting average that exists for the House. It counts a member's own bills, weights them by substance, and tracks them through committee, the floor, and the president's desk. Fifteen metrics, one number, chamber average normalized to 1.0 (CEL, 118th Congress Highlights, 2025). It does not count viral hearing clips. It does not count fundraising emails. A member who dominates every news cycle and enacts nothing scores near zero, and several do.

The Center for Effective Lawmaking is not a partisan shop. It is a joint academic project of Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia's Frank Batten School, directed by the political scientists Craig Volden and Alan Wiseman, and it has scored every member of every Congress since the 93rd on the identical fifteen-point scale (CEL, 118th Congress Highlights, 2025). The instrument treats a bill's journey as five gates: introduction, action in committee, passage out of committee, passage on the House floor, and enactment into law. It weights the bills themselves into three tiers, commemorative, substantive, and substantive and significant, so that renaming a post office cannot inflate a member the way a landmark statute does. The final number is normalized so the average member of the chamber scores exactly 1.0, which is why a 6.793 is not a percentage or a grade. It is a multiple. Sam Graves did roughly seven times the lawmaking work of the median House member (Center for Effective Lawmaking, 2025).

This report applies one filter to that data: the member must still hold a House seat in July 2026. Every name above was checked against GovTrack's live roster of the 119th Congress and the House Clerk's official vacancy list. That filter matters more than usual this cycle. The House carried multiple vacancies into the summer of 2026, including the seat left by the January 2026 death of Doug LaMalfa, the January 2026 resignation of Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the November 2025 resignation of Mikie Sherrill after her election as governor of New Jersey (Ballotpedia, Special Elections to the 119th Congress, 2026; House Clerk, Vacancies, 2026). None of those vacancies touched the members ranked here. Several ranked members lost 2026 primaries or redistricting fights but continue to hold their seats through January 2027, which is the standard for inclusion: a lost primary is not a vacated seat. The scoreboard measures the seat that is occupied now, not the seat that will be occupied next January.

What the top of the table shows

Sam Graves posted an LES of 6.793, nearly seven times the chamber average. The mechanics were unglamorous: 17 sponsored bills, 8 passed the House, 4 signed as standalone law, including major transportation measures moved through the committee he chairs (Office of Rep. Graves, 2025). Graves is not a household name. He does not trend. He runs the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and in the 118th Congress he ran it into the statute books more efficiently than any other member ran anything. That is the entire point of the instrument: it finds the members who convert a committee gavel into law and separates them from the members who merely hold one.

Don Bacon's 6.001 came with a different signature. CEL rated him the single best member of the House at getting his standalone bills substantially incorporated into other members' laws, which is how most lawmaking actually finishes now (Office of Rep. Bacon, 2025). Very little of the modern legislative agenda passes as freestanding bills. It passes folded into appropriations packages, defense authorizations, and omnibus vehicles, and the members who understand that plumbing outperform the members who do not. GovTrack's incorporation-inclusive counter credits Bacon with 9 enacted bills, the most of anyone on this list, and CEL scored him 36.1 in the Defense policy area against 10.6 for the strongest Democrat, Mark Takano (Center for Effective Lawmaking, 2025).

The Democratic side of the table was built entirely in the minority, which makes it more impressive, not less. CEL's data shows majority-party members outscore minority members on average in every Congress, because the majority controls the floor calendar and the committee gavels that move bills. Yet Joaquin Castro, Joe Neguse, and Dina Titus all cleared the top of their party, and Neguse reached seventh in the whole chamber with 108 introduced bills and 8 enactments (Office of Rep. Neguse, 2025; GovTrack, 2024 Report Cards). Reaching the top decile of a 435-member chamber while your party cannot schedule a single vote is a harder achievement than topping the same table with the gavel in your hand. CEL also found that women in the House minority were among the most effective members of their party, a finding McBath, Tokuda, Titus, and Norton illustrate by name (CEL, 118th Congress Highlights, 2025).

The subscores under the rank

The per-member meters below the ranking pull the composite apart into the components CEL and GovTrack actually publish, and the shapes are as informative as the totals. Graves and Bacon both run high on every bar: high LES, meaningful introduction counts, near-perfect House-passage rates, and enactment tallies at or near the top of the field. That is what a chairmanship converted into law looks like. Neguse runs the opposite profile, a volume machine at 108 introductions whose 8 enactments came from casting a wide net in the minority (GovTrack, 2024 Report Cards). Young Kim's meters show the rarest shape of all: 16 of her 39 introduced bills advanced past committee to the floor, one of the highest advancement rates in the chamber, even though only 1 finished as law (Center for Effective Lawmaking, 2025).

The bottom five invert every meter. Jim Jordan's introduction bar sits at 4, his enactment bar at 0, and the gap between his committee chairmanship and his output is the single largest structural mismatch in the data (GovTrack, 2024 Report Cards; CEL, 118th Congress Highlights, 2025). Al Green's introduction bar sits at 47, the tallest in the bottom group, and his enactment bar still reads zero. The meters make the argument the rank only summarizes: introducing bills and passing them are different skills, and only one of them shows up in the statute books.

The talent drain the ranking cannot show

Four of the twenty highest-rated performers of the 118th Congress are gone, and the ranking above is weaker for it. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the fourth-ranked Republican with an LES of 4.924, retired. John Curtis, fifth at 4.293, moved to the Senate. Marcus Molinaro, seventh at 3.951, lost his seat in 2024. Sheila Jackson Lee, who held one of the longest Exceeds Expectations streaks ever measured, died in July 2024 (CEL, 118th Congress Highlights, 2025; Washington Informer, 2025). CEL flagged this pattern explicitly: the members who know how to pass laws keep leaving, through retirement, ambition, or death, and the chamber's lawmaking capacity leaves with them.

This is not a partisan drain. The four departed came from both caucuses and left by four different exits, retirement, promotion to the Senate, electoral defeat, and death, which is exactly why it should worry anyone who cares about a functioning House regardless of which party runs it. Effective lawmaking is a learned craft. It takes multiple terms to understand committee jurisdiction, the appropriations calendar, and the incorporation plumbing that Bacon mastered, and when a proven practitioner leaves, the institution does not automatically replace the skill. CEL's longitudinal data shows that freshman-term performance predicts a career, so the chamber can see its future lawmakers early, but it cannot manufacture them on demand. The 119th Congress will get its own scores in 2027. The open question is who fills the vacuum, and with Don Bacon now retiring at the end of this Congress, the drain the ranking documents is still running.

What the benchmark system actually rewards

CEL does not grade every member against the same expectation, and that design decision is why this report can compare a ten-term chairman with a first-term backbencher without cheating either. Each member gets a Benchmark Score predicting their LES from seniority, majority or minority status, and committee position; a member who beats that prediction by 50 percent or more is rated Exceeds Expectations (CEL, 118th Congress Highlights, 2025). Three findings from the 118th release deserve to be quoted against the conventional wisdom. The influence of committees continues to decline as power centralizes in majority leadership, which CEL warns undermines expertise and the chamber's total lawmaking capacity. Freshman-term performance strongly predicts a member's effectiveness for the rest of their career, which makes the Lawler, Kiggans, Tokuda, and Vasquez ratings above worth watching. And effective lawmaking correlates with seeking coalition partners across party lines, in CEL's words, not with ideological purity in either direction (UVA Batten School, 2025).

The interest-area scores tell the same story at higher resolution. In the Defense policy area, CEL scored Bacon at 36.1 against 10.6 for the top Democrat, Mark Takano, numbers that came from bills moved, not from committee titles held (Office of Rep. Bacon, 2025). Danny Davis's welfare-policy ranking is the same kind of finding on the Democratic side. Specialization, measured bill by bill, is where much of the House's real work hides.

Coalition building is the hidden variable

The finding CEL keeps returning to, and the one most at odds with the incentive structure of modern politics, is that effective lawmakers seek partners across the aisle. The correlation runs in a direction cable television would not predict: the members who enact the most are not the purest partisans but the ones who assemble bipartisan coalitions around specific bills (UVA Batten School, 2025). James Baker's old maxim about competence beating loyalty has a legislative analogue here, and the data on cosponsorship shows it in reverse. GovTrack recorded that just 6 percent of the bills Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez cosponsored came from non-Democrats, one of the most partisan cosponsorship records measured, and her enacted-law count for the 118th Congress was zero (GovTrack, 2024 Report Cards). That is not a coincidence the instrument invented. It is the mechanism the instrument exposes.

The members at the top of the table did the opposite. Bacon's incorporation record required other members, many of them Democrats, to carry his language on their vehicles. Neguse's 108 introductions in the minority only produced 8 laws because some of them attracted Republican cosponsors willing to move them. The House rewards the member who can count to 218 across the aisle and punishes the member who can only count within the caucus, and the LES puts a number on that ancient truth. This is the part of the ranking that should unsettle partisans of both directions equally. The instrument does not care about ideology. It cares about arithmetic, and the arithmetic favors the coalition builder.

What zero means, and what it does not

The bottom five are current members whose 118th Congress record shows zero sponsored bills becoming law by GovTrack's count, which includes language incorporated into other measures. Within that group, the ranking runs by raw output: Al Green introduced 47 bills that went nowhere, Jim Jordan introduced 4. Jordan's case is the starkest in the data because he chaired the Judiciary Committee, and committee chairs are structurally positioned to convert bills into law at the highest rate in the chamber (GovTrack, 2024 Report Cards; CEL, 118th Congress Highlights, 2025).

Honesty requires the other side of that coin. CEL's own methodology notes that a low score does not automatically mean a bad legislator; some members define their job as oversight, constituent service, or stopping bills, none of which this instrument measures. Thomas Massie enacts nothing by design. The scoreboard does not care about the design. It records what passed. Note also that the two instruments disagree at the margins: Titus, Norton, Meeks, and Davis earn strong CEL marks from bills that advanced without finishing, while GovTrack's stricter enactment counter shows zero. Both numbers are printed here because both are true.

The honest conclusion is that this ranking measures one thing precisely rather than everything vaguely. It does not tell you who fought hardest, who represented their district most faithfully, or who stopped the worst ideas from becoming law. It tells you whose bills moved and whose did not, and it tells you that with academic-grade rigor across an identical scale for every member of both parties. A voter who values oversight over legislation is free to weigh Jim Jordan's four sponsored bills differently than this ranking does. What that voter cannot honestly do is claim the number is wrong. Four is four. Zero is zero. The 119th Congress will be scored on the same ruler in 2027, and the members ranked here will find out whether their 118th records were a plateau or a floor.