Republicans in Congress say a lot of things. They say they'll protect Social Security. They say they'll lower your costs. They say they stand for freedom.

We don't judge them by what they say. We judge them by three things they can't spin: the votes they cast, the things they did, and the things they could have stopped and didn't. Doing nothing is a choice too. A member of Congress who watches something happen and has the power to stop it owns it.

We've spent more than a year writing that record down, one candidate at a time. Here's what it adds up to, issue by issue. Every point links to the evidence.

Your health and your retirement

1. Health care should cost more and be harder to get. The Republican budget bill cut roughly $1 trillion from Medicaid. Then 197 Republicans we track voted either to block an extension of the tax credits that kept Obamacare plans affordable or for a House bill that left them out, the credits ran out, and premiums jumped for millions of people going into 2026. On August 31, Trump's health agency cancelled coverage for more than 760,000 people it called "phantoms." If it got you wrong, JD Vance says you can appeal.

2. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security should be cut. Speaker Mike Johnson said it out loud: these programs "have to be adjusted and fixed," and "We have a plan to do that next year." Even Republican Sen. Josh Hawley said that kind of talk is "usually code for 'cut.'" The Republican Study Committee, a caucus of more than 170 House Republicans, has already put out a budget that raises the Social Security retirement age. Tom Cole has pushed a bill for seven Congresses that would hand Social Security to 13 appointees and force Congress to vote yes or no on their plan, with no changes allowed. And twelve members of Congress posed for photos with a group that bragged about being the first seniors group to back privatizing Social Security.

Your money

3. The rich and big business should pay less, and the rest of us should pay more. The same budget bill that cut Medicaid cut taxes for the top 1% by about $1 trillion. In 2025, 706 big, profitable corporations paid a federal tax rate of just 10.4%, the lowest in 40 years, and 114 of them paid nothing at all. Add up the tax cuts, the lost health insurance help and the price hikes, and every income group pays more in 2026 except the top 1%.

4. Tariffs that raise your prices are good. A tariff is a tax, and Trump himself has as good as admitted Americans pay it. House Republicans changed the rules to block votes that could have ended his tariffs. When the Supreme Court threw out Trump's emergency tariffs, Amazon, Apple, Ford and Nike started collecting refunds. The families who paid the higher prices at the register got nothing. Now Trump is putting new tariffs on 60 countries, and Republicans in Congress are still helping.

5. Food assistance should be harder to get. About 39% of the people on SNAP are children. Since Republicans passed their budget bill, 4 million fewer Americans get food stamps while unemployment hasn't moved and grocery prices keep climbing. Republicans say that's the economy getting better. Reporters who drove 1,000 miles through four Republican states found what it actually looks like: a woman selling her blood twice a week with $3.78 in the bank.

6. Billionaires should get to run the government. Republicans in Congress stood aside while Elon Musk, an unelected billionaire, took a chainsaw to federal agencies with DOGE. DOGE is gone, but the damage lives on. Congress's own watchdog found the government spent about $6.7 billion paying federal workers not to work under DOGE's buyout, and never set up a way to track the bill. Now Musk's super PAC is spending $5.1 million on the midterms, almost all of it in races with Republicans on this site.

Your kids, your air, your water

7. Public schools should be drained, and the money sent to private schools. America's first voucher programs were built after Brown v. Board of Education: seven Southern states paid public money so white families could send their kids to private schools instead of integrated public ones. The Supreme Court struck down Virginia's version in 1964. Republicans just wrote the first national voucher in American history into their budget bill, with no limit on what it can drain from the Treasury. Where vouchers have already been tried, the money goes to families who were already in private school: 95% of Arkansas voucher users never went to a public school. Meanwhile, House Republicans on the education committee voted to advance bills breaking up the Department of Education, and Trump's Justice Department walked away from desegregation cases covering 56 school districts, often without asking a judge whether the discrimination had ever been fixed.

8. Big business should be able to do whatever it wants to the environment. Trump's EPA decided to stop counting the deaths avoided when it sets rules for two of the most common air pollutants. It has exempted more than 70 chemical plants from a rule that was supposed to cut their neighbors' cancer risk from toxic air by 96%. And it rewrote the rule that kept endangered animals alive. Republicans in Congress have spent years trying to stop the EPA from protecting the climate at all.

9. Guns matter more than people. Sixty-three House Republicans told the Supreme Court the AR-15 deserves protection because it is a military weapon. More than 40 Republicans asked the Attorney General not to defend a 92-year-old law that makes people register silencers and short-barreled rifles. On gun deaths, the United States is an outlier among rich countries, and Republicans have chosen to keep it that way.

10. The government should control women's bodies. In the 18 states that banned abortion at six weeks or earlier, the death rate among women with an ectopic pregnancy is now nearly double the rate in states that didn't. Trump's Justice Department is eyeing an 1873 law to cut off abortion pills, even in states where abortion is legal. And a growing part of the right wants to put women in jail for having one. Most Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Republicans don't care.

Your rights

11. Voting should be harder, especially for some of us. Republicans keep pushing the SAVE Act, which would force citizens to prove citizenship in person to register. About 146 million American citizens don't have a passport, and as many as 69 million women who took their spouse's name have a birth certificate that doesn't match it. It's a fix for a problem that doesn't exist. Trump even killed the signing of a bipartisan housing bill to hold it hostage for his voting crackdown. And his citizenship database, the one the Supreme Court just let him use on voters, was wrong at least 81% of the time in one Missouri county.

12. An unaccountable secret police force is fine. On January 7, 2026, an ICE agent in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Good, an American citizen and mother of three. In one week this July, ICE agents killed two more men, and neither was the person they were looking for. ProPublica counted 506 Americans held by immigration agents, at least 70 of them children and teens. Trump's team says it is deporting "the worst of the worst." DHS's former chief statistician found only 1 in 5 people deported had a criminal conviction. And Republicans in Congress handed ICE roughly $75 billion more for detention and deportation.

13. Freedom of speech and religion are for some people. Marsha Blackburn says government pressure on speech is "what authoritarian regimes do." A professor was fired hours after she tagged his employer in a post on X, and he's suing her. Andrew Clyde posted "Denaturalize, deport, repeat" about American Muslims. Michael Cloud joined the first caucus CAIR has ever called an anti-Muslim hate group. And federal agents sat in on church services and union meetings during an immigration surge.

Who they actually serve

14. Donald Trump is king. Congress is supposed to check the president. Instead, as of September 2025, 89% of Republicans in Congress voted with him 100% of the time. When Trump moved to cancel nearly $1 billion Congress had already approved, timed so Congress couldn't stop it, Congress's own watchdog said that was illegal. Mike Johnson's answer was to keep cancelling House workdays whenever a vote might embarrass Trump. From January 1 through September 16, the House held a recorded vote on just 72 days.

15. Powerful men named in the Epstein files should be protected. In July 2025, House Republicans blocked a vote to release the Epstein files by a single vote, 211 to 210. They only voted to release them after Trump reversed himself and told them to, and even then Clay Higgins voted no, the only person in Congress who did. When the files came out, UN human rights experts said some of what they showed may meet the bar for crimes against humanity.

16. Corruption is OK when it's theirs. Every House Republican voted to ban members of Congress from trading stocks. Seven of them kept trading anyway. Trump endorsed Diana Harshbarger on a Monday and pardoned her husband that Friday. He'd been sentenced to 48 months for swapping a cheap, unapproved ingredient into medicine for kidney dialysis patients. Kristi Noem's agency agreed to pay her donor's firm $108 million for a jet listed at under $90 million, on her last morning in office.

17. Constituents should be ignored. Donors are who matter. Richard Hudson, who runs House Republicans' campaign arm, told his members to stop holding in-person town halls. John Carter hasn't held one since 2013. When 150 of his constituents held one for him, they brought a life-size cardboard cutout. The billionaires, on the other hand, get heard: AIPAC and its allies spent $8 million to take out a sitting Republican congressman who wouldn't fall in line.

18. Power matters more than character. Brandon Herrera, discussing on a podcast a UFC fighter's call to take away women's right to vote, said: "I'm not saying that the 19th amendment was a mistake. I'm just saying the country went to shit after." Republicans spent 2024 calling him too extreme for Congress. Now that a seat has come open, Mike Johnson is raising money for him. Max Miller is under an ethics investigation over domestic violence allegations. Johnson calls him a "great member of Congress." Miller's PAC gave $70,000 to 16 Republicans in tight races, and exactly one gave it back.

War and the world

19. Getting dragged into Israel's war with Iran is fine. Congress never voted to authorize Trump's Iran war. In March, House Republicans voted down a War Powers Resolution ordering U.S. forces out, and when the House finally passed one, Senate Republicans killed it by one vote. At least 624 American service members have been wounded. Six months of war has cost the average household about $1,200, with gas up more than $1 a gallon. Israel had pushed American presidents to attack Iran for years and finally found one who would. Most Americans never wanted this war.

20. It's OK to send money to Russia while Russia helps Iran. A week into the war, AP reported that Russia had given Iran information that could help it strike American warships and aircraft. Days later, Trump's Treasury Department suspended sanctions for 30 days on Russian oil already loaded on tankers to calm oil prices. Ukraine's president said that could hand Russia about $10 billion for its war. Treasury then kept extending the waiver, through June 17. Republicans in Congress let it happen.

What the record shows

Republicans in Congress want all of us to suffer.

Sources

This post draws on our own reporting, linked above, and the sources cited on every Republican report card on this site.