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What is Congress?
Congress is the legislative branch of the federal government, made up of two chambers: the House of Representatives and the Senate. Both must agree on identical legislation before it can become law.
House of Representatives
435 voting members
Term: 2-year terms, entire chamber up for election every cycle
Represents: Districts drawn by population — states with more people get more seats
- Must originate all revenue (tax) bills
- Sole power to impeach federal officials
- Elects the president if the Electoral College ties
Senate
100 members, 2 per state
Term: 6-year terms, staggered so about a third are up every 2 years
Represents: Equal representation — every state gets the same 2 seats regardless of population
- Tries impeachments and can remove officials by two-thirds vote
- Confirms presidential nominees (Cabinet, judges, ambassadors)
- Ratifies treaties by two-thirds vote
How a bill becomes a law
Every bill Congress passes moves through the same six-step path, from introduction to the president's desk. Click through each stage to see where a bill can stall, change, or move forward.
A bill is introduced
Any member of the House or Senate can introduce a bill. It gets a number (like H.R. 1 or S. 1), a sponsor, and is referred to the committee(s) with jurisdiction over the subject.
Only members of Congress can formally introduce legislation, though the idea can come from anywhere, including a constituent, an agency, or another lawmaker.Only members of Congress can formally introduce legislation, though the idea can come from anywhere, including a constituent, an agency, or another lawmaker.
Frequently asked questions
The Lazy Voter is a free civic data platform that pulls federal election, legislative, and campaign finance data into one place. Instead of digging through separate government websites, you can search a bill, a politician, or a PAC and see who's running, what they've sponsored, and who's funding them, all in plain language.
The Lazy Voter is a nonprofit started by Simon Dao, a recent Computer Science graduate interested in politics. Simon has no ties to any political instutions or governing bodies, he just wants voting data to be as accessible to all. For more information on data usage, checkout the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service
We pull directly from public federal sources: bill text and status from LegiScan and Congress.gov, and campaign contribution and PAC data from the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Records are matched and deduplicated across sources so the same politician or committee only shows up once, even if their name is formatted differently in each dataset.
Congress has two chambers. All 435 House seats are up for election every 2 years, with representatives serving 2-year terms. The Senate has 100 seats split into three staggered classes, so roughly a third of the Senate (33 to 35 seats) is up every 2 years, with senators serving 6-year terms. The president is elected separately, every 4 years. Whichever party holds the most seats in a chamber controls its agenda and committee leadership.
Midterms happen halfway through a president's 4-year term, on the years that don't have a presidential election. The 2026 midterms take place on November 3, 2026: all 435 House seats and 35 Senate seats are on the ballot. Because there's no presidential race to anchor turnout, midterms are often decided by a smaller, more motivated slice of voters, and they can shift control of Congress without changing who's in the White House.
Raw bill text is dense and hard to skim, so we run it through a categorization pipeline that tags each bill by topic (healthcare, defense, taxes, and so on) and pulls out key terms. This is meant to help you scan faster, not replace reading the actual bill. We always link back to the primary source so you can verify anything for yourself.
Our pipeline syncs regularly with LegiScan, Congress.gov, and the FEC, so bill statuses and contribution totals stay close to real time. The Lazy Voter is, and will stay, completely free. We built this because voters deserve easy access to information their elected officials are already required to disclose. For more information on our data usage checkout our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service
Please let us know. Public data is often messy or inconsistently formatted at the source, and matching records across FEC, Bioguide, and LegiScan isn't perfect. Email us at SimonNDao13@gmail.com with a link to the page in question and we'll take a look.