Grassroots America - We the People

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Birds of a feather flock together. Geese do this. Starlings do this. And Democrats do this. At GrassrootsPriorities.com, we look for when birds of a feather flock together - and we also notice when they don't. Think of those you know. You are most closely aligned with those who share the principles and values as you. When someone lines up against your principles and values, you know that these fundamental disagreements are critical. If you're a Republican, someone who flies in formation with the Democrats can't represent you. They disagree with you in principles and values. It's important that we see who it is that each legislator disagrees with the most. We highlight these greatest disagreements on our website at the legislator page. Every Democrat disagrees with Republicans the most. Every single one of the sixty-four Texas House Democrats disagree the most with Republicans. You see it here in the disagreements matrix. Based on every record vote taken in the House during regular session, we know this is true. What happens when we bring a Republican leader into this comparison? It looks like this. This Republican leader was one of the House Impeachment Managers - but like every Democrat, he disagrees most with Republicans. Birds of a feather flock together. In fact, over twenty of our Republicans disagree most with Republicans and not Democrats. If you click the button to view a legislator's differences with other representatives, we show you exactly how often they disagree. And if you want to see the actual votes where they disagree, you can click Compare Votes and we show you the facts. Does your representative fly in formation with the Democrats? Find your legislator and see for yourself.

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The bills menu allows you to explore the story behind each of the bills filed during regular session. While you can scroll through the bills, it's better to use the Filter Bills button to narrow down what you want to see. The filter window gives you many options, and you can use multiple filters if you like. You can search for a single bill by name or bill number. Let's use Matt Schaefer's good bill, HB 20, that would have created the border protection unit. When you enter the bill name, GrassrootsPriorities.com will show you all of the bills that contain what you entered. You'll see not just HB 20, but HB 200, HB 201, and so on, because they contain HB 20 in the name of the bill. Let's search for something more complex. Let's look for any GOP priority bill coauthored by Republican Kronda Thimesch that never made it out of committee. 42 bills match that criteria. When you choose to search for someone as a coauthor, it shows you the date they became a coauthor. Notice that there are a lot of dates in May. If we click into the first bill, we see that it was filed in November. Anyone can sign onto a bill as a coauthor after January 17. Will Metcalf signed on as a coauthor on the 22nd of March. The bill was referred to committee in February and never had a public hearing - effectively killing the bill. So why is it deep into May that three people on May 6th decide to then coauthor a dead bill? And that's not the only time that happened. Almost every bill in that list shares the same story - filed early, died in committee, and then in May Thimesch and others signed on as coauthor. Let's look closer at HB 3765. Each bill page shows you what happened to the bill, the caption (or brief description) for the bill, what committees first received the bill, and its authors and coauthors, sponsors and cosponsors. If a bill's author and joint authors (together shown as authors) are all from one party, then it's declared as either a Democrat or Republican bill. If members of both parties on shown as authors, then we consider it a bipartisan bill. Then we see the bill's history. We see the House record votes and Senate votes. And finally, we see those who witness list of those who advocated for or against a bill. When viewing a bill, sometimes you will see a monetary amount attached to it. Since all of our data comes from Texas Legislature Online, the official source of record for the Texas Legislature, these figures displayed come from the fiscal notes issued by the Legislative Budget Bureau. We sum up the totals for the Five-Year Impact and display that amount for you.

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From the Committees menu, you can browse and look into the activities of the House and Senate Committees. If you click into a committee, you can then see who served on the committee and what bills were considered and when. Additionally, it shows you the vote within the committee to move the bill out of committee.

Send a personal message to your State Representative and State Senator at grassrootspriorities.com