Bridging in the wild -- unlikely House allies collaborate to curb Congressional stock trading

I sometimes field concerns from people who worry that Bridge Grades rewards those who compromise their positions toward a “mushy middle.”

I’ll remind them that collaboration and compromise are totally different concepts. Compromise requires conceding a position to accept a mutually beneficial agreement. Collaboration, instead, is about building consensus solutions based on overlapping common areas of interest, even when ideologies differ.

A great example is the collaboration from earlier this year between ideological opposites, Senators Bernie Sanders and Josh Hawley, who partnered to introduce a bill to cap consumer credit card interest rates. This is what collaboration without compromise looks like.

And, now we have another great example with the September 3 introduction of the Restore Trust in Congress Act. A bipartisan crew of 17 House Representatives teamed up to introduce the bill “to prohibit Members of Congress and their spouses and dependents from owning or trading stocks.”

Builders Movement produced a great Instagram video to celebrate this collaboration that features two of the bill’s co-sponsors—Rep. Tim Burchett (TN-02) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14)—who each spoke at a press conference hosted by the bill’s sponsors. In the video, both Representatives acknowledge how little in common they share ideologically, yet each displays civility and respect toward one another while sharing conviction in their common pursuit of fairness and transparency in Congressional financial dealings.

Video Transcript:

Rep. Tim Burchett: “Look, we’re public servants. We’re stewards of the community. Nobody is above the law. The American taxpayer always gets the short end of the stick. Congress seems to profit at their expense. This body has been enriching itself on the taxpayers’ dime and, dagummit, it’s got to stop. And I’m proud of all these people up here. I don’t agree with some of these people on anything. If Cortez told me that the sun was coming up tomorrow, I’d probably go out to check it out. But, she’s my buddy. And, I’m proud to stand up on this stage with that. And now I will introduce my friend Cortez to come up and speak. Thanks, Cortez.”

<fist bump as he passes the mic>

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “Thank you, Tim. It’s very rare, I feel in Washington, that when we bring multiple stakeholders and folks get together to negotiate on a bill, that you leave that room feeling like the bill got better. But, I genuinely feel in this process that in putting all of our bills together we’ve actually ended up with a product that is legitimately stronger than the sum of its parts. And, it is one of those rare moments where I feel like Washington is working the way that it’s supposed to work. But, I also think it is proof that things can work here. And, when we put our disagreements aside, of which of course there may be many, but we focus on the things that we have in common, we can make our country better, we can make this institution better, and we can increase and earn the faith of the American people which is really genuinely at the core of our work here.”

Voters are all for this kind of collaboration. Builders’ Instagram post alone has 59,000 likes and counting.

Our Bridge Grades scoring system rewards this sort of cross-party collaboration, offering points for authoring and sponsoring bills across party lines as they have done.

Our most recently published Bridge Grades for Congress, based on data compiled in August, show an interesting mix of grades amongst the original 17 co-sponsors who introduced the bill (there are now 78).

Note the Bridge Grades of the two reps featured in the video. Rep. Burchett’s current low B (44.4) and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s high C (42.3) are both right on the cusp of the “bridger” / “divider” threshold—indicating they are both right in the middle of the pack relative to the full roster in the House.

Bridge Grades will update periodically over the course of the 119th Congress. By the time we reach next year’s mid-term elections, each Congress member’s grades will have sharpened further—as scores and grades are based on rolling data from legislative record and rhetoric from January 3, 2025 to date, and by then we’ll have more than twice as much data on their governance track-record as we do now.

The bipartisan collaboration cited above will tally bridge points for the Reps who’ve sponsored these consensus solutions, including Burkett and Ocasio-Cortez, and it will be interesting to see how their scores move in our next update (target: November).

Bridge Grades is a citizen-led public utility. Our ambition is to build a trust-worthy, transparent, and durable system protected from big money or special interests. First principles: open-source, crowdsourced, and independently governed. We are part way on a multi-year journey to get there. We are a fiscally sponsored project of Mediators Foundation and all contributions to Bridge Grades are tax-deductible and DAF eligible.

So, what is the Bridge Grade of your representative? Check www.bridgegrades.org and find out.