The Bipartisanship Index: How the 119th Congress Scores on Working Across the Aisle — Q1 2026

The 119th Congress passed a housing bill 89-10 in the Senate and 390-9 in the House. It also spent 42 days unable to fund the Department of Homeland Security, failing seven consecutive cloture votes along the way. Both happened in the same three-month window. That's the 119th Congress's bipartisanship story: not consistent gridlock, not consistent cooperation — but a pattern that depends almost entirely on the topic in front of the chamber.

CVT's Q1 2026 Bipartisanship Index scores every major vote in the 119th Congress's 2nd session (January 3 – March 27, 2026) by minority-party crossover participation. The result is a data-driven report card covering both chambers, identifying the votes that produced genuine cross-party consensus and the votes that hardened into pure partisan standoffs.

How We Score Bipartisanship

CVT's methodology uses a consistent threshold: a vote counts as bipartisan if at least 5 minority-party senators (or at least 15 minority-party House members) vote with the majority on final passage, cloture, or substantive amendments. Procedural housekeeping votes — motions to adjourn, previous question calls, and routine consent measures — are excluded. The data period covers January 3, 2026 through March 27, 2026. All vote records are drawn from official Senate.gov roll call records and House Clerk XML data.

This methodology captures genuine legislative alignment, not procedural noise. A cloture vote counts because it reflects a real decision to advance legislation. A motion to recess does not.

What Congress Agreed On

The clearest bipartisan story in Q1 2026 is H.R. 6644, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. The bill passed the House 390-9 (Roll Call #57) — roughly 170 House Democrats voting alongside the Republican majority — and cleared the Senate 89-10 (Vote #53). No legislation in the 119th Congress came close to this level of consensus.

The bill's bipartisan margins aren't accidental. The Scott-Warren partnership — a Republican chairman and Democratic ranking member co-managing the legislation — gave both parties equal claim to the outcome. The policy itself targets housing affordability and zoning deregulation in ways that appeal to conservative deregulatory instincts and progressive housing-access goals simultaneously. The result was a rare legislative moment where both sides had something genuine to win.

Where Congress Hit the Partisan Wall

The DHS appropriations battle produced the most consistent partisan deadlock of the session. From February 12 through March 26, the Senate attempted seven cloture votes on H.R. 7147, each failing in essentially the same configuration: Republicans voting approximately 51-54 in favor, Democrats voting 45-47 against. The only Democratic crossover across all seven attempts: Sen. John Fetterman D-PA, who voted with Republicans every time.

The resolution came not through persuasion but through structural removal: the Senate amended H.R. 7147 to zero out ICE and CBP Border Security funding — the core Democratic objection — and passed the modified version by voice vote. No individual senator vote on final DHS passage was recorded. The bipartisan breakthrough on DHS required eliminating the provision that made bipartisanship impossible in the first place.

The Iran War Powers votes follow an equally rigid pattern. Three identical resolutions — S.J.Res. 104 on March 4, S.J.Res. 118 on March 18, and S.J.Res. 116 on March 24 — each failed 47-53, with the same two senators switching sides every time: Sen. Rand Paul R-KY voting Yes (the sole Republican), and Sen. Fetterman voting No (the sole Democrat). Not one other senator changed position across three votes.

The Same Congress, Same Week Paradox

March 27, 2026 is the clearest illustration of Q1's bipartisanship pattern. That morning, the House passed H.R. 7084, the Defending American Property Abroad Act, 247-164 with 41 Democratic crossovers. That evening, the same House passed the DHS Disposition resolution 213-203 with only 3 Democratic crossovers. Fourteen times more Democratic support — in the same chamber, on the same day.

The bills themselves explain the gap. H.R. 7084 protects American-owned property from foreign seizure abroad — a property-rights framing that cuts across party lines. The DHS vote was directly tied to immigration enforcement funding, where Democratic opposition is near-total. Topic, framing, and constituency alignment determined the outcome more than any individual legislator's inclination to cross party lines.

The Individual Bipartisan Champions

Two senators stand out as Q1 2026's most consistent cross-party voters — and they cross in opposite directions. Sen. Fetterman D-PA voted with Republicans at least six times, including every DHS cloture vote and both Iran War Powers resolutions where he voted No (contrary to his Democratic colleagues who voted Yes). Sen. Paul R-KY crossed to the Democratic side three times — all three Iran War Powers resolutions — while maintaining consistent Republican alignment on nearly everything else.

In the House, the most bipartisan individual bloc this session is the 41 House Democrats who voted for H.R. 7084. A separate group of approximately 20 House Democrats crossed on H.R. 1958 (the Deporting Fraudsters Act). For more detail on specific crossover members, see CVT's 119th Congress Flip-Flop Tracker.

Also notable: Sen. Lisa Murkowski R-AK voted No on the SAVE Act's motion to proceed alongside Democrats, making her the lone Republican dissenter. Sen. Martin Heinrich D-NM voted Yes on the Mullin DHS Secretary confirmation while his New Mexico colleague Sen. Ben Ray Luján D-NM voted No — a rare split within the same state's Senate delegation.

What Enables Bipartisanship — And What Kills It

The Q1 2026 data shows consistent patterns in both directions:

What to Watch in Q2 2026

The DHS funding resolution removed ICE and CBP budget lines rather than funding them. A supplemental ICE appropriations request in Q2 would reopen the exact partisan divide that produced seven failed cloture votes. Watch for whether Republican leadership attempts a standalone ICE funding bill and whether the same 51-48 pattern holds.

Congress has now voted three times on Iran War Powers discharge resolutions, with identical results each time. A fourth resolution is possible; no senator has shown any sign of changing position. Sen. Paul R-KY will almost certainly remain the only Republican Yes.

The 20-crossover performance of H.R. 1958 (Deporting Fraudsters Act) suggests a possible template: immigration enforcement bills framed around fraud, crime, or specific bad actors attract more Democratic support than broad enforcement measures. Whether this framing approach is replicated in future immigration legislation — and whether it holds in the Senate — is one of Q2's key legislative tests.

The Senate's ~54% bipartisan rate on substantive votes is a mixed picture. More than half of meaningful Senate votes this quarter produced genuine cross-party cooperation. But the votes that went partisan went completely partisan — near-zero crossovers, rigid configurations, no movement between attempts. The 119th Congress is not uniformly gridlocked. It is selectively gridlocked, in ways that closely track the political identity of the topic at hand.