The Gate Has Favorites: Who Actually Wins the House Amendment Game

By James · June 30, 2026 · ~10 minute read · Data: the leg.pub legislative record, updated continuously; counts as of June 30, 2026

Sheila Jackson Lee holds a record nobody tracks. She filed 329 floor amendments with the House Rules Committee across her last five Congresses, and she pushed 114 of them through the gate to a floor vote. Nobody else has matched that number in our data, which covers every Rules Committee amendment table since 2015. She died in office on July 19, 2024, still filing (Washington Post obituary). Watch who is chasing her record, and you learn how the modern House works.

Chasing her are two very different politicians. Scott Perry sits second at 106, a Freedom Caucus past chairman who filed more amendments than any member in the dataset, 443 of them. Josh Gottheimer sits third at 100, a Problem Solvers co-founder who wins by recruiting cosponsors and picking unobjectionable fights. The record is migrating, in other words, from committee workhorses toward insurgents and brokers.

We ranked all 780 members who led at least one amendment since the 114th Congress. We then joined the results to the membership rolls of five major caucuses. The findings reshuffle the conventional wisdom about who gets heard on the House floor.

The all-time leaderboard

Made in order means the Rules Committee approved an amendment for a floor vote. It is the whole game for a rank-and-file member; the committee now kills roughly four filings in five. Here is the leaderboard for lead sponsors since 2015, counting every bill that moved through Rules, not just the defense bills we covered in our FY27 NDAA analysis.

Look at rows two, four, five, and nine. Four belong to the House Freedom Caucus, a bloc of 31 members that markets itself as the enemy of leadership-run floors. Ogles compiled his 92 wins in just two Congresses; he arrived in 2023. Boebert tells the sharpest version of the story. She filed 191 amendments in the 117th Congress under the Democratic majority, 86 of them against the Build Back Better reconciliation bill, and got zero made in order. The gavel then flipped, and she went 67 for 168 in the 118th and 30 for 51 so far in the 119th. Same member, same tactics, opposite gate.

Volume is one path. Efficiency is another, and it belongs to a different type entirely. Set a floor of 40 filings, meaning we rank only members with at least 40 career submissions, and the top of the table turns over completely:

Gone are the mass filers. These are members who worked narrow committee lanes and asked for winnable things. Note the eras, though. Most of the ten set their records in the 116th and 117th Congresses, when the Rules Committee still approved half of what it saw, and four have since left the House. Buchanan, Kiggans, and Bergman are the exceptions; they built their rates against today's tighter gate and have gone a combined 67 for 100 this Congress.

The 119th belongs to the gatekeepers

Sort the current Congress alone and the leaderboard turns monochrome. Republicans hold every one of the top ten slots: Austin Scott of Georgia leads with 38 made in order, then Boebert with 30, Kat Cammack with 28, Perry and Buchanan and Jen Kiggans with 27 each. The best Democrat sits eleventh. She is Emily Randall of Washington, a freshman who belongs to both the Progressive Caucus and the New Democrats, and she has pushed 17 amendments through a Republican Rules Committee, more than members with two decades of seniority.

Austin Scott deserves a closer look, because his edge is structural. He sits on the Rules Committee itself. So do several other names clustered near the top, and their numbers this Congress read like a confession:

Houchin has never lost this Congress. Norman and Langworthy haven't either. The committee's nine Republicans convert at 57 percent while the chamber's other Republicans manage 39. Its four Democrats convert at 8.5 percent, and Mary Gay Scanlon has gone 0 for 31. Membership on the committee grants a Republican a fast lane; it grants a Democrat a better view of the wall.

Norma Torres proves the lane runs in both directions. She sat on Rules under the Democratic majority and converted 26 of 29 amendments in the 117th Congress, a 90 percent rate. She then lost the seat when the majority flipped. Her record this Congress: 0 for 41.

Remember also how the Republicans on that panel got there. McCarthy handed Rules seats to Norman, Roy, and Freedom Caucus ally Thomas Massie in January 2023 as a price of his speakership, part of a package Pew described at the time as shifting power "away from the speaker's office and toward committee chairs and rank-and-file members" (Pew Research). The concession outlived him. Norman and Roy kept their seats into the 119th, and the amendment ledger above is what the concession bought.

Caucus trends: each majority hits the other side's flank hardest

We joined every member's record to the current rosters of five caucuses, then followed those same members back through six Congresses. Cells show amendments filed → made in order, with the made-in-order share in parentheses:

Four trends stand out.

Majorities punish the opposing flank hardest, and the pattern is symmetric. Read the 117th column: Democrats gave mainstream Republicans 23 percent and gave the Freedom Caucus 6. Read the 119th column: Republicans give Problem Solver Democrats 16 percent, other Democrats 10, and the Progressive Caucus 5. Each Rules majority sorts the minority by ideology and prices the far end out first. Fifty-five Progressive Caucus members have filed this Congress and gotten nothing; no Republican Problem Solver has been shut out.

The Freedom Caucus stopped protesting the game and started winning it. The bloc holds 7 percent of the House and has taken 209 of the 1,289 made-in-order slots this Congress, 16 percent of everything. Its members average 6.7 wins each against 3.8 for other Republicans. The mechanism is volume plus position: HFC members filed 677 amendments this Congress, more than twice the per-member pace of their colleagues, and two of them help run the gate itself. Their per-amendment rate still trails the rest of the conference, 31 percent against 41. Rules trims their pile harder; the pile is simply enormous.

Progressives responded to exclusion by filing more, which is the lottery-ticket trap. The Progressive Caucus cohort filed 896 amendments in the 117th Congress and won 61 percent of the time. It has filed 2,159 this Congress, the most of any group in this analysis, and wins 5 percent of the time. Rashida Tlaib runs 3 for 95, Maxine Waters 2 for 79, Norma Torres 0 for 41, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 0 for 25. The pile keeps growing as its purpose shifts from legislating to signaling, exactly the dynamic we documented on the FY27 NDAA.

The centrist premium survives on only one side of the aisle. Republican Problem Solvers convert at 37 percent, close to the conference baseline. Democratic Problem Solvers convert at 16 percent, better than other Democrats but a collapse from their 68 percent peak. Bipartisan cosponsorship itself tells the same story across all bills: amendments labeled bipartisan were made in order at 64 percent under the last Democratic majority and run at 29 percent today. Building a coalition still helps a Democrat at the margins. It no longer buys what it bought.

From made in order to public law

Made in order is not law. We traced every approved amendment forward through Congress.gov floor and law records to see what survived the rest of the pipeline. The funnel is brutal. Twenty-five bills became public law out of the 346 numbered bills that carried made-in-order amendments since 2015. Those 25 held 1,398 of the 7,995 approved amendments, 17 percent. The rest rode vehicles that stalled in the Senate, failed on the House floor, or moved their policy quietly into other bills.

Floor records show 1,378 of those 1,398 reaching an outcome: 1,281 were adopted, 94 were defeated, and 3 were withdrawn. The full pipeline, then, passes roughly one made-in-order amendment in six. Five laws supplied 90 percent of the adoptions: the FY21 NDAA carried 403, the FY24 NDAA 352, the FY18 NDAA 192, the 2021 infrastructure law 128, and the 2024 FAA reauthorization 81.

Beware two distortions before celebrating anyone. The count credits floor adoption, not survival; conference negotiations can strip an adopted amendment before signature. And vehicle swaps hide real wins: three NDAAs became law under different bill numbers (FY22 as S. 1605, FY23 as H.R. 7776, FY25 as H.R. 5009), so amendments adopted on the House versions of those bills earn no credit here even where their text survived the swap.

Here is the leaderboard that survives all of it, amendments adopted on the floor of bills that became public law:

Jackson Lee tops this list too, without a single floor defeat. Democrats banked 731 of the 1,281 adoptions against 534 for Republicans, the mirror image of today's gate. The reason is timing: the two biggest amendment-carrying laws passed under unified Democratic control. Norman is the Freedom Caucus exception again, 13 adoptions and no defeats, most of them FY24 NDAA riders written from his Rules Committee seat.

Today's gate winners barely register in statute yet. Current Freedom Caucus members hold 77 career adoptions on enacted bills, against 200 for Progressive Caucus members and 267 for New Democrats. The 119th Congress has so far written three floor amendments into law, all riding the SUPPORT Act reauthorization. Winning the gate is the fashionable skill; reaching statute still belongs to the coalition builders and the NDAA workhorses.

So who is actually impactful?

Three profiles fall out of the data, and they demand different answers for different questions.

Want amendments moving right now? The answer is a Republican gatekeeper: Austin Scott, Houchin, Norman, or an Armed Services workhorse like Kiggans or Cammack riding the NDAA each summer. No Democrat can match that combination of majority, committee seat, and volume this Congress.

Want durability across majorities? The answer is a broker. Gottheimer has scored in five straight Congresses, under both parties, on 41 different bills, and he trails only Jackson Lee in amendments adopted on bills that became law. The same signature marks Ed Case, Vern Buchanan, and Darren Soto: moderate profiles, narrow asks, relentless reuse of what works. Randall looks like the next one; she built the best Democratic record of the 119th in her first eighteen months.

Want the ceiling on raw output? That remains Jackson Lee, whose 114 made-in-order amendments spanned 54 different bills, with nearly half won against a Republican-run gate. Her record has survived two years. Perry needs nine more wins to take it, and he has the committee allies to get there.

The House returns July 13 with the FY27 NDAA rule pending, 312 approved amendments frozen behind it, and every incentive in this article still live. Watch which names surface when the list reopens. The gate has favorites, and now you know their records.

Methodology: This analysis draws on longitudinal data captures from the official records: 25,986 floor amendments across 588 bills, the 114th Congress through June 30, 2026. Amendments credit their lead sponsor, "made in order" includes self-executed adoptions, and name variants merge before ranking. Caucus columns follow current rosters backward through prior Congresses.

Sources: House Rules Committee · Congress.gov · Washington Post, Sheila Jackson Lee obituary · Pew Research Center, "Freedom Caucus likely to play a bigger role" · Problem Solvers Caucus 119th Congress membership · Freedom Caucus · New Democrat Coalition · Our FY27 NDAA analysis