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Rep. Elijah Cummings [D-MD7]
U.S. Representative, Maryland’s 7th District

Photo of Cummings
State:Maryland [map]
District:7th Congressional District [map]
Party:Democrat
Birthday:Jan 18, 1951 / 59 years old

To contact Elijah Cummings, visit his official website. (Read our tips for communicating with Congress.) See the Project Vote Smart page for Cummings for more biographical and issue information.

On the Floor
Latest Floor Video from MetaVid

Congressional Service

Elijah Cummings has represented Maryland’s 7th congressional district since 1995.

Below are the past and present terms in the Senate, House, and White House held by Elijah Cummings:

WhenRoleRepresenting
1995-2010
U.S. RepresentativeMaryland’s 7th
(was preceeded by Kweisi Mfume)

Sponsorship Analysis

"Ideometer"Cummings is a far-left Democrat according to GovTrack's own analysis of bill sponsorship.

These labels come from the Political Spectrum statistical analysis that we have carried out. The statistical analysis puts members of Congress on a scale based on patterns of bill sponsorship, and is blind to party affiliation and the content of bills. From there, we have somewhat arbitrarily divided the Members of Congress into far-left/right, rank-and-file, and moderate (i.e. centrist). For each party, the most extreme 23% of Members of Congress are labeled far-left or -right. The most centrist 30% (i.e. those closest to the other party) are labeled moderate. The remaining 47% are labeled as rank-and-file.

"Leader-Follower Score"
Cummings is a follower according to our statistical analysis of bills in this legislative session. Cummings tends to cosponsors the bills of other Members of Congress who do not cosponsor Cummings’s own bills. For more, see congressional statistics.

To compute the leader-follower score for Cummings, we make a table that lists all other Members of Congress. Each row has the number bills sponsored by Cummings and cosponsored by the other Member of Congress divided by the number of bills sponsored by the other Member of Congress and cosponsored by Cummings.

This is a measure of who is following who. The higher the number, the more times others are cosponsoring Cummings's bills without Cummings returning the favor. We then take the mean of (the logorithms of) these ratios. Thanks to Joe Barillari for the idea.

Voting Record

Voting RecordElijah Cummings missed 265 (3%) of 9070 votes since Apr 25, 1996. The graph to the left shows the number of missed votes over time. Click for a larger chart and a list of recent votes.

Money & Influence

The top campaign contribution to Cummings in 2007-2008 was $13,500 from employees of CSX Corp. Elijah Cummings’s net worth was between $100,001 and $434,998 in 2007, according to Cummings’s mandated financial disclosure statements. For more information, see the Center for Responsive Politics’ page for Cummings.

Committee Membership

Elijah Cummings sits on the following committees:

Bill Sponsorship & Cosponsorship

Elijah Cummings has sponsored 79 bills since Jan 4, 1995 of which 60 haven't made it out of committee and 10 were successfully enacted. Cummings has co-sponsored 2607 bills during the same time period. (The count of enacted bills considers only bills actually sponsored by Cummings and companion bills identified by CRS that were themselves enacted, but not if they were incorporated into other bills, as that information is not readily available.)

Some of Cummings’s most recently sponsored bills include...

H.R. 3591: Constitution and Citizenship Day Act of 2009
H.R. 3967: To amend the National Great Black Americans Commemoration Act of 2004 to authorize appropriations through fiscal year 2015.
H.R. 3852: Chesapeake Clean Water and Ecosystem Restoration Act of 2009
H.R. 2651: Maritime Workforce Development Act
H.R. 1741: Witness Security and Protection Grant Program Act of 2009

View All... (including bills from previous years)

Photo from the Congressional Pictorial Directory.