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Rep. James (Jim) McDermott [D-WA7]
U.S. Representative, Washington’s 7th District

Photo of McDermott
State:Washington [map]
District:7th Congressional District [map]
Party:Democrat
Birthday:Dec 28, 1936 / 73 years old

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

On the Floor
Latest Floor Video from MetaVid

Congressional Service

James McDermott has represented Washington’s 7th congressional district since 1989.

Below are the past and present terms in the Senate, House, and White House held by James McDermott:

WhenRoleRepresenting
1989-2010
U.S. RepresentativeWashington’s 7th
(was preceeded by Michael Lowry)

Sponsorship Analysis

"Ideometer"McDermott 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"
McDermott is a leader according to our statistical analysis of bills in this legislative session. Other Members of Congress tend to cosponsor McDermott’s bills. For more, see congressional statistics.

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

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

Voting Record

Voting RecordJames McDermott missed 585 (5%) of 12677 votes since Jan 23, 1990. The graph to the left shows the number of missed votes over time. Click for a larger chart and a list of recent votes.

Committee Membership

James McDermott sits on the following committees:

Bill Sponsorship & Cosponsorship

James McDermott has sponsored 180 bills since Jan 3, 1989 of which 170 haven't made it out of committee and 6 were successfully enacted. McDermott has co-sponsored 3873 bills during the same time period. (The count of enacted bills considers only bills actually sponsored by McDermott 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 McDermott’s most recently sponsored bills include...

H.Res. 777: Honoring all those participating in a production of "The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later" in remembrance of Matthew Shepard.
H.R. 3638: For the relief of Jorge-Alonso Chehade-Zegarra.
H.Res. 750: Congratulating Ichiro Suzuki, outfielder for the Seattle Mariners, for becoming the first player in the history of Major League Baseball with at least 200 base hits in nine consecutive seasons.
H.R. 3556: To require the Secretary of Health and Human Services to establish a self-referral disclosure protocol under the Medicare Program to enable health care providers of services and suppliers to disclose violations of section 1877 of the Social Security Act.
H.Res. 798: Conveying the best wishes of the House of Representatives to those celebrating Diwali.

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

Photo from the Congressional Pictorial Directory.