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Rep. Joseph Pitts [R-PA16]
U.S. Representative, Pennsylvania’s 16th District

Photo of Pitts
State:Pennsylvania [map]
District:16th Congressional District [map]
Party:Republican
Birthday:Oct 10, 1939 / 70 years old

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

On the Floor
Latest Floor Video from MetaVid

Congressional Service

Joseph Pitts has represented Pennsylvania’s 16th congressional district since 1997.

Below are the past and present terms in the Senate, House, and White House held by Joseph Pitts:

WhenRoleRepresenting
1997-2010
U.S. RepresentativePennsylvania’s 16th
(was preceeded by Robert Walker)

Sponsorship Analysis

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

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

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

Voting Record

Voting RecordJoseph Pitts missed 233 (3%) of 8603 votes since Jan 7, 1997. 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 Pitts in 2007-2008 was $10,000 from employees of American College of Cardiology. Joseph Pitts’s net worth was between $346,009 and $815,000 in 2007, according to Pitts’s mandated financial disclosure statements. For more information, see the Center for Responsive Politics’ page for Pitts.

Committee Membership

Joseph Pitts sits on the following committees:

Bill Sponsorship & Cosponsorship

Joseph Pitts has sponsored 88 bills since Jan 7, 1997 of which 79 haven't made it out of committee and 4 were successfully enacted. Pitts has co-sponsored 1374 bills during the same time period. (The count of enacted bills considers only bills actually sponsored by Pitts 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 Pitts’s most recently sponsored bills include...

H.R. 2500: Help Kids Save for College Act of 2009
H.R. 1350: Post-Abortion Depression Research and Care Act of 2009
H.R. 1447: Family Farm Preservation Act of 2009
H.R. 2814: Reinvest in America's Retirement Act of 2009
H.R. 3448: Streamline America's Future Energy Nuclear Act

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

Photo from the Congressional Pictorial Directory.