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Rep. Eric “Rick” Crawford

Representative for Arkansas’s 1st District

pronounced erik // KRAW-ferd

Crawford is the representative for Arkansas’s 1st congressional district (view map) and is a Republican. He has served since Jan 5, 2011. Crawford is next up for reelection in 2024 and serves until Jan 3, 2025. He is 57 years old.

Photo of Rep. Eric “Rick” Crawford [R-AR1]
Elections must be decided by counting votes

Our work to hold Congress accountable only matters if elections are decided by counting votes. President Trump, his senior government advisors, and Republican legislators collaborated to have the 2020 presidential election decided by themselves rather than by voters. Their attempts to suppress entire state-certified vote counts without adjudication in the courts and using a disinformation campaign of lies and conspiracy theories was a months-long, multifarious attempted coup.

Crawford was among the Republican legislators who participated in the attempted coup. Shortly after the election, Crawford joined a case before the Supreme Court calling for all the votes for president in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — states that were narrowly won by Democrats — to be discarded, in order to change the outcome of the election, based on lies and a preposterous legal argument which the Supreme Court rejected. (Following the rejection of several related cases before the Supreme Court, another legislator who joined the case called for violence.) On January 6, 2021 in the hours after the violent insurrection at the Capitol, Crawford voted to skip Arizona and/or Pennsylvania in the counting of presidential electors, states which returned certified results for Trump’s opponent. These legislators have generally changed their story after their vote, claiming it was merely a protest and not intended to change the outcome of the election as they clearly sought prior to the vote. The January 6, 2021 violent insurrection at the Capitol, led on the front lines by militant white supremacy groups, attempted to prevent President-elect Joe Biden from taking office by disrupting Congress’s count of electors. President Trump was indicted in 2023 for soliciting the Vice President to subvert Congress’s certification of the election and his role in the fraudulent slates of electors and the insurrection at the Capitol.

Earmarks

Crawford proposed $187 million in earmarks for fiscal year 2024, including:

  • $91 million to US Army Corps of Engineers for “McClellan-Kerr Arkansas Navigation System Catastrophic Failure Prevention”
  • $74 million to US Army Corps of Engineers for “McClellan-Kerr Arkansas Navigation System, AR & OK”
  • $10 million to Arkansas Department of Transportation for “Construction of Future I-57 from Walnut Ridge to Missouri State Line, Various Counties, Arkansas, AR-01”

These are earmark requests which may or may not survive the legislative process to becoming law. Most representatives from both parties requested earmarks for fiscal year 2024. Across representatives who requested earmarks, the median total amount requested for this fiscal year was $39 million.

Earmarks are federal expenditures, tax benefits, or tariff benefits requested by a legislator for a specific entity. Rather than being distributed through a formula or competitive process administered by the executive branch, earmarks may direct spending where it is most needed for the legislator's district. All earmark requests in the House of Representatives are published online for the public to review. We don’t have earmark requests for senators. The fiscal year begins on October 1 of the prior calendar year. Source: Appropriations.house.gov. Background: Earmark Disclosure Rules in the House

Analysis

Legislative Metrics

Read our 2022 Report Card for Crawford.

Ideology–Leadership Chart

Crawford is shown as a purple triangle ▲ in our ideology-leadership chart below. Each dot is a member of the House of Representatives positioned according to our ideology score (left to right) and our leadership score (leaders are toward the top).

The chart is based on the bills Crawford has sponsored and cosponsored from Jan 3, 2019 to Sep 22, 2023. See full analysis methodology.

Committee Membership

Eric “Rick” Crawford sits on the following committees:

Enacted Legislation

Crawford was the primary sponsor of 2 bills that were enacted:

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Does 2 not sound like a lot? Very few bills are ever enacted — most legislators sponsor only a handful that are signed into law. But there are other legislative activities that we don’t track that are also important, including offering amendments, committee work and oversight of the other branches, and constituent services.

We consider a bill enacted if one of the following is true: a) it is enacted itself, b) it has a companion bill in the other chamber (as identified by Congress) which was enacted, or c) if at least about half of its provisions were incorporated into bills that were enacted (as determined by an automated text analysis, applicable beginning with bills in the 110th Congress).

Bills Sponsored

Issue Areas

Crawford sponsors bills primarily in these issue areas:

Transportation and Public Works (26%) Agriculture and Food (18%) Crime and Law Enforcement (18%) Immigration (13%) Finance and Financial Sector (10%) Water Resources Development (5%) Armed Forces and National Security (5%) Environmental Protection (5%)

Recently Introduced Bills

Crawford recently introduced the following legislation:

View All » | View Cosponsors »

Most legislation has no activity after being introduced.

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Voting Record

Key Votes

Crawford voted Nay

Failed 250/163 on Jul 25, 2023.

Crawford voted Yea

Crawford voted Yea

Passed 304/122 on Mar 30, 2022.

Crawford voted Yea

Passed 338/88 on May 13, 2015.
The USA Freedom Act (H.R. 2048, Pub.L. 114–23) is a U.S. law enacted on June 2, 2015 that restored in modified form several provisions of …

Crawford voted Nay

Passed 219/206 on Dec 11, 2014.
This bill became the vehicle for passage of the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act, 2015 [pdf], which was approved by the House on December …

Crawford voted Aye

Crawford voted Nay

Crawford voted Aye

Passed 304/117 on Jun 23, 2011.
The Leahy–Smith America Invents Act (AIA) is a United States federal statute that was passed by Congress and was signed into law by President Barack …

Missed Votes

From Jan 2011 to Sep 2023, Crawford missed 292 of 7,700 roll call votes, which is 3.8%. This is much worse than the median of 1.7% among the lifetime records of representatives currently serving. The chart below reports missed votes over time.

We don’t track why legislators miss votes, but it’s often due to medical absenses, major life events, and running for higher office.

Show the numbers...

Primary Sources

The information on this page is originally sourced from a variety of materials, including: