Rep. Michael Guest
Representative for Mississippi’s 3rd District
pronounced MĪ-kul // gest
Guest is the representative for Mississippi’s 3rd congressional district (view map) and is a Republican. He has served since Jan 3, 2019. Guest is next up for reelection in 2024 and serves until Jan 3, 2025. He is 53 years old.
![Photo of Rep. Michael Guest [R-MS3]](/static/legislator-photos/412793-200px.jpeg)
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.
Guest was among the Republican legislators who participated in the attempted coup. Shortly after the election, Guest 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, Guest 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
Guest proposed $52 million in earmarks for fiscal year 2024, including:
- $10 million to City of Meridian for “City of Meridian, Mississippi, Environmental Infrastructure”
- $6 million to Rankin County Board of Supervisors for “Rankin County Watershed-Based Stormwater Management Program”
- $5 million to City of Brandon, Mississippi for “City of Brandon, Mississippi, Grants Ferry Parkway Project”
View all requests and justifications on Guest’s website »
View analysis and download spreadsheet from Demand Progress Education Fund »
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 Guest.
Ideology–Leadership Chart
Guest 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 Guest has sponsored and cosponsored from Jan 3, 2019 to Sep 22, 2023. See full analysis methodology.
Committee Membership
Michael Guest sits on the following committees:
Enacted Legislation
Guest was the primary sponsor of 3 bills that were enacted:
- H.R. 2220 (117th): To amend title 40, United States Code, to modify the treatment of certain bargain-price options to purchase at less than fair market value, and for other purposes.
- H.R. 2246 (116th): To designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 201 West Cherokee Street in Brookhaven, Mississippi, as the “Deputy Donald William Durr, Corporal Zach …
- H.R. 1590 (116th): Terrorist and Foreign Fighter Travel Exercise Act of 2019
Does 3 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
Guest sponsors bills primarily in these issue areas:
Immigration (32%) Crime and Law Enforcement (24%) International Affairs (16%) Government Operations and Politics (16%) Armed Forces and National Security (12%)
Recently Introduced Bills
Guest recently introduced the following legislation:
- H.R. 5481: To direct the Secretary of Health and Human Services to establish an Office …
- H.Res. 444: Calling upon all Americans on this Memorial Day, 2023, to honor the men …
- H.Res. 363: Resolution memorializing law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty
- H.R. 1501: UAS Act
- H.R. 1401: END FENTANYL Act
- H.Res. 135: Providing amounts for the expenses of the Committee on Ethics in the One …
- H.R. 9473 (117th): END FENTANYL Act
View All » | View Cosponsors »
Most legislation has no activity after being introduced.
Voting Record
Key Votes
Missed Votes
From Jan 2019 to Sep 2023, Guest missed 119 of 2,368 roll call votes, which is 5.0%. 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.
Primary Sources
The information on this page is originally sourced from a variety of materials, including:
- unitedstates/congress-legislators, a community project gathering congressional information
- The House and Senate websites, for committee membership and voting records
- Office of Michael Guest for the photo
- GovInfo.gov, for sponsored bills