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Rep. Mike Bost

Representative for Illinois’s 12th District

pronounced mīk // bost

Bost is the representative for Illinois’s 12th congressional district (view map) and is a Republican. He has served since Jan 6, 2015. Bost is next up for reelection in 2024 and serves until Jan 3, 2025. He is 63 years old.

Photo of Rep. Mike Bost [R-IL12]
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 state-certified vote counts without adjudication in the courts and by using lies and fraudulent documents was a months-long, multifarious attempted coup.

Bost was among the Republican legislators who participated in the attempted coup. Shortly after the election, Bost 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, Bost voted to omit Arizona and/or Pennsylvania from the counting of presidential electors, which could have altered the outcome of the election in Trump’s favor.
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. In 2023, Trump advisors and associates pleaded guilty to or were convicted of submitting fraudulent slates of electors to Congress (which Trump was briefed on), abetting lies, tampering with voting machines after the election, and assaulting police officers at the Capitol, and Trump faces criminal charges for soliciting the Vice President to subvert Congress’s certification of the election, his role in the fraudulent slates of electors, and the insurrection at the Capitol.

Earmarks

Bost proposed $46 million in earmarks for fiscal year 2024, including:

  • $11 million to Randolph County for “Randolph County Jail Renovation and Expansion”
  • $10 million to City of Centralia, IL for “Centralia Water Treatment Plant Replacement”
  • $4 million to St. Clair County Department of Road and Bridges for “Frank Scott Parkway Extension”

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

Ideology–Leadership Chart

Bost 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 Bost has sponsored and cosponsored from Jan 3, 2019 to Mar 5, 2024. See full analysis methodology.

Committee Membership

Mike Bost sits on the following committees:

Enacted Legislation

Bost was the primary sponsor of 13 bills that were enacted. The most recent include:

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Does 13 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

Bost sponsors bills primarily in these issue areas:

Armed Forces and National Security (62%) Agriculture and Food (10%) Transportation and Public Works (10%) Public Lands and Natural Resources (8%)

Recently Introduced Bills

Bost 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

Bost voted No

Passed 314/117 on May 31, 2023.
This bill would enact a compromise reached by House Republicans and President Biden to avert an impending fiscal crisis related to the statutory debt limit. …

Bost voted Yea

Bost voted Yea

Bost voted Yea

Bost voted Yea

Bost voted Aye

Passed 260/165 on Dec 11, 2019.

Bost voted No

Bost voted Nay

Passed 249/177 on Nov 17, 2015.

Bost voted Nay

Bost 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 …

Missed Votes

From Jan 2015 to Mar 2024, Bost missed 200 of 5,276 roll call votes, which is 3.8%. This is worse than the median of 1.9% 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: