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Rep. Sam Graves

Representative for Missouri’s 6th District

pronounced sam // grayvz

Graves is the representative for Missouri’s 6th congressional district (view map) and is a Republican. He has served since Jan 3, 2001. Graves is next up for reelection in 2024 and serves until Jan 3, 2025. He is 59 years old.

Photo of Rep. Sam Graves [R-MO6]
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.

Graves was among the Republican legislators who participated in the attempted coup. Shortly after the election, Graves 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, Graves 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

Graves proposed $176 million in earmarks for fiscal year 2024, including:

  • $75 million to United States Army Corps of Engineers, Rock Island District for “UPPER MISSISSIPPI RIVER - ILLINOIS WW SYSTEM, IL, IA, MN, MO & WI”
  • $50 million to Corps of Engineers Rock Island District, and the Corps of Engineers, Kansas City District for “Northern Missouri”
  • $8 million to Mo-Kan Regional Council for “Andrew County Water Improvement”

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 Graves.

Ideology–Leadership Chart

Graves 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 Graves has sponsored and cosponsored from Jan 3, 2019 to Sep 26, 2023. See full analysis methodology.

Committee Membership

Sam Graves sits on the following committees:

Enacted Legislation

Graves was the primary sponsor of 10 bills that were enacted. The most recent include:

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Does 10 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

Graves sponsors bills primarily in these issue areas:

Transportation and Public Works (33%) Education (21%) Emergency Management (17%) Health (17%) Science, Technology, Communications (12%)

Recently Introduced Bills

Graves 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

Graves voted Yea

Graves voted Nay

Graves voted Nay

Graves 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 …

Graves voted Aye

Graves 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 …

Graves voted No

Graves voted Yea

Missed Votes

From Jan 2001 to Sep 2023, Graves missed 673 of 14,714 roll call votes, which is 4.6%. This is much worse than the median of 1.8% 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: