Everyone has heard how important it is to pay attention to Congress, especially during an election season, but how many of us actually know how to do that? 4USXUS is my new favorite tool because it makes it simple. Or at least, as simple as politics itself can be.


4USXUS is a nonpartisan website that gives you an awesome overview of how your government works and how much you really line up with your elected officials. We’ve talked about it before, but today we want to dive into the details of how it works.

First, Find Out Who Your Representatives Are


Quick! Can you name your three representatives in Congress? If you’re like many Americans, you may not even realize there are three you need to pay attention to. Heck, many Americans don’t even know their representative’s party. If you’re in that group that can’t name the members of Congress you could’ve voted for, 4USXUS will start by telling you.

For those who missed their civics class, you have two people in the Senate representing your state, as well as one person in the House of Representatives from your district. These are your big three. They are the ones who were elected to represent you, specifically. You are their constituents, which means they have an incentive to listen to your voice (that incentive being your vote). Once you create an account on 4USXUS and enter your address, the site will show you the three politicians that represent you.

Ideally, you’d know who these people are before they’re elected. Hopefully, you’d have either voted for or against them in the last election. Everyone’s gotta start somewhere, though. If your eyes glazed over during the last election, or you just want to catch up on what your representatives have been up to, now’s your chance.

Research Your Representatives Voting History


Now that you’ve found your representatives, it’s time to find out what they’re working on. Click on one of them and you’ll be taken to a profile page. Along the top of the profile, you’ll see a box with a ton of links. Here, you’ll find their bio on Congress’s website, their own home page, their social media info, and a phone number when available. If you scroll down a bit, you’ll find their Twitter stream embedded in the left-hand side of the page.

The real meat, however, is in the activity feed. Here, you can find which bills your elected officials have sponsored (or co-sponsored) and see how they’ve voted on various bills. There’s also a comment section if you’d like to discuss your representatives directly, because apparently no one thought that could go poorly.


If you’ve voted on any bills (we’ll come back to that in the next section), you’ll also be able to see how your votes compare with your officials. There are a variety of approval ratings all over the place as well. The site will compare how a given politician voted overall against how 4USXUS users vote on bills, how Congress as a whole votes, and how you, specifically, vote on bills to give you an idea of how much your representatives stack up by various metrics. The most useful metric is obviously how your reps compare against your own votes, but that’s where things get complicated.

Learn About Bills Before (and After) They Become Laws


When you click on a bill, you can get an overview of what the bill does and how your officials voted for it. You can also browse all the available bills in Congress by clicking Bills in the navigation bar on the left-hand side of the site under Browse. This is where the rubber meets the political road. It’s also the hardest part to deal with because, as it turns out, laws are complicated.

The bill page is highly informative, but it can be confusing if you’re not used to reading legalese. You can read the full text of a bill (if it’s available) on the Bill Text tab if you want to get into the finer details. For the layman, the Summary tab of a bill will provide the most succinct information about what a bill intends to do, but keep in mind both of these are written by Congress members themselves. For that reason, there’s also a Comments section where users can discuss the bill, raise issues or questions, and debate the merits of the bill itself.


If you’ve ever thought that governing is easy, this process will probably humble you. I went in expecting it to be simple to vote on which bills I liked to see how my votes compared with my elected officials. First, I checked out the controversial CISA law. I knew a bit about this, so I voted Against and learned that two of my reps voted For. Interesting! However, the timeline on 4USXUS said nothing happened with it since it passed the Senate in October 2015. But I know from the news that CISA was later attached to an omnibus spending bill and passed in December. It was impossible to know that from just this page.

It only got harder when I started browsing other bills. For example, the FAST Act seemed like a basic highway infrastructure bill. However, I learned from the discussion threads that there were sections (which I don’t understand) at the end that deal with banking regulation. Are those relevant? Are they good, or is some unrelated bad thing I should be concerned with? Am I even qualified to answer this? Then I looked at the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act of 2016 and lost what remaining confidence I had that I know anything about politics.


Much of the problem here is due to the complicated nature of politics in general. A bill with an unrelated rider doesn’t tell you in its summary if its shady or not. There’s no notification process to let you know when a failed bill attaches itself to a larger one. Laws in general are designed to be read by lawyers, not the layman. While the site helps parse some info, it can only do so much given the complex process it’s covering.

Keep Researching On Your Own

After a while browsing around bills and trying to decide on my own votes, I realized that this job is more complicated than I thought. There’s a reason we vote representatives into office, rather than everyone in the country voting on each issue individually. You just can’t expect everyone to be able to make rational, wise decisions on everything.


However, it’s also important that everyone be able to find out what’s going on in their government. From that perspective, 4USXUS is a perfect starting point. You won’t learn everything you need to know about your government from this site, but it will give you a place to learn what you should be researching. Once you know who your representatives are, you can start finding out more about them and their competitors during election years. You can even look up individual bills to find out how much you agree or disagree with them before you learn about it too late in a news story.

It’s unlikely you’ll be able to keep up with every single bill (and if you can, maybe you should be in politics), but 4USXUS is an excellent resource. It provides the basics you need to see how your representatives are voting and how much you really agree with them.