Tim Walz was ranked among top 10 most bipartisan members in Congress

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic nominee for vice president, has spent almost 20 years collaborating with colleagues from across the aisle, starting with his very first election.

Walz represented southern Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives for 12 years. The district voted for Republican President George W. Bush in the 2004 election; when Walz first ran for the House in 2006, he had to appeal to those Republican voters to defeat his opponent, Republican Gil Gutknecht.

He voted for the 2009 Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a stimulus package that passed with bipartisan support and was signed into law by President Barack Obama. He also voted for Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which had helped more than 35 million Americans buy health insurance coverage as of 2022.

Walz, who doesn’t own a single share of stock, introduced the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, which passed with near-unanimous support from Democrats and Republicans and was signed into law by Obama in 2012.

The Lugar Center at Georgetown University ranked Walz the seventh-most bipartisan member of the House of Representatives during the 114th Congress, which ran from 2015 to 2016.

The University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University’s Center for Effective Lawmaking ranked Walz seventh out of 203 Democrats in legislative effectiveness during his last term, which ended in 2019.

Colin Van Buren, the co-director of the Center for Effective Lawmaking, said the organization’s data shows Walz was a remarkably effective lawmaker despite being in the minority party during that last term: Republicans had won control of the House of Representatives when former President Donald Trump won the White House in the 2016 presidential election. Walz introduced 11 bills, two of which made it to Trump’s desk and were signed into law.

“Four of them reached the floor of the House. Three passed the House. Two became law. For members of the minority party, that was pretty rare,” Van Buren said in an interview.

He said that according to the Center for Effective Lawmaking’s scoring system, Walz was twice as effective as the average Democratic House member during that term.

The first of Walz’s successful bills was a symbolic action directing the Secretary of the Treasury to mint commemorative coins for the 100th anniversary of the American Legion.

The second bill, the Quicker Veterans Benefits Delivery Act of 2017, had tangible benefits for veterans. The law required closer scrutiny of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ processing of veterans’ claims for disability benefits, aiming to reduce the need for in-person examinations and requiring the department to report annually the number of times veterans’ claims were rejected on the grounds that their private medical evidence was unacceptable.

The law came about after Air Force veteran and Minnesota resident Bob Morris contacted Walz and Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s offices about his struggle to obtain benefits for coronary artery disease and Type 2 diabetes that he suspected were caused by exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam.

Walz’s bill had such bipartisan support that it passed the House by voice vote and the Senate by unanimous consent. Trump signed it into law in March 2018.

“Our veterans put their lives on the line for us and the least we can do is ensure they are getting the benefits they have earned when they need them,” Walz said at the time. “I recognize the benefit-claims backlog wasn’t created overnight and won’t be solved immediately, but we can and must do better. This bipartisan law will enhance VA’s current efforts to break the backlog by helping it become more efficient. As a result, it will help veterans get the benefits — and the care — they deserve in a timely manner.”