Politics

Trump Pushed GOP Lawmakers To The Right — But There’s A Catch

Office of Speaker Mike Johnson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

During President Donald Trump’s second term, congressional Republicans have become simultaneously less moderate and less likely to embrace limited government, according to a new study shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Institute for Legislative Analysis (ILA) released its 2026 Congressional Vote Report on Thursday morning after analyzing over a quarter million different legislative votes and ranking all members of both the House and the Senate on a 0 to 100 ideological scale, with higher numbers signifying stronger adherence to limited government principles. Republican lawmakers were significantly less likely to score below 60% in 2025 than in 2023 and also less likely to score above 90%, the report found.

The fact that almost all House and Senate Republicans scored above 60% on ILA’s scale is evidence moderate GOP lawmakers “are voting further to the right and closer to President Trump’s agenda,” ILA indicated in a Thursday press release sent to the DCNF.

In 2023, when former President Joe Biden was in office, there were 33 Republican lawmakers that had a sub-60 ILA score. This number had shrunk to just three in 2025.

However, the near-extinction of congressional Republicans with low ILA ratings was also accompanied by a sharp decline in Republicans that voted more than 90% on the side of limited government, the study also found.

“Republican alignment with the more traditional limited-government stances has declined, with the number of Republicans scoring above 90 percent on the ILA scale falling by more than half, from 63 in 2023 to 27 in 2025,” the Institute’s press release stated.

“A conference can lose some of its purest limited-government members at the top of the scale while also becoming harder to distinguish from itself at the median,” the ILA’s report noted. “In that sense, the Republican story in the ILA data is one of re-sorting and consolidation, not simple dilution.”

RINOs Going Extinct?

The report cited Republican New York Rep. Mike Lawler, who is widely seen as a moderate — especially on immigration, as a case study of centrist GOP lawmakers moving rightward under the president’s leadership. The lawmaker represents a seat failed 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris carried by less than a percentage point and he won both his 2022 and 2024 contests by single-digits.

“In 2023, Lawler opposed most all Republican-led fiscal restraint measures. According to the three-year ILA trendline, Lawler moved from 46.83 in 2023 to 56.03 in 2024 and then to 64.14 in 2025,” stated the report. “The shift stands out because it suggests movement not in rhetoric but in voting behavior.”

The Institute specifically pointed to Lawler’s support for legislation such as the Trump-backed Rescissions Act of 2025, which codified a combined total of $9 billion in foreign aid and public broadcasting cuts identified by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

“For ILA, support for measures of this kind helps explain why previously moderate Republicans posted higher scores in 2025 than in either of the preceding two years,” the report added. “This finding complicates the usual media narrative about intra-party betrayal or softness.”

Lawler has Trump’s endorsement in his bid for a third House term in November. The New York Republican is running unopposed in the GOP primary and is set to face a highly competitive general election.

A More Populist Party

ILA’s study specified that the dramatic drop in GOP lawmakers “in the most hard-line constitutionalist and limited-government tier,” does “not necessarily mean the Republican conference simply moved in a uniformly statist direction.”

The report singled out what it called “different coalitional alignments” among elected Republicans on “trade, surveillance, and some accountability-related disputes.”

“Where earlier Republican orthodoxy often emphasized free trade and skepticism toward broad industrial policy, a more populist and nationalist governing style appears to have normalized a wider use of tariffs and more situational departures from older constitutional and civil-libertarian instincts,” it clarified.

“The ILA study also found that, despite frequent claims that [former Republican Georgia Rep.] Marjorie Taylor Greene and [Republian Kentucky Rep.] Thomas Massie have dramatically changed philosophically, both have remained relatively consistent over the last three years,” ILA’s press release noted, referring to two right-wing lawmakers linked to the America First movement who have emerged as Trump critics over the past several months.

Both Massie and Greene, who resigned from Congress in January, had scores above 90% in both 2023 and 2025.

“The bigger shift appears to be the movement of the broader Republican Party toward a more populist and nationalist direction,” ILA’s press release stated. “That trend is reflected in members like [Republican Missouri Sen.] Josh Hawley, whose score moved from 83.93 percent in 2023 to 70.13 percent in 2025.”

Though he is still generally considered a staunch social conservative, the red state senator has in recent years taken positions sharply differing from limited government orthodoxy on a variety of issues such as organized labor, corporate regulations, increasing the federal minimum wage and Medicaid.

This nuance is seen by looking at Hawley’s lifetime ratings from the ILA split by policy category.

Of the 10 categories, ILA gives the senator a perfect 100% rating on four of them: education, energy and environment, local and national security and free speech and elections. He has a lifetime score of over 90% on law and scope of government and individual liberties.

However, his total score is brought down by the other four policy areas, where populists such as him generally favor at least some government intervention. Hawley has a lifetime ILA score of 81% on regulations, 67% on workforce and labor, 62% on tax and fiscal and a stunning 40% on healthcare.

“While scorecards based on a handful of votes can be useful for showing differences among lawmakers, our annual index covers every substantive vote and is designed to show how political philosophies and party dynamics change over time,” ILA CEO Ryan McGowan said in a statement sent to the DCNF.

“The latest report shows that different wings of the Republican Party are increasingly gravitating toward President Trump’s policy agenda,” McGowan continued. “On the Democratic side, we are beginning to see more internal variation in what has otherwise been a party far more unified in its voting than Republicans.”

The two members of Congress with the highest ILA ratings are Republican Texas Rep. Chip Roy and Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. Both Roy and Paul scored over 99% and are widely considered to be staunch constitutional conservatives.

The Republican with the lowest ILA rating is Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick — who like Lawler represents a seat Harris narrowly carried in 2024 — with 49.25%, according to the new study. The Democrat with the highest rating is Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar — whose seat Trump had carried — with 54.73%.

Dozens of congressional Democrats meanwhile had ratings in the single digits. The lowest score of members who have served in office for the entire current term was 2.51%, belonging to Democratic Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a founding member of the “Squad.”

The ILA states that its mission is to advance “the limited government principles of the U.S. Constitution by increasing transparency within Congress and the 50 state legislatures,” according to the Institute’s website. The group further notes that it plans to accomplish this by “building the nation’s most advanced legislative database and lawmaker evaluation platform for the liberty movement.”

An ILA spokesperson told the DCNF that the group is in the process of expanding its rating system to provide more details on lawmakers’ stances on specific policy issues. To that effect, the ILA in the coming days plans to launch its new Center for Healthcare Affordability as well as its Healthcare Affordability Index. This metric will track lawmakers’ votes, sponsorships and actions related to health care affordability, which analysts say will be a key decisive issue in November’s midterm elections.