Congressional Fact-Check Mandate Act

Section 1. Short Title and Finding of Institutional Dishonesty

This Act may be cited as the “Congressional Fact-Check Mandate Act” or the “The Floor of the House Is Not a Creative Writing Workshop Act of 2026.”

The House finds and is forced to acknowledge:

(a) The Speech and Debate Clause of the United States Constitution (Article I, Section 6) provides that members of Congress “shall not be questioned in any other Place” for any speech or debate in either chamber, a protection originally designed to prevent executive intimidation of the legislature, not to provide blanket immunity for making things up.

(b) The Congressional Record permits members to “revise and extend” their remarks after the fact, meaning that the official record of what was said on the floor of the House and Senate is, in a meaningful sense, a work of editable fiction. Members may alter their statements, insert entire speeches they never delivered, and remove comments they regret — privileges that not even Wikipedia editors possess.

(c) Senator Joseph McCarthy, on February 9, 1950, claimed to possess a list of 205 communists working in the State Department. He never produced the list. He was eventually censured by the Senate in 1954, but notably not for lying — rather, for conduct “contrary to senatorial traditions.” The distinction is telling.

(d) No fact-checking mechanism of any kind currently exists for statements made on the floor of either chamber. A member may state that the Earth is flat, that the national debt is $12, or that they personally invented the internet, and the Congressional Record will faithfully preserve these claims for posterity.

(e) The Congressional Record costs the American taxpayer approximately $400 million per year to publish, making it among the most expensive collections of partially fictional nonfiction in the world.

(f) Members may insert entirely new statements into the Record that they never actually said on the floor, which are then published alongside actual floor debate with no distinction between the two. The Congressional Record is, effectively, a magazine that accepts unsolicited submissions.

Section 2. The Real-Time Footnote Requirement

2(a). Citation Standard

Any factual claim made by a member of Congress during floor debate — including but not limited to statistics, historical assertions, quotes from constituents, and claims about what “the American people” want — shall be accompanied by a citation to a verifiable source, displayed on the C-SPAN broadcast as a footnote.

2(b). Acceptable Sources

Acceptable sources shall include:

1. Published government reports (CBO, GAO, CRS)
2. Peer-reviewed academic research
3. Official government data (Census, BLS, CDC)
4. The Congressional Record itself (when the claim was actually made there by the person being cited)

2(c). Unacceptable Sources

The following shall not be accepted as citations:

• “Everybody knows”
• “Many people are saying”
• “A friend of mine — very smart person”
• “I read somewhere” (unspecified)
• Any source that, upon investigation, turns out to be the member’s own previous uncited statement

2(d). Enforcement

Statements made without citations shall be flagged in the Congressional Record with the notation: [CITATION NEEDED], in the same manner as Wikipedia, which Congress will now be held to the same standard as.

Section 3. The “Revise and Extend” Accountability Clause

3(a). Transparency of Revisions

When a member exercises the privilege to “revise and extend” their remarks in the Congressional Record, both the original statement and the revised version shall be published, with changes displayed in redline format.

3(b). Justification

The committee finds that the current practice — where a member may say one thing on the floor and then publish a materially different version in the Record — would be considered fraud in any other context, including college term papers, newspaper reporting, and depositions.

3(c). Limitation on Revisions

Revisions shall be limited to:

1. Corrections of grammatical errors
2. Corrections of obvious misstatements (“I meant to say million, not billion”)
3. Insertion of citations that were spoken but not captured

Revisions shall not include:

1. Adding entire paragraphs of argument not made on the floor
2. Removing statements that generated negative media coverage
3. Inserting speeches the member did not deliver and was not present for
4. Changing a vote from “aye” to “nay” or vice versa (which, remarkably, this provision was necessary to specify)

Section 4. The Congressional Pinocchio Index

4(a). Establishment

There is hereby established a Congressional Pinocchio Index (CPI), maintained by the Congressional Research Service, which shall track the factual accuracy of floor statements by each member.

4(b). Scoring Methodology

Each member shall receive an annual accuracy score on a scale of 1 to 10, where:

• 10 = “Cites sources consistently; statements verifiable”
• 7 = “Mostly accurate with occasional rhetorical embellishment”
• 5 = “Creative interpretation of available data”
• 3 = “Relationship with facts is complicated”
• 1 = “Has a list of 205 names they will not produce”

4(c). Public Disclosure

CPI scores shall be published annually on each member’s congress.gov profile page, directly beneath their photo and above their committee assignments, where constituents cannot miss them.

Section 5. The McCarthy Prevention Provision

5(a). Prohibition on Phantom Evidence

No member of Congress shall, during floor debate or committee proceedings, claim to possess documentary evidence — including lists, reports, studies, photographs, or recordings — without making said evidence available to the opposing party within 48 hours.

5(b). Historical Basis

This provision is named for Senator Joseph McCarthy, who waved a piece of paper claiming it contained names of communists infiltrating the government. The number on the list changed between speeches (205, then 57, then 81), and the list was never produced. Four years of accusations, ruined careers, and institutional damage followed before the Senate acted.

5(c). Penalty

Any member who claims to possess evidence and fails to produce it within 48 hours shall have the following notation entered into the Congressional Record:

“The member claimed to possess [description of evidence] on [date] and has not produced it. This notation shall remain in the Record until the evidence is produced or the member withdraws the claim.”

Section 6. Effective Date and Self-Awareness Clause

This Act shall take effect upon enactment, and the committee acknowledges that the bill itself contains 14 factual claims, all of which are cited, making it more thoroughly sourced than any floor speech delivered in the current Congress.

Committee Note: This bill was reported out of committee 8-14. The 14 members who voted against it offered several factual reasons for their opposition, none of which were sourced. When the committee chair requested citations, she was told that “now is not the time for that.” The committee report documenting this exchange was subsequently revised and extended by three members who were not present for the vote.

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This bill failed 14-421 in the full House. The Congressional Record entry documenting the bill’s failure was “revised and extended” by 38 members to include remarks about the importance of accuracy in public discourse, none of which were actually delivered on the floor. The committee’s 128-page post-mortem report on the bill’s failure contained 47 unsourced factual claims, which the committee chair acknowledged was, in her words, “exactly the sort of thing.” The report was published at a cost of $1.2 million, bringing the total amount spent on this bill to slightly more than the cost of fact-checking it would have been.