Click here for a web version of the New Jersey Globe’s April 2026 vote tracker, with links to the bills and votes in question, or scroll to the bottom of this article for a PDF version.
Few issues confronted by the 119th Congress have proven to be as thorny – or as hard to explain – as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, better known as FISA, which allows for warrantless surveillance of foreign nationals.
To its defenders, FISA is a critical part of the U.S. national security infrastructure; to its critics, it’s an easy-to-abuse tool that’s a potential disaster for civil liberties. Those debates, which are actively roiling both parties, helped to scuttle successive legislative efforts to extend FISA for 18 months, three years, and five years; Congress finally passed a stopgap prolonging it for 45 days, kicking the can further down the road.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-Tenafly), alone among New Jersey Democrats, supported every FISA extension bill the House considered in April. Reps. Herb Conaway (D-Delran) and Donald Norcross (D-Camden) voted with him in favor of the three-year clean extension, and Rep. Nellie Pou (D-North Haledon) joined them on the 45-day extension; Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis), meanwhile, is more FISA-skeptical than most of his party and opposed the five-year extension effort.
How will the saga end? No one knows yet, but Rep. Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City) outlined one of the key reasons most Democrats still aren’t playing ball on any kind of FISA extension: “With this administration, and the risk they pose in every single way – and how they’ve used other agencies and branches and authorities to harm Americans – I’m not signing up for it.”
Other votes (or lack thereof) of note:
• Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield) did not cast a single vote in April due to an unspecified medical issue; he also missed most votes in March, with his last recorded vote being on March 5. He said in a statement on April 27 that he “expect[s] to return to a full schedule and be at 100 percent,” but has not revealed what has been ailing him or laid out a clear timetable for his return.
• Joining the New Jersey delegation in April, meanwhile, was Rep. Analilia Mejia (D-Glen Ridge), who won an April 16 special election to replace Gov. Mikie Sherrill. For most of her first 30 roll-call votes, Mejia stuck with her party, but she broke with a majority of Democrats on one unsuccessful farm bill amendment to make sugary sodas ineligible for SNAP benefits.
• Republicans want to use the reconciliation process to pass a party-line bill providing $70 billion in funding to ICE, but in order to do that, they first have to approve a procedural item known as a budget resolution. Both the House and the Senate did that in April, with – predictably – every New Jersey Democrat voting in opposition, and the state’s two present Republicans voting in favor.
Separately, a monthslong shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security came to an end after the House passed a DHS funding bill that, at the insistence of Democrats, excludes ICE funding – but since the bill was approved on a voice vote, there’s no record of how any individual House member voted.
• Democratic-led efforts to force the Trump administration to wind down hostilities in Iran and reassert congressional authority continued apace in April, but without any success. New Jersey Democrats have unanimously supported the war powers resolutions each time; one of them, Rep. Gottheimer, has a resolution of his own that should come up when Congress returns from its recess next week.
• Two failed resolutions authored by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) to block arms sales to Israel got the support of a majority of Senate Democrats, including Senators Andy Kim and Cory Booker, the latter of whom had opposed similar resolutions when they came up in the past. “I am using every tool available to me to stop [the Iran War], and do not support more weapons to continue the combat, whether it is to our own government or to one of our closest allies,” Booker said of his vote.
• In a rare rebuke of President Donald Trump, a handful of Republicans joined Democrats to pass a bill preserving Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, who have been targeted for removal by the Trump administration. None of the ten Republicans who supported the bill were from New Jersey.
• After quite a bit of intra-Republican discord over various controversial provisions, the House passed a long-delayed farm bill reauthorizing key Agriculture Department programs on a 224-200 vote. Every New Jersey House Democrat opposed the bill, which is traditionally bipartisan but which drew Democratic ire for keeping last year’s cuts to SNAP in place.
April 2026 votes - House April 2026 votes - Senate