How N.J.’s congressional delegation voted in the final months of 2025

Click here for a web version of the New Jersey Globe’s End of 2025 vote tracker, with links to the bills and votes in question, or scroll to the bottom of this article for a PDF version. This story covers votes between October 1, when the government shutdown began, and the end of the 2025 session.

Government shutdown 

The federal government spent much of its autumn stuck in a shutdown, one that finally ended in mid-November after a critical handful of Senate Democrats relented and let a funding bill pass – but at no point during the 43-day standoff did any of New Jersey’s members of Congress break with their party.

The Senate took dozens of votes throughout September and October on two different funding bills, one put forward by Republicans and the other by Democrats, before eventually passing a modified version of the GOP bill; Senators Andy Kim and Cory Booker voted for their own party’s bill and against the other’s every time.

When the House returned to session to pass the Senate bill and reopen the government, it was the same story: all nine New Jersey Democrats voted against it, all three Republicans voted for it.

Health care

At issue during the shutdown was whether or not to extend Affordable Care Act tax credits that are set to expire at the end of this year; every Democrat and a handful of Republicans supports an extension, but Republican leaders in both chambers are not on board.

Senators Kim and Booker voted for a bill that would extend the credits for three years, but it was blocked by Senate Republicans. The House and the Senate also took votes on Republican health care packages that don’t touch the credits, efforts that drew nothing but nays from the New Jersey Democratic delegation.

Far more interesting, though, will be a House vote in January on the three-year extension bill (a vote that will come after the subsidies have already expired). It’s likely that the bill will draw some Republican support; Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis) will oppose it, but Reps. Chris Smith (R-Manchester) and Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield) have thus far declined to say how they’ll vote.

Other votes of note

Every single New Jersey member of Congress – and nearly every member of Congress, period – supported a bill to force the release of the Epstein files, one that only came up for a vote in the first place because four Republicans defected and signed onto a largely Democratic discharge petition (which forces bills to the floor upon getting 218 signatures).

Speaking of discharge petitions, a bill rolling back President Donald Trump’s executive order stripping collective bargaining rights from federal employees made it to the floor thanks to one such petition – and New Jersey’s three Republican congressmen, all of whom have close ties to state-level organized labor, proceeded to break with most of their party in supporting the bill.

The 2026 National Defense Authorization Act passed on broad bipartisan votes in both chambers, but six New Jersey Democrats – Senators Kim and Booker and Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing), LaMonica McIver (D-Newark), Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City), and Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch) – voted against it, with many saying it lacked sufficient guardrails on the Trump administration’s actions.

In the Senate, Kim and Booker have supported repeated resolutions targeting Trump’s military actions in the Caribbean and his tariffs around the world – and some of the tariff-focused resolutions have succeeded.

In the House, a contentious bill making it a federal crime to provide gender-affirming care to minors got a handful of Democratic yes votes, but in the New Jersey delegation, the vote went down entirely on party lines.

Lastly, the House passed a permitting bill that aims to speed up environmental review processes for infrastructure projects, but only after changing it to satisfy Reps. Van Drew and Smith on an offshore wind issue. The two Republican congressmen had held up a procedural vote on the bill because they worried it would impede Trump’s ability to cancel offshore wind projects, only relenting once GOP leaders agreed to amend it.