their religion and their right to have a Catholic president. Summary of results This chart shows the estimated Democrat/Republican split of the Catholic vote in elections since 1948. Catholic candidates and elections in which Catholics voted for the national winner are in bold. Representation in government Congress According to the Pew Research Center, Catholics represent 30.5% of the United States Congress as of January 2019. There are 141 Representatives and 22 Senators that are Catholic, which split as 99 Democrats and 64 Republicans. Edward Kavanagh was nationally noticed as the first Catholic elected from New England in 1830. Kavanagh was elected as a Jacksonian to the Twenty-second and Twenty-third Congresses, serving from March 4, 1831, to March 3, 1835. On January 4, 2007, Nancy Pelosi, a Catholic, became the first woman elected as the Speaker of the House. She was elected again as Speaker of the House on January 3, 2019, after serving as House Minority Leader for the Democrats from 2003 to 2007 and 2011–2019. Paul Ryan is Catholic as well and served recently as Speaker of the House from 2015 to 2019. Supreme Court A majority of the Supreme Court has been Catholic since 2005. The first Catholic Supreme Court appointment was Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, appointed by Andrew Jackson in 1836. The second, Edward Douglass White, joined the Court in 1894 and was elevated to Chief Justice in 1910. He was joined on the Court by Catholic Joseph McKenna in 1898. After White's death in 1921, there became an informally recognized tradition of holding one seat on the Court for a Catholic justice, though not necessarily the same seat. Pierce Butler was appointed to the Court in 1923 and succeeded by Frank Murphy in 1940. Both were Catholic. During Murphy's time on the Court, he was briefly joined by James F. Byrnes, who was raised Catholic but had converted to Episcopalianism many years before his appointment. After Murphy died in 1949, he was not succeeded directly by a Catholic. However, President Harry Truman appointed Sherman Minton to a different vacant seat, and his appointment was seen as in keeping with the tradition, as Minton's wife was Catholic. He would convert five years after his retirement from the Court. Upon Minton's retirement, Cardinal Francis Spellman successfully lobbied Dwight Eisenhower to replace him with William J. Brennan, a practicing Catholic. The traditional one-seat rule was abandoned by President