  Each year, the United States Congress considers {thousands of legislative
proposals to select bills} to present to the US President to sign into law.
Naturally, the decision processes of members of Congress are subject to peer
influence. In this paper, we examine the effect on bill passage of accrued
influence between US Congress members in the US House of Representatives. We
explore how the influence of a bill's cosponsors affects the bill's outcome
(specifically, whether or not it passes in the House). We define a notion of
influence by analyzing the structure of a network that we construct {using}
cosponsorship dynamics. We award `influence' between a pair of Congress members
when they cosponsor a bill that achieves some amount of legislative success. We
find that properties of the bill cosponsorship network can be a useful signal
to examine influence in Congress; they help explain why some bills pass and
others fail. We compare our measure of influence to off-the-shelf centrality
measures and conclude that our influence measure is more indicative of bill
passage.
