An old joke around the south side of the Capitol involves a Representative winning election to the Senate (and thus moving northward). It varies in its telling, but the punch line is always  and now the average IQ of both chambers has increased.  It’s a joke that can be retold often: historically, about 30-40% of Senators in any given Congress had previously served in the House…

Of course, as illustrated by the chart below, this joke is hardly ever told on the North side of the Capitol. The plot shows, by Congress, the percentage of Representatives who had previously served in the Senate. Not many.

Prior to the 1840’s, it was more common: five Members of the 13th  and 16th  Houses had formerly served in the Senate, as had six Representatives in the 23rd Congress. The most notably of these was perhaps John Quincy Adams, who had also already been President. After the civil war, the numbers fell. The last Representative to have previously served in the Senate was Claude Pepper, who served in the Senate from 1936 until 1951, and in the House from 1963 until 1989.