The congressional databases now have direct links to both the roll call votes tabulated by the Clerk of the House and to the text of bills and resolutions at the Library of Congress. This now make it easier to access the bills directly.
A few weeks ago, asked the question of how bipartisan Mr. McHugh was. I therefore looked at all the votes where Mr. McHugh agreed with the Democratic position. My answer came back at about 50%. Not bad.
Then I looked closer at the votes. It turns out that the Republicans and Democrats agree about 40% of the time. Most of those votes however are non-policy votes. Good for “atta boys” back home but of utterly no consequence. These include naming of post offices, recognition of national champion sport teams, recognizing birthdays, recognizing Muhammad Ali, naming “National Heart Month” or “Hire a Veteran Week”, etc, etc, etc. They actually spend a considerable amount of time voting on these things.
The more sophisticated question is: how many time does our congressman agree with the majority when his party disagrees. That is the real marker of bipartisanship. In the 110th congress, he votes about 25% of the time with the Democrats. In the 109th Congress he only agreed 13% of the time when his party disagreed with the Democrats. The difference in the 110th is that the agenda is controlled by the Democrats. For example, he votes for a clean minimum wage bill this year when the Democrats brought it to the floor but refused to sign the discharge petition with the Democrats last year to bring it to a floor vote. The difference between being passive and active – reluctant agreement.
The question prompted me to create a searchable database. It is based on the Washington Post’s compilation of congressional votes and then expanded with more detailed information on the bills. It was easy to expand it to our other Central New York and North Country congressmen/women. Over the past three weeks I’ve had to learn three computer languages – JavaScript, PHP and mySQL – to put it up. I expect bugs in it so please post the problems you find and I’ll brush up my newly learned languages and try and fix it.
The Database search abilities are fairly intuitive. The issues option is not yet completed and the type of actions for the 109th are not in yet. I will try and keep it up to date every week.
A few more interesting facts from the database:
Jim Walsh has missed 34 out of 301 or 11% of the votes. Where’s he?
Gillibrant missed 15 of 301 or 5% including the veto override of the Iraq war funding supplemental.
McHugh missed 6 of 301 or 2% including the Drug Negotiation bill.
Arcuri has missed NONE.
How many of us are allowed to miss that much work and keep our jobs? It’s called taking responsibility. This author does not see why we should not hold our congressmen to the same standard that is applied to us in the workplace.
I hope this provides our readers more insight into how we are being represented. Happy searching.
Your can enter the congressional databases here.
Please welcome Publius and Yellerdog as guest writers to the blog. McHugh Watch welcomes a diversity of opinion regarding how we in the North Country and Central New York are being represented in Washington.
Theophilus does not edit guest contributors essays. We are only bound by the opinion that what happens in Washington has the most profound effect upon each of us who call the North Country our home. Again – Welcome.