Carney's Votes by the Numbers

One of Tom Marino's very first press releases claimed that Chris Carney "voted with Nancy Pelosi 91% of the time," and I've seen the same claim repeated in NRCC ads on TV. (Of course, this implies that everything Nancy Pelosi votes for is "liberal," but we'll set that aside for a moment.) I said to myself, "That can't be right." Carney has stood up and done the right thing many times (voting for healthcare reform, the DISCLOSE Act, etc.) but I think many liberals and progressives would be a lot happier with him if he really did vote "91% liberally." So I did a little digging.

The first thing I found was this Factcheck.org article which addresses 6 ads being run by the NRCC with basically the same accusation ("voting with Pelosi") against 6 different Democrats. Factcheck points out two reasons the "91%" is wrong and misleading. First of all, it doesn't actually use Pelosi's votes. "Traditionally" (and this was news to me), the Speaker doesn't participate in most of the votes in the House, so for instance out of the 991 votes taken in 2009, Pelosi only cast a vote on 46 of them. So, the NRCC opted instead to assume that any time Carney voted with "the majority of Democrats," he was voting with Pelosi.

The trouble with that (reason #2 why the "91%" is misleading) is that Congress takes many, many votes where a majority of both parties agree. These include quorum calls, votes to name post offices, votes to "honor the 50th anniversary of Miami Dade College" (House Vote #520 in 2010), stuff like that. So if we're really trying to get at a measure of "how consistently does Carney side with the Democrats" (as opposed to siding with everyone), we've got to take that into account.

Factcheck makes the assumption that anything Pelosi actually bothered to vote on must have been a contentious issue, and therefore reports in their article how often (in 2010 only) Carney and Pelosi actually did vote the same (including only the measures that they both actually voted for). They report this number as 84%, which is still pretty high, but the NRCC obviously preferred their (not-quite-accurate) "91%" soundbite.

While Factcheck's assumption is probably true most of the time, it's not necessarily true all the time. In other words, Pelosi may have voted on "non-controversial" things, too. Since we have access to raw Roll Call Vote data from Thomas.loc.gov (or in a more easily usable format at Govtrack.us), I wanted to go a step further than this and see how often Carney really agreed with the Democratic vs. Republican leadership on "controversial" (i.e., non-unanimous) votes over his whole career, not just in 2010. I used two measures to determine which were the "contentious votes":
(1) Any votes that weren't unanimous (the winning side had less than 90% of the vote); or
(2) Any votes where the highest-ranking voting member of each party voted differently.

For (2), since Pelosi doesn't usually vote but her deputy Steny Hoyer (of MD) does, I compared Hoyer's votes with those of John Boehner (the Republican minority leader). Their votes "should" reflect the way that Democrats and Republicans were "supposed to vote" on each measure (I realize this isn't a perfect assumption, but I think it's more objective than Factcheck's).

With all that in mind, I compiled the following table showing how Carney has agreed or disagreed with both parties since he started in Congress in 2007. (Click to enlarge -- I apologize for inserting it as an image, but I was having trouble converting from Excel to HTML.)

Basically, this suggests a few conclusions:
(1) Carney has been pretty consistent under both Bush and Obama;
(2) Carney consistently sides with the Republicans (and breaks with Democrats) between 16-21% of the time. While that's not a huge number, it translates to somewhere between 300 and 400 "controversial" votes with the Republicans (depending on how you define "controversial") or roughly 1 out of every 5 votes. So he's definitely voting with the Democrats more often than not, but he's no mindless drone.

(Final disclaimer: Obviously, none of this addresses which of these votes were "important" bills, or how Carney breaks with the Democrats on certain issues, but it is meant to give an overall picture of his voting tendency.)

I have drafted a letter to the editor that I plan to send to the Daily Item, but if others would like to use this information and send letters on a similar theme, I hope that we could get this information out to combat the "91% voting with Pelosi" myth.

Is there a clean energy future for the US?

Two bits of recommended reading:

First, this piece from Tom Friedman about how we are failing to invest in Energy Secretary Steven Chu's vision of energy innovation--mini-Manhattan projects:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/opinion/13friedman.html

Second, this piece from the Breakthrough Institute that holds up a vision of a post-partisan path forward (which is, of course, already under partisan attack):

http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/2010/10/postpartisan_power.shtml

We've seen federal action on 2 of CSCC's top 3 issues (Ending the Iraq War and Health Care) in the last couple years. We know we need to do something about energy/environment, but when? How?

Trey Casimir and Erik Viker, 85th District

Trey Casimir did an interview with SQVNEWS recently (less than 10 minutes).

He has stuck to his promise not to solicit donations, and he's only spent about $500 so far.

Here are his top three agenda items:

1. The Thruway
2. Severance tax on natural gas development
3. Close the digital divide (provide more access to high speed internet for those who want it but can't get it).

Trey is running an unorthodox campaign, to say the least. It will be interesting to see how many Republicans vote for someone other than the Republican this time around.

I suspect that Fred Keller will get fewer votes than Russ Fairchild did last time around and that Erik Viker will get some of those. See his SQVNEWS interview here. Like Trey, he says he's using no Harrisburg consultants and running a grassroots campaign and that he wants to get beyond the broken political party system. Seems like there's a consensus about getting rid of the "walking around money" too.

As far as I know, Fred Keller hasn't done a similar interview. Feel free to post information in the comments if you are aware of any.

Free film screening: "CRUDE: A Documentary" next Tuesday, Sept. 7

As our monthly meetup in September, CSCC will host a special film screening of the 2009 documentary, "CRUDE" on Tuesday, September 7 at 6:30pm at the Union County Public Library, 255 Reitz Blvd., Lewisburg. This event is FREE and open to the public. Please join us! For more information, contact us here.

CRUDE (2009, 100 minutes), directed by Joe Berlinger, follows a two-year portion of a $27 billion class action suit brought against the Chevron Corporation following the drilling of the Lago Agrio oil field in Ecuador, a case also known as the "Amazon Chernobyl." The plaintiffs of the lawsuit are 30,000 Ecuadorians living in the Amazonian rainforest, which they claim has been polluted by the oil industry. CRUDE shows interviews from both sides, and explores the influence of media support, celebrity activism, the power of multinational corporations, the shifting power in Ecuadorian politics, and rapidly-disappearing indigenous cultures.

"Dynamic, tightly arranged, and deliberately provocative, Joe Berlinger's CRUDE is a sobering, enraging wake-up call," according to the film website RottenTomatoes.com which gives it a 95% positive rating.

Reading the signs

Another Daily Item story today indicates that Rep. Carney has deep support across the district, in spite of some rumblings about his support for the Health Care bill:

http://dailyitem.com/0100_news/x1047881716/Show-of-support

Recent stories in the DI have noted the tremendous cash advantage that Carney holds: 70-1 (though there is a much smaller gap in money raised from within the district).

Here comes Rick

If you haven't seen this video of Rick Santorum's comments to the state GOP, it's worth a look. He really does say that President Obama doesn't understand what it means to be an American.

Fivethirtyeight.com now gives Toomey a 53% chance of winning in November. That's down from a 70% chance of winning before the primary. Joe Sestak is looking better every day. I'm hoping that Rick Santorum gets out and campaigns for Toomey. That should be interesting.

Thruway update

The July 3 (2010) Daily Item contains an extended story about more small steps in the Thruway saga. One new piece of information involves the fabled "swap" that would have to take place in order to get the Thruway onto the radar for the Appalachian Regional Commission. The proposed stretch for a swap is not on the 50 year plan, and runs parallel to a now existing stretch of I-99. The argument is that this other proposed corridor is not needed and never will be. At a bare minimum, it isn't needed in anything like the way the CSVT is needed.

Ryan Unger reported in June that it's all or nothing right now. If this breakthrough doesn't happen in the next year, we'll be looking at splitting up the project, leading to another long delay.

Here's my thought: an on-line petition aimed at residents and also at non-residents who pass through. If we don't have enough people power to pass out hand bills to trucks stopped in traffic on the golden strip, how about a billboard and a website? An on-line petition of some sort?

The message should be simple and direct--something that people can deliver clearly to elected (and unelected) officials throughout this whole tangled process: BUILD IT. (The Thruway.)

The Thruway is the weak link in a chain of highway from Canada to Baltimore. Something like 24 traffic lights--stop and go traffic at random times throughout the day. And that doesn't even mention the abuse the Northumberland has to endure with all those trucks--90% of which are just trying to get somewhere else.

Anybody have experience with on-line petitions? It seems like a Facebook Group might work, but a direct e-mail campaign might send the message farther. I like the billboard idea because I think the papers would cover the story, especially if we could put together a few thousand signatures. If I hear some support I'll start looking into what it would cost and what kind of technical know-how is involved.

The one advantage here is that it's hard to find anyone who's against it. It comes down to money. So maybe we also have to propose some ways to pay for it. I would support tolling the new bridge if it comes to that, even though in general I don't like tolls (and Ryan Unger indicated that there are a bunch of legal problems with the idea). If the bridge were tolled, the trucking companies who would be benefiting greatly from the enhanced infrastructure would be helping to pay for it.