The National Journal has issued its annual rankings that seeks to gauge each member's ideology based on their votes. This year's ranking considered 84 Senate and 103 House votes.
Rep. Nick Rahall, D-WV3, is the 166th most liberal member of the U.S. House, out of 429 ranked.
Rep. Alan Mollohan, D-WV1, is the 172nd most liberal.
Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, R-WV2, is the 275th most liberal.
(Conversely, Capito, Mollohan and Rahall are the 155th, 258th and 265th most conservative House members among those ranked.)
Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., is the 31st most liberal senator out of 99 ranked.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., was not ranked because of missed votes. (Update: chronic back problems and "very, very major surgery" kept Rockefeller out of the Senate for a good part of 2006.)
"The ratings rank lawmakers on how they vote relative to each other on a conservative-to-liberal scale in both the Senate and the House. The scores are based on the members' votes in three areas: economic issues, social issues, and foreign policy," the National Journal explains.
Interesting findings:
* Byrd is the 8th most liberal senator on foreign policy issues;
* Capito is, along with 34 other House members, more liberal on foreign policy issues than only 6 percent of the House;
* The delegation is otherwise more or less in the middle when it comes to economic, social and (except for Byrd and Capito) foreign policy issues.
The methodology is explained here. My thanks to my cyber-mentor, Taegan Goddard, who blogs about the survey on his Political Wire.
03 March 2007
Ranking W.Va.'s congressional delegation
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3 comments:
The most telling thing in all these stats is that Rockefeller has voted enough to even get a ranking.
I'd like to know his excuse for missing so much work and why we should bother re-electing him if he can't spend any time representing us in the senate.
It all looks pretty shabby when you consider how Robert Byrd- at his age and with his health problems- hardly ever misses a vote.
Elvis, follow the link my man.
Messina even did the research for you. All you have to do is click...
JDR had major back surgery in March of 2006. His wife was fighting cancer in 2005 and 2006.
Mannix's article (that link you couldn't bring yourself to click) does a fairly good job of explaining it.
And if your comment was posted before the update with the JDR story was posted, I'd like to personally thank you for posting your retractin comment here so your un-advised views didn't contribute to an echo chamber.
My apologies for not being clear: the original post did not include the link regarding Rockefeller's absence. I added it after the initial comment, but really should have provided that context from the onset. Again, sorry.
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