I’ve noticed that the FOX talking heads (yeah, I saw Hannity recently), keep referring to Obama as the MOST liberal person in the Senate. That of course is the first time I’d seen anyone identified as more liberal than Ted Kennedy. But, anyway, I checked with a website that is liberal and which ranks senators and house members on a liberal (progressive) vs. conservative scale on all votes that have come up and this is what I found:
Progressive Punch Senate Rankings
This is a ranking of all votes – not just on certain issues that might skew the tabulations one way or the other.
Obama ranks 25th on the “liberal” scale in the Senate (that’s his lifetime score). For 2007-08 he’s 43rd (that puts him two notches ahead of Joe Lieberman, a ways behind Hillary and quite a bit behind his fellow Illinois Senator Richard Durbin, who is Number 1 in 2007-08).
While Obama does not fall into any conservative tendencies on any issues, he loses his chance at being No. 1 “most liberal” on the following votes: moving class action lawsuits to less consumer-friendly federal courts; voting with Republicans to move forward on Senate approval of Republican judicial nominations; he voted against a move to delete funding for an additional prison at Guantanamo Bay; he voted against an amendment by Tom Coburn that would have made the 9/11 Commission recommendations expire in the year 2012, thereby siding with Republicans, while Coburn sided with some Democrats (it’s a wacky, wacky world sometimes); he sided with Coburn on Tom’s amendment to an appropriation bill to cut $100 million for security at the presidential party conventions this summer; and he voted to confirm Condelezza Rice’s nomination as Secretary of State in 2005, despite criticism at the time for her role in lobbying for the war in Iraq (which Obama opposed). Much of the rest of his poor showing as a “liberal” was because he was absent during close votes on issues regarding big business and restrictions on credit card companies.
I may have to reconsider my support for Obama. He may be too conservative for me.
Meanwhile, according to this ranking, there are 40 U.S. Senators more conservative than John McCain (based on lifetime votes). He lost his “conservative” star by voting with Democrats/”liberal”s the following way: to stop debate on an immigration bill; to curb an expansion of the list of crimes that would prevent illegal immigrants from applying for legal status; to allow federal funds for embryonic stem cell research; to allow the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate for cheaper pharmaceutical prices for senior citizens (apparently Repubs are healthier and don’t need medicine); he voted with Democrats to reduce certain tax breaks for persons earning more than $1 million annually, in order to fund greater veterans medical benefits; he authored a bill requiring current background checks for gun buyers to apply to “gun shows”, thereby closing a loophole. This was hotly opposed by the NRA (the bill was then added to the gun liability bill, which was soundly defeated when the gun lobby ramped up); he voted with Democrats for $100 million in aid to Mexican farmers hurt by falling coffee prices (someone tell Starbucks about that); McCain voted against an amendment to the drug bill that would have barred states from providing health insurance to poor legal (yeah, legal) immigrants. The amendment failed, but McCain was one of only 8 Repubs to vote against it; in 2004 McCain sided with Democrats and voted against a bill to cut funding for education and social security and provide tax cuts for the highest tax bracket taxpayers; he voted against a bill to cut taxes on social security benefits and allow budget deficits to increase; in 2002 he voted against allow pharmaceutical companies to extend their patents (his vote thereby allowed less expensive generic drugs to become available at the current time frame); in 2005 he voted to re-instate polluter-pays fees to fund the bankrupt Superfund trust originally created to clean up abandoned toxic waste sites (the bill failed, so the taxpayers have foot the entire bill, but clean up has slowed to half what it was before); he sided with Democrats in a bill requiring the Dept of Energy to set timelines for development of hydrogen fuel cells (32 REpubs voted against this for whatever reason); in 2004 he voted against opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling; and in 2002 he voted with Democrats to create a commission to examine spikes in energy prices. His absence on several key votes regarding pharmaceuticals also affected his score.
But before you call McCain the most liberal of Republicans, he is ranked 19th most conservative in the Senate in the 2007-08 period. There are 30 Republicans who score more liberal than him over-all, according to this study of each senators entire voting record during that period. But there are only eight Republicans who score more liberal than him when the senators’ lifetime voting record is taken into account.
Both Obama and McCain missed about the same number of close votes on various issues in the last two years.
So when you hear FOX labeling Obama the MOST liberal in the Senate, that’s obviously not true. He may be far more liberal than they want, but it’s the sort of hyperbole that we are fed by cable TV media who have an agenda. If conservative critics label McCain too liberal, he probably is for their tastes, but mostly due to his votes critical of big business or the gun lobby.
-MDD
