Party First

We’d like to alert you all to a great resource out there in the intertubes and netwebs. It’s called OpenCongress.org. You can search on any member of the Senate or the House of Representatives and find their latest votes, the committees they sit on, even recent news articles on them. But what we’ve been interested in this morning is “voting trends,” which is listed about halfway down the page of each member’s section.

In the voting trends section is an item called “votes with party.” So far, we’ve clicked on about 30 or 40 representatives at random and the lowest rate of party-line voting we’ve found belongs to John Kuhl of New York. He only votes with his fellow Republicans 86% of the time. Just about every other representative we’ve studied votes along party lines on more than 90% of the issues, often that number is more like 95%.

Even the celebrated maverick John McCain parrots his caucus on 9 out of 10 votes. And if you think Democrats are any better, they’re not. Actually, most Dems we searched on showed 97-98% party loyalty.

Oh, and by the way: John Kuhl lost on Tuesday.

Update: More searching has yielded a new champion of independent thinking in today’s Congress. Dr. Ron Paul only supports his Republican caucus 3 out of every 4 votes. Not bad, relatively speaking, but still a bit deflating. Even someone as liberated as Paul only disagrees with his party’s leadership 25% of the time?

PS: If anyone searches the database and finds someone with a better record of bucking their party, please let us know. Or - conversely - we’d like to hear about the biggest partisan toadies out there. Is there anyone with a 99% record? 100%?