I am very pleased to announce that once again the FlashReport has partnered with the California Republican Assembly, the states oldest, conservative Republican organization, to present the debut of the CRA’s annual legislative scorecard! While there are many organizations that produce scorecards, this is the scorecard that, in my mind, provides the greatest insights into the voting patterns of legislators — especially Republican legislators. While many of the bills that are chosen for this scorecard represent some of the most important pieces of legislation voted on this past year, other bills are chosen because they provide insight into the ideological nature of a legislator. As always, the CRA also does a good job of including bills where the “pressure is on” and a lot of lobbying is taking place to produce outcomes. Most other groups that rate the legislature come at it from their particular issue perspective (for example, on taxes the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association is the best) — but the CRA score is compiled by looking at votes on a myriad of different subjects.
You can download the CRA 2012 legislative scorecard here — which includes both spreadsheets of the Senate and Assembly, as well as documentation detailing the legislation that was scored this year. The scorecard is easy to read, so I encourage you to “dig in” and check it out. I would encourage you, of course, to provide your legislator with feedback. Where they did a good job, call or email them with your praise. If they voted poorly, well you should share that with them as well.
It seems appropriate to praise the handful of legislative Republicans who scored a perfect 100% on this years scorecard. So congratulations to State Senators Joel Anderson, Ted Gaines and Mimi Walters — the “perfect score” club in the Senate! Honorable mentions go to Senators Dutton and La Malfa for scoring over 90%. The dubious honors of being the Republicans with the worst voting records in the Senate go to Tom Harman (by far, who voted with the CRA position a mere 54% of the time) and Bill Emmerson (62%). The latter actually had the dubious distinction of authoring one of the bad bills used in the scorecard. Of note – while Democrats in the Senate, as expected, score very poorly on this card, one of them actually scored better than Harman — Lou Correa voted with the CRA position 56% of the time. An honorable mention goes to Rod Wright who hit the 50% mark.
Nathan Fletcher really took a hard left turn, with a deplorable 17% score from the CRA.
On the State Assembly side, congratulations to the perfect 100 club — Diane Harkey, Steve Knight and Dan Logue! In the 90% club, worthy of being mentioned are Connie Conway, Paul Cook, Tim Donnelly, Beth Gaines, Martin Garrick, Shannon Grove, Curt Hagman, Linda Halderman, Kevin Jeffries, Brian Jones, Allan Mansoor, Mike Morrell, Chris Norby, Jim Silva and Don Wagner. Which Assembly Republicans fared the worst on the CRA scorecard? Katcho Achadjian (63%), Jeff Gorrell (66%), and Cameron Smyth (67%). Which Democrats voted with the CRA position the most? Kathleen Galgiani (33%) and Allyson Huber (44%). Of particular note to our readers would be the dismal 17% score from former Republican turned Independent Nathan Fletcher. Seventeen Democrats had worse or just as bad a voting record as Fletcher this year.
A big thanks to the team at the California Republican Assembly for all of the research, numbers crunching, and formatting necessary to produce this useful and informative scorecard. I will close by publishing some comments from California Republican Assembly President Celeste Greig…
“As always and following tradition, the CRA proudly announces their annual Scorecard on the Sacramento Legislators and congratulates the principled legislators who achieved above 90% voting record and moreover those with a perfect 100% voting, personally I’m truly appreciative to our CRA Vice President Tom Hudson for all the labor of love, valuable and long hours of research and dedication that he put into this endeavor to make it a success, to Jeff Evans and Rick Marshall for their support and advice to Tom and to our amazing and great leader and past CRA President and Publisher of the FlashReport (my political Bible), Jon Fleischman, for giving us the opportunity once again to include our Scorecard on his award-winning and acclaimed FlashReport.”
Disclaimer: I am proud to have served as President of the California Republican Assembly myself from 1995-1997.