Legislative Scorecards from the ADA and the PDD
December is the time of year for year end reviews. The Delaware General Assembly will be restarting its 147th Session this January, and now is a good time to see what they did, and how they did it. The Delaware chapter of Americans for Democratic Action released its 2013 Legislative Report Card last month. As you may or may not know, the ADA concentrates on social and economic justice issues and is not necessarily part of any political party. The Delaware chapter of the organization is relatively new yet very vocal and effective. Their legislative report card focuses on the individual members of the General Assembly and how they sponsored and voted on specific progressive pieces of legislation.
The report card names 10 legislators “Delaware ADA Heroes” – those legislators who co-sponsored over half of the 10 selected pieces of legislation. Not surprisingly, Representative John Kowalko is the top “hero” among legislators, co-sponsoring 9 of the 10 selected pieces of legislation. The ADA also names 17 legislators as “Delaware ADA Zeroes,” for they did not co-sponsor any of the 10 selected pieces of legislation. According to the report, State Representative Trey Paradee was the only Democratic legislator who did not sponsor any of the 10 selected pieces of legislation.
Here is the full ADA report:
The Progressives Democrats for Delaware (PDD) released their legislative scorecard today, and they instead focused on how their progressive priority legislation fared in the General Assembly as a whole that is completely controlled by Democrats. Not that tracking how individual Senators and Representatives voted isn’t important, indeed, it was part of the PDD-DL Vote Tracker project, which will be starting back up in January when the General Assembly returns and will be a very important aspect to how candidates and incumbents are endorsed in 2014 for election and re-election.
However, since the Democrats control both the House and the Senate, and thus can control both what legislation is voted on and what legislation is kept in committee, the PDD thought it instructive to grade the entire General Assembly based on how their progressive priorities fared. For a reminder, the PDD legislative priorities in this session were the passage of measures providing for 1) marriage equality, 2) reasonable gun control, 3) progressive tax rates for incomes above $60,000, 4) single payer healthcare, 5) lobbying and lobbying disclosure reform, 6) no excuse absentee voting, 7) justification for rent increases in manufactured homes, 8) a Transgender discrimination ban, 9) independent redistricting reform, 10) the repeal of the death penalty, 11) an increase in the state’s minimum wage, and 12) no benefit cuts to Medicaid.
The PDD report is entitled “The Good, the Bad, and the Incomplete” and states that “four legislative goals were achieved; four were defeated, while four were incomplete.” The full report is embedded below, but here is some selected excerpts:
Hopefully in the second half of this General Assembly session, some of these incomplete bad grades will be rectified.
Becky Walker is as close to a zero as you can get. It wasn’t as if the ADA’s items were creating heated controversies in the district.
You’d have to chalk up her lackluster sponsorship record to laziness or fear of an increasingly mythical GOP bogeyman.
Should she fear a Democratic Primary from an actual Democrat instead?
Walker voted for 6 of those 10 bills in addition to the one she sponsored. Not sure why she didn’t sponsor more bills, but a legislator’s voting record is probably just as important to check to get a full picture.
Co-sponsorship means next to nothing, IMHO. I respect the ADA, but co-sponsorship has little to do with one’s record.
Some people are co-sponsors on dozens of bills, equally-effective legislators co-sponsor very few. For many, it’s a reflection on whether they take a more macro or micro approach to promoting legislation.
Votes are what’s important. In this session alone, there were instances of ‘sponsors’ either voting against a bill with their name on it, or going ‘not voting’.
One of the advantages of looking at co-sponsorship is that it allows ADA to account for bills that haven’t yet received a vote, for instance minimum wage, redistricting reform, and death penalty repeal in the House. While no perfect legislative scoring system exists, I think taken as a complement to PDD’s report card (which accounts for votes) the ADA score card is informative.
I think if a legislator wants to champion a bill they should be willing to put their name to it. And if a legislator co-sponsors the majority of the priority bills identified as moving social and economic justice forward, they are at least proclaiming their outward support for many pieces of important progressive legislation. Using a system that only scores legislators on pieces of legislation that come to the floor for a vote privileges those legislators in power who can help ensure bills they like get floor votes and bills they dislike get killed without a floor vote.
I think the PDD voter scorecard, ADA co-sponsorship record, and DL qualitative descriptions with rankings all help build a picture of our legislators.
That being said, any measure has its shortcomings. We recognize ours has shortcomings: our report card, on its cover page, notes: “This Record has several inherent limitations. Formal co‐sponsorship does not measure a legislator’s actual work on particular legislation or the individual’s degree of responsibility for helping move the legislation forward. This record does not account for legislators’ votes or work for or against any particular legislation. It does not reflect a legislator’s lifetime of work.”
I would welcome anyone who is interested in working on this report card in the future, including lending their ideas about how to best measure whether legislators are championing social and economic justice issues, to join Delaware ADA’s Electoral Politics Committee. We will be working to elect progressive Democrats.