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.