Given Sen McCaskill’s seeming intransience on fighting the FISA bill, is it any wonder some of us want to know more about her voting record on all the issues?
I’m using a broad database provided by the Washington Post but would love to see a site that has more detailed analysis.
If you count all the members of the Senate, party members vote with the party 84.4% of the time.
How does that compare to Sen McCaskill?
Right there on the average at 84.2%
Democratic Senators vote with the party 87.5% of the time so she’s a little below average there.
Ah, but scratch the surface and see what you think.
If you rank the Senators from top to bottom in voting with the party, she comes in at #79, thus, there are 78 Senators with a higher level of voting with the party than Sen McCaskill.
Who might some of these Senators be?
Kit Bond at 86.1%.
Joe Lierberman is at 86.5%.
JOE LIEBERMAN?!!!!!!!
Give. Me. A. Break.
And even tho she votes most often with Jim Webb, he’s at 90.5% of voting with the Party.
As a former VA resident, there are a lot of demographic commonalities with Missouri in terms of voting patterns. And Jim Webb definitely ran as more of a conservative Democrat that did Sen McCaskill.
And yet, here we are looking at someone who’s not voted the way she ran and who can point to JOE FUCKING LIEBERMANN as someone who votes “more Democratic” than the junior senator from Missouri.
Again, I don’t expect her to be Dick Durbin (he votes with the Dems 97.5% of the time) but I don’t expect her to:
a) stray from the party line more than Jim Webb,
b) stray from the party line more than Joe Liberman, and
c) stray from the party line on issues like the 4th Amendment, holding the Executive Branch accountable and yunno, all those other pesky little constitutional issues she claimed in 06 she’d stand up for.
What a world we live in.
and is exactly the reason why I’ve been so surprised by Claire. When Claire was running I remember telling someone in another state that I had no illusions about Claire being progressive, but that I expected that she would be a good Democrat and vote with the majority and if she broke with them it wouldn’t be on highly controversial issues that were strongly supported by Republicans.
I have no illusions that she is a ‘do or die’ Democrat – she primaried a sitting Democratic governor for goodness sake. But I did not expect her to break with the party on core votes.
I expected her to potentially buck the party on parochial interests here in Missouri, every pol does that. And I certainly didn’t expect her to stake out a progressive agenda that most of us here would heavily cheerlead.
But, she said again and again that she’d stand up to this administration.
I guess to her, certain amendments to the Constitution are more important than others.
I can guarandamntee you that if this were some kind of Congressional assault on guns and by extension, the 2nd Amendment, she’d be as supportive of defending that amendment as the next Missouri pol. She’d have to be. I just don’t get why she’s seemingly doesn’t care about the 4th. And I don’t see how voting against FISA is gonna make her any more vulnerable in 2012 than she already may or may not be.