How Kerry Votes: Like A Massachusetts Liberal
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By Robert J. Caldwell
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20041017/news_lz1e17caldwel.html
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The non-partisan National Journal magazine conducted an exhaustively detailed review of all Senate votes during 2003. Its conclusion: Massachusetts Sen. John Forbes Kerry had compiled the most liberal voting record of any member of the U.S. Senate. More liberal, by several degrees, than even that of the Senate's liberal icon, Ted Kennedy.
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Americans for Democratic Action has been rating every member of Congress on liberalism's key quotients since the 1940s. Its lifetime rating for the fervently liberal Ted Kennedy is 90 percent. Kerry's lifetime ADA rating is 92 percent.
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The ADA's ideological opposite is the American Conservative Union. The ACU rates the votes of members of Congress on their fealty to such politically conservative principles as restraining government, resisting higher taxes and maintaining a strong national defense. Kerry's lifetime ACU rating: 5 percent.
Congressional Quarterly, the encyclopedic and non-partisan chronicler of what Congress does and how its members vote, found that Kerry voted 100 percent of the time with Ted Kennedy on major legislation in 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1992, 1993, 1998 and 1999.
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On taxes and spending, Kerry has a lifetime rating of only 18.7 percent from the National Taxpayers Union. Kerry's average rating from Americans for Tax Reform from 1999-2003 is 12.5 percent. Citizens Against Government Waste gave Kerry a paltry 5 percent rating in 2001 and a 1990-2001 average of just 26 percent.
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On abortion, Kerry earned a 100 percent rating from the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League for every year from 1995 through 2002. This tally includes six votes against legislation banning partial-birth abortions, a gruesome procedure denounced by the Vatican as "an incredibly brutal act of aggression against innocent human life." NARAL's opposite, the National Right to Life Committee, gives Kerry a rating of 0.
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The AFL-CIO puts Kerry's big labor voting record at 100 percent for five of the last 19 years and an average of 89 percent from 1985 through 2001.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, defender of the nation's free enterprise, free market economy, records Kerry's lifetime record of support as a weak 35 percent.
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Kerry poses today as a hunter, gun owner and defender of the Second Amendment's constitutional right of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms. The National Rifle Association, with its 4 million members, isn't fooled. The NRA gives Kerry a failing F on gun-rights legislation and last week endorsed Bush for president.
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Caldwell, editor of Insight, can be reached via e-mail at robert.caldwell@ uniontrib.com.
By Robert J. Caldwell
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20041017/news_lz1e17caldwel.html
_________________________________
The non-partisan National Journal magazine conducted an exhaustively detailed review of all Senate votes during 2003. Its conclusion: Massachusetts Sen. John Forbes Kerry had compiled the most liberal voting record of any member of the U.S. Senate. More liberal, by several degrees, than even that of the Senate's liberal icon, Ted Kennedy.
________________________________
Americans for Democratic Action has been rating every member of Congress on liberalism's key quotients since the 1940s. Its lifetime rating for the fervently liberal Ted Kennedy is 90 percent. Kerry's lifetime ADA rating is 92 percent.
________________________________
The ADA's ideological opposite is the American Conservative Union. The ACU rates the votes of members of Congress on their fealty to such politically conservative principles as restraining government, resisting higher taxes and maintaining a strong national defense. Kerry's lifetime ACU rating: 5 percent.
Congressional Quarterly, the encyclopedic and non-partisan chronicler of what Congress does and how its members vote, found that Kerry voted 100 percent of the time with Ted Kennedy on major legislation in 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1992, 1993, 1998 and 1999.
____________________________________
On taxes and spending, Kerry has a lifetime rating of only 18.7 percent from the National Taxpayers Union. Kerry's average rating from Americans for Tax Reform from 1999-2003 is 12.5 percent. Citizens Against Government Waste gave Kerry a paltry 5 percent rating in 2001 and a 1990-2001 average of just 26 percent.
____________________________________
On abortion, Kerry earned a 100 percent rating from the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League for every year from 1995 through 2002. This tally includes six votes against legislation banning partial-birth abortions, a gruesome procedure denounced by the Vatican as "an incredibly brutal act of aggression against innocent human life." NARAL's opposite, the National Right to Life Committee, gives Kerry a rating of 0.
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The AFL-CIO puts Kerry's big labor voting record at 100 percent for five of the last 19 years and an average of 89 percent from 1985 through 2001.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, defender of the nation's free enterprise, free market economy, records Kerry's lifetime record of support as a weak 35 percent.
____________________________________
Kerry poses today as a hunter, gun owner and defender of the Second Amendment's constitutional right of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms. The National Rifle Association, with its 4 million members, isn't fooled. The NRA gives Kerry a failing F on gun-rights legislation and last week endorsed Bush for president.
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Caldwell, editor of Insight, can be reached via e-mail at robert.caldwell@ uniontrib.com.
Comments
Let's take the same facts, the same implication conservative good, liberal bad and see what someone else said about the same report.
Posted on Sun, Oct. 17, 2004
Kerry a bleeding heart? The record says no
By ROBERT SCHEER
SPECIAL TO THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
Thank you, George W. Bush, for trying to assure me that John Kerry is a liberal. Wish it were so.
I like liberals. They gave us the five-day workweek; ended child labor; invented unemployment insurance, Social Security and Medicare; and led us, despite fierce opposition from "America First" pseudo-patriots on the political right, to victory over fascism in World War II. Liberals also ended racial segregation and gave women the vote.
But when Bush used the L-word in the second presidential debate, Kerry did not defend that proud progressive tradition. Nor did I expect him to. Kerry is one of those New Democrats who rejects the "liberal" label that I find so honorable. After all, Kerry, as he bragged in the debate, voted for the atrocious 1996 welfare reform bill, which has contributed to the 4 million additional people, mostly children, pushed below the poverty line during Bush's tenure.
However, after Bush's attempt to tar him as a bleeding heart, I thought I had it wrong - so I checked the Web site of the National Journal, the source cited by Bush as branding Kerry the No. 1 liberal of our time.
As is his habit on so many things, Bush had the facts wrong. The career voting record of the "Massachusetts liberal" ranks him as only the 11th most liberal, behind current colleagues from Iowa, California, Illinois, Minnesota, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Vermont and Maryland - and his running mate is a miserable 27th.
It turns out the duo moved up in the journal's 2003 rankings only because they were both out campaigning and, just as Republican presidential nominees have in the past, missed many congressional votes. As the journal later explained in disclaiming the GOP's misinterpretation of its ranking system, the 2003 rating of Kerry as the top liberal was based only on the 19 votes he cast on economic issues.
But even that narrow selection was misinterpreted, as noted by Al From and Bruce Reed, the leaders of the Democratic Leadership Council - and thus the guardians of the party's dominant centrist ideology. They define Kerry not as a liberal but as a Clinton-style moderate, even when looking at only his 2003 votes.
Eight of Kerry's "liberal" votes last year dealt with cutting back Bush's tax giveaway to the 1 percent richest Americans. Another four reflected moderate pro-environment positions, while two others should have been supported by all Americans: an extension of benefits for folks thrown out of work, many by the outsourcing abroad of decent jobs, and a challenge to the Bush assault on overtime pay.
The DLC guys further point out that Kerry's "centrism" has been affirmed in the last decade by his votes for measures that many liberals rightly opposed, such as the 1997 balanced-budget agreement, free-trade extensions without commensurate protections for the environment and workers' rights, and the knee-jerk 1994 law-and-order "100,000 cops" anti-crime bill.
So, once again, as with Bill Clinton, I find myself supporting a Democrat with a domestic agenda to the right of Richard Nixon. Yes, the man Arnold Schwarzenegger eulogized at the GOP convention was in favor of a guaranteed annual income for all Americans - something that can be made to sound even more socialist than liberal. Nixon's point man on such issues was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who as a Democratic senator from New York later blasted Clinton's anti-welfare bill as an immoral assault on the poor.
I interviewed Nixon in 1984, long after he had been chased from office, and found him to be quite proud of his domestic agenda. How sad for the nation that his domestic policy is now considered progressive compared with Bush's. Many excellent programs such as Social Security and Medicare that once had strong bipartisan support are now under attack by a perversely destructive president.
OK, Kerry may not be a daring liberal, but he is an enlightened moderate who would at least safeguard the gains made since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. By contrast, the Bush administration seems determined to return us to the 19th century, when corporate robber barons owned the White House and employed crude "gunboat diplomacy" to serve their greed.
ROBERT SCHEER
SPECIAL TO THE
LOS ANGELES TIMES