Monday, February 24, 2014

Arizona Has Most Perfectly Conservative Congressional Delegation In Nation In 2013! House Increasingly Partisan

The conservative powerhouse group Club For Growth released its 2013 scorecard today, and not surprisingly, ranked three Arizona GOP Representatives at the top of the House with perfect voting records.

Only Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) joined AZ Reps. Trent Franks (R-CD8), Matt Salmon (R-CD5) and David Schweikert (R-CD6) at the head of the CFG class.  Arizona's other Republican Representative is Paul Gosar (R-CD4), and he was only the 51st most optimal Congressperson in the Club's eyes, with an 83% score.

Also not surprisingly, the scorecard amplifies the increasingly partisan makeup of Congress and the shrinking number of moderates on either side of the aisle.  Only two Democrats had (slightly) higher CFG scores than the four lowest-scoring Republicans; less "mixing" than in any recent year reviewed by Arizona's Politics. 2012 and 2013 were also the only two years that more than 200 members of the House had CFG scores of 50% or higher - 241 in '12 and 205 in '13.

The Club For Growth considers a number of what they consider to be key votes, assigns them varying degrees of importance, and then calculates a percentage.

Only Kentucky and Texas were close to Arizona in the number of perfectly-conservative members of Congress.

Arizona's five Democratic Representatives were bunched closely together between 11-16%.

On the Senate side, the Club For Growth had spent a ton of money defending then-Rep. Jeff Flake in his primary battle against Wil Cardon and in the general election against Rich Carmona.  However, Flake - who had had nearly a perfect CFG score during his tenure in the House - only ranked 20th in the Senate with an 84% score.  John McCain was in the bottom half of the Senate Republican's class, with a 71% score.

Two weeks ago, Arizona's Politics reported on the similarly-conservative Heritage Foundation's report card.  They also saw Franks and Schweikert as perfect, with Salmon missing only one vote.

We welcome your comments about this post. Or, if you have something unrelated on your mind, please e-mail to info-at-arizonaspolitics-dot-com or call 602-799-7025. Thanks.

No comments: