Last week, by way of a threat, the National Rifle Association announced that it would “score” U.S. senators on how they vote on the nomination of Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court. A vote for confirmation would suggest that the senator is not fully committed to gun rights.
This is no big surprise. But such scorecards rarely are. They’re entirely predictable. And they’re designed more to intimidate legislators than inform voters. Maybe they should be called “scarecards.”
They’re equally flawed whether they come from the right or the left of the political spectrum. Evidence suggests that more of them come from the left. Do a Google search for “legislative scorecard” and the first references that come up are links to websites for the American Library Association, the California Public Interest Research Group, Washington Conservation Voters, the AFL-CIO and the American Civil Liberties Union.
The total number of hits is greater than 60,000. A lot of legislative scorecards are being done, including quite a few by media. But there also are dozens, if not hundreds, being done by chambers of commerce and other business groups, and a very large number of various sorts of taxpayers’ associations, which are usually associations of people who would rather not pay taxes at all if they can help it.
The right’s scorecards usually cover business and social issues on the positive side, and tax and government issues on the negative side. A vote for gun rights, or against abortion rights or gay marriage, is a good thing on these scorecards. A vote to impose more regulations or remove tax deductions is a bad thing.
The left’s scorecards are big on social issues, too, but usually for opening things up rather than closing them down — such as gay marriage or abortion rights.
The trouble with all this scoring is that it ignores the larger issues. It’s very narrow and usually partisan in its selection of issues to include in the rankings. It tends to pick the more purebred controversies — the ones you wouldn’t vote for (or against) unless you were a particularly partisan legislator. And sometimes it leaves things out.
That was Republican legislators’ complaint against a scorecard prepared by Colorado Conservation Voters, an environmental advocacy group. While the Colorado legislature as a whole voted with the group 88 percent of the time, Democrats scored highest, with 51 voting for all 13 bills used as criteria.
Republicans pointed out they would have scored higher if the scorecard had included one of the session’s most important eco-friendly bills, requiring some coal-fired electrical generating plants to convert to natural gas.
Maybe the problem was that the bill had strong bipartisan support. By focusing on the more partisan issues, scorecards discourage compromise and negotiation and promote a purity of ideology that contributes to the inability of legislative bodies to actually accomplish anything.
Pete Maysmith, director of Colorado Conservation Voters, said the fuel-switching bill wasn’t included because some of the organizations involved in deciding what to score were neutral on it. But he did “recognize and thank” legislators of both parties who voted for it. That’s a nice sentiment, but only underscores that scorecards are mostly based on narrow litmus tests.
The voters who look up scorecards probably do more research than the majority does. But truly informed voters should not be relying on scorecards to do their thinking for them.
Fred Brown (punditfwb @aol.com) is retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post.
