October 19, 2008
CalComUI Releases 2008 Legislative Score Card
California Communities United Institute (CalComUI) is happy to announce that it has released its legislative score cards for the 2008 legislative year. It will release a score card on the Governor later in October.
The score cards have been placed on a page on our web site. You can go directly to that web page, and a video explaining the score cards by clicking
here.
As most people would expect, the Democrats in the legislature received higher scores than the Republicans. On the Assembly side, the overall score for Republicans ranged from 25% through 56% while the overall scores of Democrats in the Assembly ranged from 50% to 97% . On the Senate side, the overall scores for Senate Republicans ranged from 35% through 54% while the overall scores of Democratic Senators ranged from 61% through 97%.
As we have seen in past years,
Assembly Members had a more liberal voting record than their colleagues in the Senate. The average overall score for Assembly Members, on all issues tracked by CalComUI was 77%, while that overall average in the Senate was just 56%.
CalComUI works on legislation in five issue areas. Those are:
AIDS issues
Economic Justice issues
LGBTI issues
Issues of concern to People of Color
Women's issues.
Sadly legislators had a dismal voting record on LGBTI issue bills. They voted the right way on these bills only 65% of the time in the Assembly and 37% of the time in the Senate. As has been true in past years, legislators had the best record on women's issue bills. Assembly Members voted the right way on these bills 88% of the time. Senators voted correctly on women's issue bills 74% of the time.
As I have said, Democrats generally had better voting records than Republicans. However, they have much room for improvement. No Democratic legislator got an overall score higher than 97%. In prior years several Democrats would get a perfect 100% score.
Also, the voting records of two Democratic legislators are absolutely abysmal. The scores given to Assembly Members were based on how they voted in 100 votes on the Assembly floor. Assembly Member Nell Soto (D, Ontario) was absent or abstained from every one of those votes. While Senator Edward Vincent (D, Inglewood) was absent or abstained from voting in 75% of the votes we used to score Senator's voting records.
Our score card page has summary tables which show the average scores of legislators on each of our five issue areas along with the overall scores of those legislators. Separate tables give more detailed information on how legislators voted on each of the bills in each of the five issue areas. These more detailed tables contain links to copies of the actual bills voted on. This allows you to get a clearer picture of what they were voting on.
You might want to see how we rated your legislator. The Score Card page also contains a link that you can click on to see who your Assembly Member and Senator are.
To see the score cards, click
here.
Boyce Hinman
California Communities United Institute
LambdaLP@aol.com
www.CalComUI.org
