Reply #18: Lies, damned lies, and statistics

[mohc]

Looking at individual roll call votes may well be a decent objective metric for "party unity", but it certainly misses many things and over counts others. Multiple votes on the same issue compound the importance of the issue, and when Congress fails to even act on an issue, it is not even counted. Stripping out the various designations of facility bills, and all the other measures which garnered near unanimous support (which did include some good legislation such as the 9/11 Commission Recommendations and US Attorney Independence Act) we are left with just a few contentious issues for the 110th Congress. Here is my list:

Iraq
FISA
Impeachment
Gonzales(US Attorney)
Habeas
SCHIP
Stem Cells
Immigration

On Iraq and FISA, Democrats may have "backed the majority position of their caucus", but I would certainly view the Democrats as having capitulated. Indeed the fact that the majority position ran counter to the "Left" view, or at the very least was consistent with the Republicans, makes these issues even worse. While there has been some action on the Gonzales controversy, and he did finally resign, the Democrats have not pushed these issues as strongly as they could have. Habeas restoration seems to in the same ball park as FISA, just getting far less attention. SCHIP and Stem Cell legislation I guess are the Democrats shining achievements for the session so far, but it appears they will be unable to override the vetoes. If they had simply been as unified on all the other issues as they were on these two, I would have no problem with them. Immigration is perhaps the most interesting of the issues, with the Democrats and Republicans split, which makes it hard to analyze. But those that did support this, yet did not fear the backlash, I have some questions for. What was it about immigration reform that made it ok to risk right-wing backlash but not for Iraq, FISA etc...it boggles the mind.