The Difference Between the House and Senate, Part 387

Rummaging around on some other blogs brought me to the website of the Texas Heritage Alliance, a right-wing political organization masquerading as patriotic Christians. The Texas Heritage Alliance is the new nom de guerre of the Free Market Foundation and its affiliated FreePAC.

FreePAC had its fifteen minutes of infamy when, in 2002, is sent out a series of factually inaccurate, hateful mailers trying to sabotage the re-election chances of Republican elected officials like state Senators Bill Ratliff and Jeff Wentworth and state Representatives Brian McCall and (now Senator) Kip Averitt. Wentworth's mailer accused him of being "extremely liberal" because he'd voted for the hate-crimes legislation and was a supporter of gay rights. Wentworth, who voted against a hate crimes bill in 2001 and later authored the Defense of Marriage Act in 2003, was understandably outraged. After all, he may be a parking scofflaw, but he's no milquetoast liberal.

Wentworth, Ratliff and the others condemned FreePAC and its hateful tactics -- Ratliff called their mailers "political pornography" -- and the uproar forced FreePAC to go underground for a while. The discredited organization resurfaced as the Heritage Alliance, explained founder Richard Ford, "to signify a unified effort of economic and social conservatives passing those values onto future generations."

Anyway, the Heritage Alliance has a Legislators' Scorecard on its website, ranking all 150 House members and 31 Senators according to their votes on conservative issues like supporting Tom Craddick for Speaker (RV1) and placing "In God We Trust" above the dais in the House Chamber (RV16). In all, there are 67 House votes and 53 Senate votes analyzed to produce a ranking.

I think it's interesting that the Senators' scores are more clustered than the House members'. While House scores range from a low of 3 (Paul Moreno) to a high of 96 (Jodie Laubenberg), the Senate scores range only from a low of 40 (Eliot Shapleigh) to a high of 79 (Robert Nichols). In other words, the Senate is less extreme in the swing of its members' views than the House.

Interesting question: why are four of the five most conservative members of the House (Laubenberg, Brown, Crabb, Harper-Brown, and Riddle) women?