Conservative Review on NCGOPers in DC: Meadows, Jones, Holding most conservative, Burr & Tillis most liberal
It’s election time, and we’re hearing all of the elected ones brag about how great they are and how scummy the other person is. If you’re reading this blog, it’s likely you’re a big fan of limited government. A lot of folks claim to be conservative, but don’t walk the walk. We – and good folks like Conservative Review (CR) — aim to hold those people accountable for their deception.
CR has a running vote score card for all members of the US House and Senate. For the North Carolina delegation, Mark Meadows ranks as the state’s most conservative House member with a grade of 93% (A) out of a possible 100. Walter Jones comes in second with a grade of 78% (C), while George Holding is close behind at 77% (C). 
Mark Walker follows Holding at 73% (C), and Richard Hudson follows Walker with a grade of 61% (D). Now, here come the Fs — the failures: Virginia Foxx (58%), Renee Ellmers (55%), Patrick McHenry (53%), David Rouzer (53%), and Robert Pittenger (43%).
Let’s move over to the US Senate. Richard Burr and Thom Tillis — our two guys in the upper chamber — rank as the most liberal Republicans representing North Carolina in DC. Burr gets a grade of 39% (F) and Tillis gets a grade of 35% (F). Let’s compare them to South Carolina’s Republican team. Tim Scott gets a grade of 89% (B) while Lindsey Graham matches Burr’s 39% (F). CR has Scott 
ranked as the fifth most conservative senator overall.
Utah’s Mike Lee (100%), Texas’s Ted Cruz (97%), Nebraska’s Ben Sasse (94%), and Kentucky’s Rand Paul (92%) are the only members of the upper chamber more conservative than Scott. 
As a point of reference, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren’s grade of 18% (F) makes her the most conservative Democrat in that body.
Voting with the party seems to be the only criteria it takes to score highly with Conservative Review.
Is that how you define a Conservative?
You clearly have not looked at the issues involved in these ratings. Voting conservative OFTEN involves voting against the party Obama-enabling leadership of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.
If you want to see how often a member of Congress votes with the majority of their party, those ratings are at Congressional Quarter. The CR rating, the Heritage Action rating, the SCF ratings, Club for Growth rating, etc, are based on conservative policy issues that often go against the establishment of both parties. A good example is to look at Mitch McConnell’s own rating, which is moderately liberal. There are quite a few GOP Senators to the right of Mitch McConnell.
So you are familiar with “The Liberty Score” method that “Conservative Review” uses for evaluation…?
It gives no points for anything other than voting along party lines.
Is that how you define a Conservative?
You are clueless about what ”party line” means. The leadership – McConnell, Ryan, and their deputies set the leadership position which is considered the ”party line”. Many of the conservative votes on the Conservative Review scorecard and the Heritage Foundation scorecard are opposite to the position of the GOP leadership. The fact that the leadership themselves score poorly on both ratings clearly shows that the ratings do NOT correspond with leadership’s positions. Look up the scores of McConnell and Cornyn in the Senate or McCarthy in the House and you will see many votes where the leadership voted against the conservative position. The Speaker does not usually vote, so you cannot check Ryan.
The “Party Line” is the party’s agenda isn’t it?
You are so off in left field that you do not seem to comprehend that the GOP leadership in Congress is run by establishment Obama-enabling moderate-liberals. The positions they support are OFTEN NOT the conservative position.
I wish the conservative position WAS the party line, but with Ryan and McConnell it often is not.
You are so right. Rick Glazier was one of the more liberal members of the NC House. My wife compared our records and found that he, a Democrat, voted with the majority more than I did while we were both there. What that tells me is that our leadership has been supporting a liberal Democrat-friendly agenda a lot of the time, which I, as a conservative, could not support. So if you see me not voting with the majority, know it is because I am a conservative who votes that way.
The type of people we have in legislative leadership is a real disappointment to the GOP base. They are more Democrat facilitators than principled Republican leaders. At the federal and state level, the only GOP legislative leader worth a crap is Phil Berger in the State Senate. Berger is a man of principle who has a backbone and a set of ‘nads. The same cannot be said about our GOP leadership in the State House, US House, or US Senate.
A few courageous Congressmen including Mark Meadows and Walter Jones of NC got rid of the awful John Boehner, but he got replaced by someone equally as bad, Paul Ryan who is Boehner 2.0. That idiot Mitch ”Benedict Arnold” McConnell refuses to fight Obama, even to the extent that Boehner pretended to, and is already babbling to the media about how Senate Republicans can work well together with Hillary Clinton. Tim Moore runs the NC House about the way Boehner ran the US House, and panders to Democrats just as much if not more.
Other than Berger, Republicans badly need a change in out leadership.
Richard Burr has also consistently ranked low on the other widely respected conservative rating, that by Heritage Action. Burr has been left of center on their rating for years, and currently sits at a lowly 42%, lowest of any NC Republican in the House or Senate. That is just 3 points different than CR.
Burr seems not to care. When Orrin Hatch, like Burr someone who used to vote conservative but then ”went native” inside the DC beltway, came up for reelection last time, he at least starting voting conservative again for the year or so before the election. Burr does not even make a pretext. He just keeps voting liberal.
If Burr will not vote for us in the Senate, how does he expect us to vote for him on election day? Most of this term, Burr has voted the interests of the K Street special interests, not the interests of the people of North Carolina.
Totally agree on not voting for Burr. I’m sitting this one out. I’m not voting for Ross; I’m just leaving all bubbles blank.
“Burr seems not to care”
Why should he? It doesnt matter much if people grumble when they cast their vote. 🙂 There are plenty of NC voters who’s vote is already owed by him because he’s got that R behind his name. For them, nothing else matters.
They can always throw out the “at least I’m not a Democrat” line, and it’s always been pretty reliable – that’s how his buddies Tillis and McCrory got elected… now that I think about it, it’s even effective at the Presidential level this year. 🙂
I see Rouzer in Nc7 scores an “F” on the CR scorecard. NO surprises. I gave him an F long ago. He said he stood up for LIFE and against the crony ExIm Bank. Then he funded them after lying to our faces time and time again in last year’s Omnibus vote. He said he regretted signing the Mulvaney Pledge to defund Planned Parenthood since at the time he didn’t think about what it would be attached to. What a man of little principles. This year, his CR vote wasn’t even needed–IE, he could have voted his district yet he voted his conscience I guess since he voted once again to fund the entire Obama in the CR.Heritage Action has scored Rouzer with a 76% The GOP House average is 66%. I guess he could get worse (like Burr and Tillis). In time, that will happen.
Amazing that Holding NOW gets a “C”. I’ve said for years that he’s more conservaTalk than conservaReal.
These ratings may tell you something, but maybe not always as accurately as you might think. In 2013, Civitas only ranked me at 13th most conservative in the NC House, mainly because i voted no on the budget. What they didn’t understand, and what I explained to them afterwards, was that I didn’t vote for the budget that year because I didn’t consider it a conservative budget. In 2014, when I did vote for the budget adjustment (too late actually to fix the whole budget, but I supported a lot of the changes made that year), they ranked me as the number one conservative in the House, with a 92% score. The highest in the Senate was David Curtis, with, I believe, a 76% score. I voted for the budget in 2015, only after about 30 of us conservatives banded together to try to get 12 items taken out of the budget and succeeded in removing 8 of them. I was ranked number two conservative. This year, I was one of eleven ranked number one by Civitas. So it is hard to pin down just how accurate these rankings are, especially when they are base on a limited number of votes, and not on one’s total voting record. If our leadership would allow some of my bills to be heard, and if the people who produce these ratings paid attention to that, I don’t doubt I would be the number one conservative most of the time. The rankings are not worthless; but they don’t tell you everything.
I mean to say “based on,” not “base on.” Sorry for the typo.
The political reality is that NC is a “purple State”, being quite moderate compared to the rest of the traditional “South”. A true ‘conservative’ candidate, like Larry Pittman or Mark Harris, simply cannot get enough votes for U.S. Senate, by appealing to the evangelical base, which is shrinking according to polling data. So we must either be content with the milque-toast moderates we’ve elected, or go the way of the Whig Party, as Democrats re-take those seats.
You really do not understand the dynamics of politics. Most voters who consider themselves ”moderate” are not moderate on all issues; they are conservative on some and liberal on others, and so consider themselves moderate overall. The way conservatives get elected with such voters is to appeal to them on issues on which most of those moderate voters are actually conservative and downplay issues where they may be liberal. Campaigns are won and lost on specific issues, not on where a candidate stands overall of the political spectrum.
A good example is the immigration issue. The Washington Post did a poll a couple of years ago and found that both among self identified moderate voters and self identified independent voters, a Republican who opposed a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants ran a full 12 percentage points higher with each group than a Republican who supported a pathway to citizenship for them. This is an example of how taking the conservative strategically on a key issue helps a candidate get the moderate and independent vote.
Another good example is abortion. Jack Hawke in a gubenatorial race did a lot of polling and focus groups on this issue in North Carolina. He found that voters divided into three groups, those against all abortions, those for abortion on demand, and those who did not want to totally ban abortions but had reservations about abortion. The abortion on demand group, which was the smallest, was pretty much straight ticket Democrat, so there was no use pandering to them, but both of the other groups were comfortable with a candidate who was not totally against abortion but wanted to put restrictions on it. Those restrictions could be as broad as restricting abortion to cases that involved rape, incest, of a threat to the mother’s life. Thus the general conservative position on abortion is the best strategically to get votes.
Campaigns and Elections magazine used to do a series each election cycle on ”the six movable tribes of voters” all of whom were up for grabs and each group had issues they were liberal on and issues they were conservative on. They did a running analysis on the campaign’s successes in capturing these groups. None of them were captured by being moderate. They were captured by being conservative or liberal on the issues that in the final analysis were most important to these groups on election day.
Your analysis is highly superficial and a politician who followed it would be just as superficial. The voters who are themselves moderate on all issues are miniscule and they are probably mostly people who do not follow politics enough to know what issues mean, and thus might not even vote.
Burr is a moderate liberal, not a moderate. Many conservatives could tolerate a moderate conservative like Elizabeth Dole, but Burr is straying far enough left that he is running off his base. That is a dangerous political move. Smart politics would have been to tack back right in an election year, like Orrin Hatch did, but I guess his advisors are not the sharpest knives in the drawer.