#ncga: We’ve got legislator rankings!
Granted, they’re from Civitas and the American Conservative Union. Granted conservatism is in the eye of the beholder. One man’s conservative is another man’s liberal. But, here we go.
For 2017, now-former Rep. Chris Millis was the only House member to get a perfect conservative rating from Civitas. Three of the House’s top five conservatives for that year — Millis, John Blust, and Jeff Collins — will not be around after November 2018. Talk about a sobering reality.
For 2018, however, Civitas has handed out a bunch of perfect ratings. I dug 
deeper and found that they based those only on TWO votes: school psychologist reciprocity and the Build NC bond issue. Hopefully, they’ll factor in more votes. Otherwise, a lot of people — who don’t deserve it — will be able to campaign for reelection this year as “perfect conservatives”.
The American Conservative Union has also releases conservative rankings for the NC General Assembly for 2017. The ACU is quite the establishment cheerleader these days. To them, “conservative” often means supporting GOP leadership — which we know can stray from conservatism at the drop of a hat.
According to the ACU, the most liberal Republican in the House was Hugh Blackwell. The most conservative Democrat — (the next William Brisson?) — was Ken Goodman of Richmond County. Goodman is ranked a hair to the left of Blackwell.
Reps. Autry, Butler and Fisher rated as THE most liberal House members.
Over in the Senate, Tamara Barringer rated as the most liberal Republican. Ben Clark rated as the most conservative Democrat.
Senators Bishop, Dunn, Harrington, Tarte, Tucker, Hise and Lee rated as the most conservative senators. Senators Don Davis, Valarie Foushee, Jay Chaudhuri, and Gladys Robinson ranked as the most liberal senators.
Where is the ultra conservative Steinburg’s name on the list?
The Civitas rating used to be the gold standard in NC, but since John Hood started exercising heavy control, its rating became a joke, failing to rate on some of the big issues most of concern to conservatives, taking the liberal side on others, and using some minor issues. It is not worthy of consideration any longer.
Decades ago, the American Conservative Union had a state affiliate, the NC Conservative Union, which did a rating that hit all the important issues and had high crediibility, but then ACU discontinued its state afffiliate program and that rating fell by the wayside. Since then, ACU was captured by the establishment and its national ratings have no longer held the respect they did decades ago.. To make matters worse, their state ratings are compiled in Washington, DC by people who know little of NC politics.
North Carolina is badly in need of a reliable conservative / liberal rating scorecard. We do not have one at the present time.
South Carolina, on the other hand, has a highly respected rating of its legislature by the state chapter of the conservative Club for Growth.
Maybe the Haymaker could start doing a rating?.
I would like to see a legislator rating based on personhood bills sponsored or co-sponsored by NCGA members. For the 2017-2018 session, not a single personhood bill was brought to the floor for a vote, and the women who sponsored the bills were targeted by the NCGOPe in the primary. 2 of the 4 women sponsors are not coming back in November. This is truly the ONLY rating that should matter.
HB2 is also a key issue in this time period. It was part of the Civitas rating previously when it first passed, but John Hood pressured Civitas not to include it when it was repealed. Hood was part of the elitist clique of surrender monkeys who were cheerleading for the sellout to Roy Cooper and the corporate bullies on this issue. John Hood has singlehandedly destroyed the credibility of the Cibitas rating in refusing to let them use the two most high profile liberal / conservative issues in their 2017 rating – the HB2 repeal and the major gun rights bill (the one that Grassroots North Carolina had the March Against RINOs over).
A personhood bill should be part of the rating, but to rate on any issue you have to have a floor vote. The fact that this bill never got a floor vote is a huge reason why the leadership needs to be changed in both the House and Senate.
As the ACU, they destroyed the credibility of their rating in 2014 when they rigged it to show squishy moderate Mitch McConnell as the most conservative member of the Senate. They did that to help McConnell in his primary against a major conservative challenger (that challenger is now Governor of Kentucky). Claiming McConnell was more conservative than people like Mike Lee, Rand Paul, and Ted Cruz did not wash with nayone, and even rank and file voters in Kentucky did not buy it. If ACU had rigged it to bump McConnell’s score up, but not all the way to the top, they might have gotten away with it, but they went overboard, and their ratings are now not respected.
Um, what is ‘personhood’?
I wanted to run a personhood bill when Skip Stam, supposedly “Mr. Prolife,” was Speaker Pro-tem. He told me in no uncertain terms that it would not be allowed a hearing.
Personhood is the NEW pro-life for the 21st century. In the 21st century we can no longer afford to be focused on a single pro-life issue. Human life and human dignity are under assault in ways we never before imagined.
South Carolina passed a Personhood bill last month, and Georgia is right on their heels. There are no exceptions in Personhood bills, and therefore the need to continue creating new bills goes away.
All Representatives and Seantor are voted for in 90-80% range Great Conservatives.
These ratings have become useless as they have been corrupted, but trying to rate the short session separately was always a dumb idea as there are so few votes taken.
Not only did BOTH the Civitas and ACU ratings fail to rate on the bill that most separated the conservatives from the liberals (or men from girly men), the HB2 surrender on bathroom privacy, but in the case of ACU they failed to rate on another bill that separated conservative small government legislators from the liberal friends of big government and that was the renewable energy subsidy bill which forces electric ratepayers to subsidize the expensive and unreliable wind and solar electricity boondoggles.. Civitas did, at least, rate on that one. ACU is completely clueless.
Wind and solar cause electric rates “to necessarily skyrocket” to use Obama’s words. Countries that have deployed it extensively have seen their poorest citizens thrown into energy poverty with many countries seeing the higher electric rates forcing hundreds of thousands off the grid as they cannot pay their electric bills.
Here is what this renewable energy obsession is doing to real people:
https://stopthesethings.com/2018/06/15/intolerable-cruelty-rocketing-re-power-costs-punishing-poorest-most-vulnerable/
Those pushing this garbage in North Carolina, including Berger and Moore, are shameful whores to greedy special interests..
I would love to see a state chapter of the Club for Growth organized in North Carolina, like the really great one in South Carolina. They have done an excellent and honest conservative scorecard on their state legislature for years. Here is an example:
https://www.scclubforgrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2015-2016-SCCFG-House-Scorecard.pdf
Some sad news from SC is that Congressman Mark Sanford, who is 100% conservative on the national Club for Growth scorecard lost his primary to State Rep. Katie Arrington, who ranked a miserable 14% conservative on the state Club for Growth scorecard. Arrington wrapped herself around Trump and managed to get a last minute endorsement tweet from Trump that probably put her over the top. Trump was very badly advised on that one. Sanford has survived his colorful personal life in past primaries but the Trump endorsement changed the game in this one.