Madison Project

Earlier this week, I detailed the ridiculous faults inherent in the National Journal legislative scorecard.  Today, the Club for Growth published their annual congressional ratings for 2011.  You can view the House scores here and the Senate scores here.

People have emailed me wanting to know why the Club for Growth’s scorecard is slightly different from Heritage Action’s rolling scorecard.  Here is the divergence between the scorecards for the top ten scorers in both the House and Senate:

Take a look at Heritage Action’s top scores here.

Now view the Club for Growth’s top scores.

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In order to balance the budget we must severely limit the dependency state and eliminate many agencies and programs.  However, the least we can do is to cut duplicative programs.  This is something that should be a bipartisan endevour, yet Congress is dragging it’s feet.

Last March, the Government Accountability Office published a report that identified 81 areas with unnecessary duplication within the federal government.  Specifically, they cited 53 programs to help entrepreneurs, 15 unmanned-aircraft programs and more than nine different agencies involved in protecting food and agriculture systems from disasters and terrorist attacks.

Yesterday, the GAO put out two more reports; one detailing Congress’s failure to deal with original recommendations and another identifying an additional 51 areas to streamline government.  The follow-up report, which was order by Senator Tom Coburn, found that Congress completed action to eliminate or combine just 4 of the 81 duplicative programs.  Why are they dragging their feet?

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In what has been a consistent feature of this primary season, turnout was once again disappointing.  Turnout was estimated at 15-20% throughout the state, but even lower in some of Romney’s strongest counties.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out  the broader problem.

While we hold House Republicans accountable for breaking their spending pledge, we should also publicize the good legislation they pass.  Yesterday, the House passed a commonsense bill by voice vote to overturn an aspect of the 2005 Supreme Court eminent domain decision in Kelo v. City of New London.

The Fifth Amendment grants government the right to take private property and use it for public functions like roads and bridges, as long as the owner is fully compensated.  In 2005, the Supreme Court shocked the country be extending eminent domain rights to other private entities for the purpose of economic development.  The consequence of that decision was that if a local government deemed it necessary to tear down a Motel 6 and hand the property to the Ritz Carlton, it would be permissible under the guise of economic development.  This decision was one of the most egregious infringements on our property rights ever.

Republicans passed H.R. 1443, which would rescind federal funds for any locality that exercises eminent domain rights as a means of promoting “economic development.”  The bill also would prohibit states and the federal government from exercising their powers of eminent domain over property of religious or other nonprofit organizations.  This is a no-brainer bill, yet Harry Reid is making no promise to bring the legislation for a quick floor vote in the Senate.

Liberals talk a lot about bipartisanship, yet they are nowhere to be found when it comes time to pass something that is truly supported by all sides of the political spectrum.

Senate Democrats have not passed a budget for over 1,000 days.  Their motivation for not passing a budget is to ignore the entire process in which the Senate votes on 12 separate appropriations bills in regular order.  This spares them the embarrassment of putting out 12 bloated spending bills, opting instead to roll them all into one omnibus bill at the end of the year.

Just two weeks ago, Harry Reid announced that he won’t even allow a budget resolution to come to a vote on the Senate floor this year.  He asserted that the Budget Control Act, which set discretionary spending at $1.047 trillion for FY 2013, is tantamount to a budget!  Now he is having a change of heart:

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Rasmussen published a new poll today showing all three GOP contenders leading Democrat Tammy Baldwin for Senate in Wisconsin.  We are all told that we need a moderate to win in a swing state.  As such, the establishment is backing Tommy Thompson, a comprehensive moderate who supported massive interventions in the healthcare sector as Secretary of HHS.  Well, it turns out that the conservative in the race, former Congressman Mark Neumann, leads Baldwin 46-37.  Thompson does lead Baldwin by a wider 14-point margin, but he has more name recognition.  Moreover, as PPP noted in their preliminary results from their Senate poll, Thompson is polling third among Tea Party voters.

It is becoming clear that we don’t need a milquetoast moderate to win in Wisconsin.  Neumann had a solid record during his time in the House.  Madison Project was proud to be one of the first to endorse him.

Folks, if you aren’t signed up for our email list, you need to sign up today to receive what is quickly becoming the premier legislative bulletin for Washington, DC, The Madisonian.

Compiled each week by conservative blogger extraordinaire and our deputy political director, Daniel Horowitz, it is a quick study of the legislation that will be in both chambers with a quick take on what the conservative action/counteraction should be.

So you can get a feel for it, here is The Madisonian, Issue#4.

And don’t forget to sign up today and send it to your friends!

Nothing exemplifies the pernicious effects of Keynesian economics more than the housing crisis.  It is simply astounding that 5 years after the housing bubble burst, prices are still falling.  The latest numbers from the Case-Shiller index show housing prices falling another 3.8% during the last quarter to the lowest level since 2006.  When will all these Keynesian learn that their bailouts,  fiscal and monetary stimulus will never work?  Had we left the market alone back in 2008, we would have already bottomed out and would be in the midst of a recovery.

If you think that the 2010 elections cleared out all of the dead wood from the House, you need to think again.  If you think that our only intra-party problems emanate from blue-district Republicans, you need a reality check.

Here is a state with a totally dysfunctional congressional delegation.

He was elected to the House in 2002 during a good Republican year, and has held his seat for five terms.

While conservatives cheered on the effort to keep the GOP pledge by cutting $100 billion from the 2011 budget, this member deemed it “misguided.”

This member is one of those who used his membership with the Republican Study Committee as a means of concealing his affinity for big-government from his conservative constituents.  After years of voting against every single RSC proposal, and after realizing that the group would not roll over and genuflect before leadership, he summarily terminated his membership.

Throughout his career, he has been a reliable vote for CAFE standards, ethanol, and all sort of subsidies.

No – he doesn’t represent a Democrat-leaning district in the northeast, even though he scored a dismal 54% on the Heritage Action Scorecard.  He represents an R+14 district in this staunch conservative state.  In fact, it is such a conservative district that he faced no Democrat opponent in 2010.  His nearest competition was from the Constitution Party.

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Two conservative fighters for freedom are celebrating their 39th birthday today.  They are twin brothers; Drew and Ned Ryun.  Ned is the president of American Majority and Drew is the director of American Majority Action and our leader here at Madison Project.  Good job Daddy Ryun for contributing so much manpower to the cause.