National Journal: Dang, but those Democrats are incredibly in lockstep!

Not that the National Journal would put it in such a fashion. And, fair warning: this is from ten months ago.  But it’s still pretty funny.

So The National Journal did a list of the 15 most liberal Senators, the 15 most conservative Senators, the 15 most liberal Representatives, and the 15 most conservative Representatives.  All of this based on 2013 rankings (remember, this is from February of 2014): as to who they were… well, I don’t really care, and maybe neither should you.  The inadvertent thing here is the funny thing.

Basically, if you look at the lists you’ll discover a godawful number of ties among liberal Democrats.  As in, there was a seven-way tie for “Most liberal Representative.” Followed by a six-way tie for 8th place, and a two-way tie for 14th. Liberal Senators were almost as bad: three-way tie for 1st, seven-way tie for 5th, three-way tie for 13th, the rest singletons. Meanwhile, over on the GOP side… one tie for 8th place on the House list, fifteen singletons on the Senate one.  Feel free to bring this up the next time somebody complains about how much the GOP hates dissent; at least our legislators can be distinguished from each other by their voting records…

Oh, one last thought: presumably the National Journal will be redoing this feature in a couple of months.  I wonder if they’ll get a better grouping this time?  Or will the Democrats, once again, look like this?

Moe Lane

PS: …No, I don’t know how that seagull survived getting run over by a car without visible injury, either.  Apparently Finnish birds are simply as flat-out tough as the rest of the country is.