Dakota Beacon

Recently it was brought to the attention of local radio talk show host Scott Hennen and his guest, Congressman Kevin Cramer, that the latter had received a very poor rating of 38% from the Conservative watchdog organization, Heritage Action.  Cramer brushed this off as some right-wing attempt to raise money and stir up trouble in his home district, to encourage Tea Party people to raise a challenge in the primaries this year.  He condescended to tell listeners that Tea Partiers were being misled and that we should ignore these scores.

Cramer’s irritation with Heritage Action stems from this low rating.  Heritage Action is part of the Heritage Foundation and its mission is to read the bills and compare them with Constitutional and fiscally responsible standards and then decide what the right vote should be for a Constitution-minded Conservative on each bill that they weigh.   Not all Republicans score badly with Heritage Action.  Most, however, do better than Cramer did. 

Cramer charged Heritage Action with “cherry-picking”, just looking at certain votes and not being fair.  Just to check them out on this, I looked at how they ranked other Republicans, and then I went to two other watchdog organizations, New American “Freedom Index” and “FreedomWorks”.  I looked at how Heritage Action compared with them and how other well-known members of Congress and the Senate fared with them.  I looked for him in Club for Growth’s index, but he is too new for them to have reviewed his votes.

What I found was really interesting.   I “spot-checked” Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor, John Hoeven, Tom McClintock, Lamar Alexander, Lisa Murkowski, Michele Bachmann and John McCain – about as varied a crop of Republicans as I could think of from every point on the spectrum.  Of these people, Heritage Action gave its highest ratings in this order: Tom McClintock (CA) – 91%; Michele Bachmann (MN) - 82%; Mitch McConnell (KY) – 80%; Eric Cantor (VA) – 61%; Lamar Alexander (TN) – 46%; John Hoeven (ND) – 44%; John McCain (AZ) – 43%; Kevin Cramer (ND) – 38%; Lisa Murkowski (AK) - 36%.  From this we can see than even though Tea Party people are working on challenges to some of these people, Alexander and McConnell among them, they both received substantially higher ratings from Heritage Action.  This group is not hesitant to note a strong conservative voting pattern and informs us of these patterns in our legislators in Washington.

I didn’t want to focus on only Heritage Action, which is associated with former South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, so I went further afield to see how Congressman Cramer stacked up with other groups.  FreedomWorks is associated with, among others, former Texas Congressman Dick Armey, a North Dakota native.  They maintain a scorecard on all members of Congress as well.  They also encourage challenges to Republicans who are drifting too far to the left in their votes in Washington.  Here I found consistency, if slightly higher “grades”.  Again, the high score of my selected samples went to Tom McClintock, with 97%.  The rest are as follows:  Michele Bachmann – 92%; John McCain – 78%; Mitch McConnell – 77%; Eric Cantor – 75%; Lamar Alexander – 62%; Lisa Murkowski – 52%; Kevin Cramer – 48%; John Hoeven – 45%.  Again, not quite a stellar performance by North Dakota’s delegation. 

Finally, I looked at the New American “Freedom Index”.  This website is really useful in that not only do they feature the legislators’ scores, but give a brief account of the bills they use to score them and their positions on each and the reasoning they employ in arriving at their assessments of the bills.  The others also provide information on the bills, but New American’s format is very user-friendly and straight-forward.  If you don’t like the Constitution you also won’t like the “Freedom Index”.  This is associated with the John Birch Society and their views are quite libertarian and strictly Constitutional.  They will take a position which is sometimes at odds with Neo-Con types who favor government overreach in “national security” – i.e., spying on innocent American citizens and data-mining, excessive foreign involvement in hostile actions,  etc.  To these people, the federal government has become scarier than our foreign enemies.  They may have a very good point.  At any rate, they were far more generous to Cramer than the other two, although he falls woefully short as any kind of “conservative”.

Here are the Freedom Index scores on my sample:  Tom McClintock – 93%; Michele Bachmann – 80%; John McCain – 63%; Mitch McConnell – 62%; Eric Cantor – 56%, John Hoeven – 56%; Kevin Cramer – 55%;  Lamar Alexander – 54%; Lisa Murkowski – 50%.  Once again Kevin Cramer fails to shine as a Conservative. 

There are differences among these groups because they weigh bills in different ways and tabulate by their own formulas. They are consistent within their own criteria, however.  There is no “cherry-picking” that weighs unfairly within each scorecard.  They are viewed impersonally on the record, as each views the bills on which they voted.  It is easy to see that both Tom McClintock and Michele Bachmann are genuine Conservatives.  There are some pretty soft Progressives in there, like Lamar Alexander, and you can see this as well.  Some fare better than others with some organizations, based on their particular focus.  But in each case, we can see that even John McCain, who has termed Conservatives “wing-nuts” and “wacko-birds” is far to the right of Mr. Cramer.

In all honesty and fairness, however, there are some bills which are more important than others.   In every session there are minor matters which come up for a vote.  But this session has been rife with crucial votes on vital issues.  What has ever been put to Congress which is more far-reaching than Obamacare and the funding that makes this monster possible?  Is weighing in on a $1+ trillion budget “cherry-picking”?  I hardly think so.  Looming ahead is immigration “reform”.  Another blockbuster issue. Congress has been careening dangerously from one extreme bill to the next, moving an ever-increasing distance away from our Constitution.

This would not be quite so bad had Cramer campaigned as “Mr. Moderate”, or as a Progressive, business-as-usual-in-Washington type Republican.  Of course he didn’t because he knew if he did he would likely not be elected by the people of North Dakota, who were ready to return to Constitutional values and the principles of the Founding Fathers.  Instead, he ran as a Conservative.  Conservative tea party organizations drafted him to run!  The reason they did so is because he talked the talk.  We misconstrued his actions as Public Service Commissioner also.  Many of us looked to him as a champion of federalism and a foe of “big government”.  It turned out that when he was in state government he wanted the power to remain with the states, but now, in the federal House, he apparently prefers the big government and influence he finds in Washington.

His performance bears close scrutiny.  1) He voted to end the government shutdown by acquiescing to the Senate’s rewrite of the House bill which had defunded Obamacare, to put funding back in for this.  It was a major missed opportunity to fight back against the so-called “Affordable Care Act”.  This was a betrayal.  [HR 2775].

 2) He voted against an amendment to an agreement for joint military exercises with the military forces of the People’s Republic of China.  The amendment would have prevented collaboration with enemy forces on American soil.  Odd to consider that we permit this involvement of one of our chief foreign enemies while we are snooping on Americans in the name of “national security”. [HR 2397].  3) In that same agreement, he voted against an amendment which would have stopped unlimited use of the War Powers Act to enmesh us in endless wars (remember Viet Nam?). 

4) He voted in support of HR 1947, a farm subsidy bill.  While this might appeal to some of Cramer’s farm-based constituency, it also provides for federal government overreach again.  Here’s the New American’s reasoning: “The constitution does not authorize the federal government to subsidize food, farmers, or poverty. These subsidies have resulted in large market distortions as the government essentially picks winners and losers in the food production industry, and the fact that the number of people enrolled in food stamp programs has grown consistently illustrates that these programs do little to lift people out of poverty.”  Should farmers become reliant on - and therefore controlled by - federal government bureaucrats?   

5) Cramer voted in support of indefinite incarceration of “suspects” without charging or trying them.  This is part of the misguided Neo-Con paranoia which has us throwing away our Bill of Rights over fear of these bogeymen “terrorists”.  If it were only terrorists who are involved some might look at it differently, but this allows the President to override American citizens’ basic rights to a fair and speedy trial on charges.  If we are to suspend our rights in this matter we will soon find that anyone who even knows anyone “suspected” could end up confined indefinitely without being charged and thus without the chance to defend himself.  It is unconstitutional and it should be seen to be.  Too often we bring out scare tactics in order to abridge freedom and rights of the innocent.  Fear is a tool used by many tyrants, from the Japanese Empire to Hitler to cow their people and deny their freedom.  This country finally got around to apologizing to the Japanese Americans for their treatment by the Roosevelt government.  Now we’re doing it again, but in a more insidious, individual way which is, if you think about it, even more terrifying to honest, innocent Americans. Under this act, American citizens can lose their rights without trial simply by being designated by the President “enemy combatants”.  Scary, huh?

6) Cramer voted in favor of the Cyber-Spying, data-mining and sharing of private information of Americans through  HR 624, which allows massive sharing of private information with all government agencies – not just those concerned with national security, it takes corporations off the hook for damages resulting from their sharing of information they gather.  It contravenes our Bill of Rights – again.  And he supports this.

7) He has voted repeatedly for bills allowing the federal government to borrow more and more money to  get by day-to-day.  His votes in favor of the continuing resolutions that keep extending the federal government’s credit way, way beyond its means of paying for it is shockingly irresponsible for someone who ran as a “common sense” down-to-earth man of the people. 

Cramer is no longer a “man of the people” if, indeed, he ever was.  He has become, or has been revealed as, just another big-government, pork-barrel  Neo-con.  Sure, he has occasionally voted right.  He predictably supported the Keystone pipeline, for example.  Even a broken clock, however, is right more often than Cramer has been in his first term.

And the problem with this is that if we assent to a second term, he has his directive to keep doing what he has been doing and that is driving us farther down the road to bankruptcy and tyranny.  Cramer might not be the worst man in Congress, but he ranks among the worst Republicans in Congress and that’s not good.  Yet he complains on radio talk shows that these scorecards are some kind of conspiracy to draw feckless Tea Party idiots into challenging him in a primary.  Well, folks, that’s what primaries are for – to put forward the best candidates, the ones we want to see in high office.  There is nothing wrong with a primary or a primary challenger.  I seem to recall that Cramer won his office via a challenge in a primary.  Now he thinks that’s a bad thing.

We were fooled by Cramer.  He’s no Conservative.  At best he’s a left-leaning “Moderate” or “Progressive”.  If that is what we want entrenched in Washington, then we should give him another term.  If we want support in Washington for people such as Tom McClintock or Mike Lee or Ted Cruz, however, we need to find someone else in a hurry.  Someone who really means it when he says he’s a Conservative.  If you are buying into the impeachment scenario, more power to you, but don’t ever, ever count on support from Kevin Cramer.  He’s just not there.  He won’t fight for investigating Benghazi, he won’t fight against Obamacare, he won’t try to get the Fed audited.  And he won’t support or fight for impeachment.  He won’t fight big spending that we can’t pay for.  Benjamin Franklin said it – “’Tis hard for an empty bag to stand upright.”

There’s no point in Cramer bashing these watchdog organizations because they are calling him out on his votes.  As we’ve seen it’s not some rogues at Heritage Action, it’s virtually every Conservative organization that scores votes in Congress!  Cramer should just come out as a Progressive.  Then he won’t have to explain away these scores.  His problem is that he wants it both ways.  He wants Conservative support at home for Progressives votes he casts when he’s in Washington.  If he wants them to give him high ratings as a Conservative he will have to vote as a Conservative.   If he doesn’t like the scores he’s getting down there at the bottom, he should look to people like Michele Bachmann or Tom McClintock and vote more like they do.  Don’t blame the mirror if you don’t like what you see there.