Scatterbrained

My recent post about Bill Frist taking the reins on the sea port issue from flimsy national security posturers like Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton got me thinking about Senatorial voting records and the quantifiable differences among Senators and their legislative priorities.

To get a visual on these differences, I decided to scattergram Senators' votes along two dimensions: national security and pro-growth economic policy.

To assign each Senator a national security score, I took the average of the two measures mentioned in the previous post - the 2003-04 support ratings (0-100) according to two prominent national security interest groups (the Center for Security Policy and the American Security Council).  As a proxy for Senators' commitment to pro-growth economic policy, I counted the number of votes cast during the 109th Congress in keeping with the Club For Growth Congressional Scorecard (0-6).

Not surprisingly, these two dimensions carve up the Senate pretty cleanly along party lines.  Senators Frist, Schumer, and Clinton are plotted in green.  Others are colored by party (GOP: Red, Dem/Ind: Blue).  Some interesting anomalies and endpoints are noted by letter.

Click image to enlarge.

It's easy to forget how demonstrably weak certain legislators are on key issues like keeping us alive and allowing free market capitalism to drive global prosperity, but we can't let empty rhetoric slung around now and then by opportunistic ideologues erase their enduringly atrocious voting records.