A couple weeks ago, I exchanged comments with a progressive writer in Orange County, CA who has it in for his conservative House Rep. Young Kim. I confessed “I know very little about Rep. Kim but she does earn very high marks on Bridge Grades which ranks members of Congress on a collaboration and bipartisan measure.”
His response: “Kim also earns high marks from the Heritage Foundation and is campaigning as a ‘100% Trump Republican.’”
Okay, he exaggerated a little, but still.
I’m often asked about whether legislators with strong ideologies are able to earn high marks for collaboration. This question reliably launches me into a “don’t mistake compromise for collaboration” discussion, which centers on the principle that compromise is ceding territory in a zero-sum game while collaboration is about finding new utility in win-win solutions where interests overlap.
Still, his comment about her Heritage Action score (a scorecard that aligns with an overtly conservative legislative agenda) got me curious to dig deeper into data. I scraped scores from the Heritage Action scorecard and added in the Congressional scorecard from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) which is something of a proxy for a progressive legislative record, and placed all of the data into a single table and published it here.
The screenshot above shows the table sorted by highest Bridge Grade1, and you can see Rep. Kim right there in the 8th row. Just above her, check out Rep. Joe Neguse from Colorado whose ideological profile is almost exactly the opposite — Heritage Action considers him a disaster, while the ACLU rates him as a champion.
Do these ideological stalwarts with high Bridge Grades for collaboration discredit our scoring system? On the contrary. It shows that even ideologues can govern collaboratively, build coalitions, be civil in their discourse, and seek out win-wins for our common interests — all while holding onto their ideological beliefs.
Our systems don’t care where on the ideological spectrum these collaborations sit. There are seemingly endless opportunities for those with wide political ideologies to collaborate on consensus solutions based on areas of mutual interest. Here are a few examples from the 24,081 pieces of legislation introduced to Congress this term so far.
(Numbers in parenthesis below are ideological scores from voteview.com called DW-NOMINATE ranging from -1.0 for the most progressive to +1.0 for the most conservative)
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (-0.742) and Sen. Tim Scott (+0.628) collaborating on the recent Senate housing bill.
Rep. French Hill (+0.435) and Rep. Maxine Waters (-0.656) collaborating on the House version of the same housing bill.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (-0.545) and Sen. Josh Hawley (+0.820) collaborating on capping credit card interest rates.
Rep. Tim Burchett (+0.664) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (-0.333) collaborating on banning stock trading by Congress members.
And, so on.
These are just examples that include names of legislators many of us are familiar with. Legislators with the highest Bridge Grades are generally more unknown (scan that chart above for any familiar names) and quietly earn their high marks for simply engaging in cross-partisan governance, on any topic, more often than their peers.
That’s it.
It’s a good thing that our legislators represent a wide range of ideological beliefs. Our ideological differences are not the problem here. It’s a bad thing when our representatives don’t listen to, brainstorm with, and collaborate with one another for our common interests. This is the problem Bridge Grades tries to solve.
About Bridge Grades
Bridge Grades is a citizen-built, citizen-funded project of Mediators Foundation Inc, a 501(c)(3) based in Boulder, Colorado. Bridge Grades is built to become a trusted Wikipedia-like resource used widely across American politics. With systems that are transparent, open-source, and independently governed, Bridge Grades is protected from big money, special interests, and blackbox technologies. Our north star is a low-overhead, self-sustaining public resource that maintains durability and independence for at least the next 10 election cycles. We are two years into a multi-year quest to get there.
The table on the webpage is fun to sort for yourself.
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