Dems support the troops, Repubs just put magnetic ribbons on their cars

Great Debates
1

Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America took 324 Congressional votes of concern to the well-being of troops and veterans, and used them to grade all our Congresscritters.

Daily Kos published a table arranging the grades for all the Senators in order of grade. Turns out that every Dem Senator got at least a B-, and no GOP Senator got better than a C.

As Hunter at DailyKos says, “The IAVA is a nonpartisan organization. That the results – who supports the troops, and who doesn’t – are so strikingly partisan is another demonstration of Republicans talking the talk, and the Democrats walking the walk.”

2

Amazing – Senator John McCain got a D, about halfway down the Republican ranks. You’d think that that if anyone would, he’d be looking after veterans.

3

The very unanimty of these results suggests to me that something is highly screwy: how are they defining “well being of troops and veterans” anyway? Not a SINGLE Republican outscored a Democrat? Not even the mot conservative Dem underscored a moderate Republican? I call BS on that.

4

Huh. Does the site link to how they gathered their data and came up with their rankings?

I mean, if a senator votes against a support-the-troops bill with all sorts of nasty rider attached, that shouldn’t count agains them. I’d like to see how they came up with those letters.

5

While it would certainly not surprise me thatthe Republicans don’t give a shit about soldiers and their families, I’m going over the list of votes that make up this rating and frankly a lot of the IAVA’s positions are, um, questionable. I assumed at first that that ratings were based on votes for or against things like military pay, benefits, and programs, but on further investigation, that is not the case.

For instance, the very first legislation on the list is the Military Commissions Act. This act is assumed to be negative towards veterans; e.g. a vote for it is bad for military people, and a vote against it is good. Why? I don’t like the Military Commissions Act either but this doesn’t directly fail to “support the troops,” does it?

Similar, consider H. Res. 619, “Providing for consideration of the resolution (H. Res. 612) expressing the commitment of the House of Representatives to achieving victory in Iraq.” This is also listed as bad. (The corrollary Res. 612 is, for some reason, good.) This appears to be a procedural vote, and yet it’s counted against the Republicans. Why? The site gies no explanation at all. How could this conceivably affect ANYONE, much less soldiers and veterans?

6

[QUOTE=Apos]
The very unanimty of these results suggests to me that something is highly screwy: how are they defining “well being of troops and veterans” anyway? Not a SINGLE Republican outscored a Democrat? Not even the mot conservative Dem underscored a moderate Republican? I call BS on that.
[/QUOTE]
Party discipline ? The Republicans are known for that.

7

[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
As Hunter at DailyKos says, “The IAVA is a nonpartisan organization. That the results – who supports the troops, and who doesn’t – are so strikingly partisan is another demonstration of Republicans talking the talk, and the Democrats walking the walk.”
[/QUOTE]
To be fair, I don’t find any indication that they are well-funded mouthpieces for Soros and friends (in other words, they don’t seem to be the lefty equivalent of Swiftboat Vets), but they are quite openly against the Iraqi war, so they’re likely to be biased against those who more fervently and openly supported and support the war. That’s not to say they’re wrong, as I think not going to Iraq would have been a pretty good way of supporting the troops, but we should be honest about their stance.

8

[QUOTE=robertliguori]
Huh. Does the site link to how they gathered their data and came up with their rankings?
[/quote]

From the IAWA site: “To calculate the Ratings, IAVA reviewed all legislation voted on in the Congress since September 11, 2001. For each piece of legislation that affected troops, veterans or military families, IAVA took a position either in support of, or in opposition to its passage. The letter grades were derived, using the scales below, from the percentage of times that each legislator’s vote matched the official IAVA stance.”

The page also includes the numeric scales they use to assign letter grades.

The list of legislation used by the IAWA is here.

9

Well, IAVA certainly foucses on the welfare of our soldiers.

They are non-partisan, yet among the pieces of legislation they support:

A very progressive piece of legislation.

But what, precisely, does it have to do with Iraq and Afghanistan veterans?

Could it be that the non-partisan IAVA has some relatively lib… er, progressive views, and that THAT accounts for uniformly poor ratings given to Republicans and the uniformly higher ratings given to Democrats?

10

[QUOTE=Bricker]
Could it be that the non-partisan IAVA has some relatively lib… er, progressive views, and that THAT accounts for uniformly poor ratings given to Republicans and the uniformly higher ratings given to Democrats?
[/QUOTE]
Well, could it? When you find out, get back to us.

11

[QUOTE=Fear Itself]
Well, could it? When you find out, get back to us.
[/QUOTE]

I’m sure Bricker, being such a legal expert, will be back with this shortly but to save him the trouble it seems that the Act had provisions related to veteran businesses and so, shockingly, it seems the IAVA isn’t just a liberal smear group after all.

Summary of Act

12

[QUOTE=tagos]
I’m sure Bricker, being such a legal expert, will be back with this shortly but to save him the trouble it seems that the Act had provisions related to veteran businesses and so, shockingly, it seems the IAVA isn’t just a liberal smear group after all.

Summary of Act
[/QUOTE]

Fair enough. I did miss that, and I’ll concede that the bill does arguably impact veterans. I think it’s a relatively minimal impact, but I guess if we assume that this group has taken upon itself a course of action to support any legislation that advantages veterans specifically in any way, no matter how attenuated, then this qualifies.

The loss of that particular example does not annul my point, however. The positions taken on the Military Commission Act seem unclear – what, precisely, is their impact on veterans?

Senators who voted to table Senator Kennedy’s SA 3918, an amendment offered by Senators Kennedy, Reed, Feingold, Akaka, and Durbin to S.2514, were given a downcheck. S.2514 was the bill to authorize appropriations for fiscal year 2003 for military activities of the Department of Defense, so that certainly would be a legitimate area for IAVA to weign in upon. But the specific grade was voting to table (essentially remove) Kennedy’s proposed amendment. What did the Kennedy/Reed/Feingold/Akaka/Durbin amendment say that was so vital to veterans and soldiers?

It sought to protect DoD civilians from competition from private contractors, by placing barriers in front of any effort to hire contractors to perform functions previosly done by DoD federal civilian employees. For example, it mandated that work could not be shifted from civilian employees to contractors unless a minimum 10% savings to the government could be shown.

Again - very progressive view. But how is it an issue that a “non-partisan” IAVA should be taking a position on?

Landrieu Amendment No. 452, to appropriate $1,047,000,000 for procurement for the National Guard and Reserves, was tabled. If a Senator voted for tabling it, he got a bad mark against his IAVA record. The amendment affected S.762, and would have pigeon-holed money for the National Guard and Reserves, instead of general DOD use. If the IAVA were a reservist organization, I can see their taking such a position – but why is it anti-veteran or anti-solider to permit DoD to apportion money to the Guard and Reserves instead of mandating it by law?

How many examples are needed? IAVA may be a non-partisan organization in the loosest sense of the words, but they are clearly advancing positions that go beyond the simple “we support the troops”. They have a very definite agenda for governance, and it seems, remarkably, to parallel the centrist Democratic view of things. Nothing wrong with that. But it IS wrong to piously claim utter neutrality when it doesn’t exist.

13

[QUOTE=Apos]
The very unanimty of these results suggests to me that something is highly screwy: how are they defining “well being of troops and veterans” anyway? Not a SINGLE Republican outscored a Democrat? Not even the mot conservative Dem underscored a moderate Republican? I call BS on that.
[/QUOTE]
The reason is that more than any congress in my memory, this one votes on party lines. Democrats are much more likely to cross party lines to support a Republican bill than the other way around.

14

[QUOTE=Bricker]
Fair enough. I did miss that, and I’ll concede that the bill does arguably impact veterans. I think it’s a relatively minimal impact, but I guess if we assume that this group has taken upon itself a course of action to support any legislation that advantages veterans specifically in any way, no matter how attenuated, then this qualifies.
[/QUOTE]

I don’t often agree with you (mostly because your usually wrong) but I don’t think you need to come up with a lot of “evidence” to assert that a site that characterizes the least veteran friendly Democrat as being more veteran friendly than the most veteran friendly Republican is basically full of shit. Democrats very often stick veterans into the preferred group into proposed legisaltion. Republicans might not like the underlying legislation even though the legislation prefers veterans over others.

For example there was recently an asbestos bill that would provide no-fault awards to anyone suffering from mesothelioma. the money was going to be collected from all the defendant companies and insurance companies. Many Mesothelioma victims are veterans who contracted the disease while working in military shipyards. Sovereign immunity prevents these veterans from suing the US government so they are stuck without recourse. The defendants liked the bill and the victims liked the bill (the vitctims got more money than they would get on average otherwise because they didn’t have to pay a contingency legal fee and the defendants liked it because they ended up paying out less (basically the plaintiffs and the defendants were splitting the plaintiff’s lawyer’s contingency fee). The proposed asbestos bill was strongly opposed by trial lawyer for obvious reasons but it was also opposed by the insurance industry because it would force them to pay out on claims immediately instead of over the decades that they would have to pay out if they dragged everything through the legal system (time value of money and all that). Veterans came out strongly in favor of the bill (it was the only way they could recover for mesothelioma. The bill was quahed on a procedural motion (requiring 60 votes) it got 59 votes for 40 votes against and one abstention (by Inouye). Considerable pressure was brought to bear by all sorts of public interest groups and in the end McCain voted to quash the bill.

Examples like this exist for just about every Republican, they are just more disciplined and vote with their party more than Democrats. I’m not saying that McCain was a sheep but if he wanted the Republican party to do anything for him, he had to toe the party line.

There is an add running in the Virginia Senate race that claims that George Allen voted against body armor for the troops. Yes it is technically true that he voted against a bill that provided more funding for equipment for reservists but it was a party line vote (as a matter of fact there were a lot of party line votes where the Democrats proposed stuff that would be good for the troops that the Republican voted down just because they could, maybe this is where the disparity in grading comes from, but its not a genuine reflection of troop support). There is no end to the amount of money you can devote to “the troops,” but the Republicans controlled congress and the senate and the Republicans get to set the agenda for the nation, no compromise or negotiation necessary.

That is why we need a split congress.

15

[QUOTE=rjung]
From the IAWA site: “To calculate the Ratings, IAVA reviewed all legislation voted on in the Congress since September 11, 2001. For each piece of legislation that affected troops, veterans or military families, IAVA took a position either in support of, or in opposition to its passage. The letter grades were derived, using the scales below, from the percentage of times that each legislator’s vote matched the official IAVA stance.”

The page also includes the numeric scales they use to assign letter grades.

The list of legislation used by the IAWA is here.
[/QUOTE]

I apologize to one and all. This rating is a piece of unadulterated crap. I should have looked closely enough to see that.

16

[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
I apologize to one and all. This rating is a piece of unadulterated crap. I should have looked closely enough to see that.
[/QUOTE]

Meh. A partisan organization hides under a neutral name, and offers “facts” to people who already believe that to be the case. Not the first time that’s happened, and won’t be the last.

But high kudos for stepping away from it.

17

[QUOTE=John Corrado]
Meh. A partisan organization hides under a neutral name, and offers “facts” to people who already believe that to be the case. Not the first time that’s happened, and won’t be the last.

But high kudos for stepping away from it.
[/QUOTE]
No biggie. I really should have taken a closer look before posting, just on the basis that it didn’t pass the “too improbably good to be true” smell test.

Not to mention, the number of votes alone should have been a dead giveaway; even spread over five years and two houses of Congress, how could there have been >300 votes significantly affecting the welfare of our troops and veterans?

Plenty of tipoffs to be skeptical, but I let myself get suckered anyway. Pffft.

18

[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
I apologize to one and all. This rating is a piece of unadulterated crap. I should have looked closely enough to see that.
[/QUOTE]

I think **rjung **was serious, though. His post was supposed to validate the method, not disparage it. Right?

19

[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
No biggie. I really should have taken a closer look before posting, just on the basis that it didn’t pass the “too improbably good to be true” smell test.

Not to mention, the number of votes alone should have been a dead giveaway; even spread over five years and two houses of Congress, how could there have been >300 votes significantly affecting the welfare of our troops and veterans?

Plenty of tipoffs to be skeptical, but I let myself get suckered anyway. Pffft.
[/QUOTE]

Hats off to you. Having had to eat crow myself from time to time, I know it’s not the most pleasant of dishes – thanks for being willing to own up to the meal publicly!

20

[QUOTE=John Mace]
I think **rjung **was serious, though. His post was supposed to validate the method, not disparage it. Right?
[/QUOTE]

I was merely providing references; I made no claims to the validity of the data.