| RC No |
Amendt No, etc |
Rep |
Description |
| 747 |
700 |
Kind |
FARM21 |
| 748 |
706 |
Jackson-Lee |
Sense of Congress re school food quality |
| 749 |
707 |
Rangel |
Relaxation of Cuba sanctions |
| 750 |
708 |
Boehner |
Fix loophole on calculating farm handouts |
| 751 |
713 |
Davis (IL) |
Strike sugar subsidy, bioenergy provisions |
| 752 |
715 |
Udall (CO) |
Token diversion of cotton subsidy to conservation |
| 753 |
716 |
Putnam |
Relaxation of proposed subsidy cap |
| 754 |
717 |
Cooper |
Crop insurance reform |
| 755 |
MTR |
Goodlatte |
Remove tax provisions on international companies |
| 756 |
Passage |
NA |
NA |
There are a good number of questions to explore using this data.
Firstly, there's the extent of party unity. Compared with the overall statistics for the Congress (somewhere in the mid-90s), unity was not stellar: counting only votes cast, 77.4% were cast with the majority of Dems. (Regularly quoted unity stats include procedural votes in which loyalty is both expected and shown.)
The motherhood-and-apple-pie #748 passed with no Dem votes against. In the votes on passage and on the motion to recommit, 14 and 7 votes respectively went wayward.
But - given the text, the vote on the MTR is hardly surprising; and the passage vote was always going to garner almost a full turnout - the GOP were bound to make it a solidly partisan, and it would be unthinkable for a bunch of Dem reps to lose a big bill for Nancy right now.
The other votes show rather deeper splits.
The Dem tally on the Kind amendment was 72-155. Support was garnered from CA (12 reps - including Tauscher and Harman!), MA (6) and NY (12). Meanwhile, TX supplied one yea: Doggett.
In due season, it will be interesting to check the ideological makeup of the two camps on Kind: my immediate impression is that it was not a clear left-right split. More difficult, but still possible, would be to look for a rural/urban angle.
We have a further comparator in the 2001 vote on HA 340 to HR 2646 (107th), the farm bill eventually enacted in 2002. (The amendment was introduced by Boehlert, but is referred to (even at the time) as the Kind amendment. It seems to have had a similar thrust to HA 700 to the current bill.)
The vote on HA 340 was tight: 200-226, 54 GOP voting in favor, 64 Dems voting against. Pelosi and Hoyer both voted for it.
How to explain the marked falloff over six years in Dem support for a Kind kind of amendment? I suspect that we're in the majority now, stupid! doesn't explain everything! (More spreadsheeting needed.)
A further angle to explore is how liberal the Dem votes were.
My coding? I rate 750, 753 and 755 as nays for liberals, the rest being yeas.
On this basis, Dems gave 1,382 liberal votes to 874 non-liberal ones (that's 38.7% of Dem votes given on the 10 RCVs): 155 against Kind, 192 against Boehner (perhaps this was pure partisanship: but then I've not looked at his amendment!), 174 against Davis, 107 against Udall and 110 against Cooper.
Things to look at: first, the extent to which Dem non-liberal votes went beyond the number needed to kill the amendment in question; excess votes may imply a desire to demonstrate loyalty to the leadership or to show a bit of leg to contributors.
Second, the votes in which the Dems were split pretty much down the middle (Udall and Cooper). Were these heavily whipped, or did the leadership not take too strong a view?
Much more goodness to be extracted, I reckon. |
STATE BLOGS
