Last week, the Warwick Beacon reported some local legislators’ results on the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s Freedom Index.  The article bore the bizarre and inaccurate headline, “McNamara debunks legislative scorecard.”

The reference appears to be to the following statement from one of Warwick’s representatives in the General Assembly, Joseph McNamara, who is also the chairman of the State Democratic Committee:

“Their formula is so convoluted, it borders on insanity,” said McNamara, who in addition to being a Warwick/Cranston legislator chairs the State Democratic Committee, when asked about the results.

“They gave lousy ratings to their own Republican colleagues that voted against virtually everything.”

On the first count, the formula is not at all convoluted.  A team of reviewers grades legislation from -3 to 3, the Center gathers up the legislators’ votes (with partial credit for non-votes), and each legislator’s score is his or her percentage of what an “ideal” senator or representative would have scored.

McNamara is also wrong on the second count, in two ways.  First, the Republicans in the General Assembly are not the Center’s “own Republican colleagues.”  The Center is non-partisan; it’s organized around policies, no matter which party or politicians choose to champion those policies.

Second, it’s simply not true that Republicans in the General Assembly “voted against virtually everything.”  The Freedom Index itself is evidence.  Because “nay” votes on bad bills give legislators positive scores, and because the great majority of bills counted in the index were negative, “nay” votes would have produced positive scores for Republicans.

Of course, that’s on the limited number of bills that the Center counted.  For a broader view, we checked with BillTrack50.com, which has automated tracking of events in the legislatures of all 50 states.  

According to the data that BillTrack50 provided, only 5% of all Republican votes were “nay.”  Granted, that was twice as contrary as the Democrats, who voted “nay” only 2.4% of the time, but it’s hardly “virtually everything.”  In fact, it would be more accurate to say that Republicans voted for virtually everything.

If we look at individual legislators, and include votes that they missed, the average Republican voted “nay” only 4.4% of the time, ranging from Senator Dennis Algiere, with 0.9%, to Representative Brian Newberry, with 7.2%.

Rep. McNamara should be more careful with his words, and the Warwick Beacon should be more careful with its headlines.