Colorado Confidential has expanded its look into the most and least effective legislators by dividing things according to political party.
Take a look at the most and least effective Republicans in the state legislature through the first half of the 2007 session:
MOST EFFECTIVE REPUBLICANS
1. Jim Kerr
2. Al White
3. Rob Witwer
4. Jack Taylor
5. Josh Penry
LEAST EFFECTIVE REPUBLICANS
1. Kent Lambert
2. Kevin Lundberg
3. Dave Schultheis
4. Cory Cardner
5. Bill Cadman
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Kent Lambert is basically Dave Schultheis’ little lap dog, AND HE SCORED HIGHER. HAHAHAH!
I’m represented by BOTH of them.
the least and most effective Democrats thread?
surprise that 3 of the least effective come from El Paso County. No news flash there.
Cory Cardner????
or did you mean Bob Gardner. Or Cory Garnder.
Strong reporting Coloradopols. Strong reporting.
This whole rating of effectiveness thing is simply stupid–Corey Gardner is the House Republican Whip. He is on the forefront of the right wing’s causes. He got the so-called “Make My Day Better” bill out of the House with several D votes–much to Alice Madden’s consternation. If that is not effective as far as the R’s are concerned, nothing is.
As for Bob Gardner, some of the R’s and even some D’s have labeled him a moderate. But, he managed to whip the R’s into a frenzy over the definition of “family” in a housing bill last week and turn a straightforward bill into a nearly party line vote. Guys like Schultheiss in the Senate had missed the issue and opportunity altogether. The guy is unpredictable and dangerous!
It is the B. Gardner – not the C. Gardner.
White is great to work with. He’s moderate and able to see both sides of an issue and he’s the only Representative I’ve seen that can quote Shakespeare in committee. Penry and Taylor are very knowledgeable and carry good bills.
Agree with the bottom five, except for C. Gardner. He was able to work with Kester and Romer this session HB 1150 and anyone who can work with Romer can’t be that ineffective.
It might be a better measure if one could find out how many bills these people were responsible for getting killed that the D’s wanted passed. There have been some notable bills that legislators like Corey Gardner got killed by getting some crossover Dems to vote for. Both Corey Gardner (Whip) and Bill Cadman (Caucus Chair) are in leadership–surely a measure of their perceived effectiveness from their colleagues.
Measuring the effectiveness of R’s when the D’s are in charge is almost impossible. What a liberal blog would consider effective is probably destruction of Western Civilization to the Republican constituencies that these people represent. Even the list of least effective Dems has some very effective legislators on it. Almost anyone, even an R, can carry a feel good, do nothing bill and get it passed; and an R who wants to pass things can carry bills that D’s love to show how bipartisan they are; but, it takes a really courageous and effective legislator to carry a bill that really has impact and truly changes the State and even get it out of committee in the face of all of the entrenched interests in the Capitol (both liberal and conservative).
If one really wanted to know who is effective, it would be best to ask colleagues and lobbyists off the record. They know who is and who isn’t–even when they don’t agree with the legislator.
Your namesake tried to convince Socrates (accused of corrupting the youth of Athens; analogous to a liberal destroying western civilization) to escape rather than drink the hemlock. Tsk, tsk, tsk! We liberals have been successfully destroying Western Civilization for over 2000 years, and Thank God for it! Else, there would be no Western Civilization to destroy!
The point is not whether Dems are destroying Western Civilization or not. The point is that it is fallacious to measure effectiveness, even among the Dems, by numbers of bills passed and so forth. But, if destruction of Western Civilization is your measure of effectivenss, I would submit that some of the most dangerous people on the Dems side were rated as least effective by Colorado Confidential–hardly fair to them and their efforts on your behalf.
After all, I would not have rated Hilter, Goebbels, and Himmler or Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky as ineffective–wrong and dangerous, but not ineffective. Even if failed in the long term, they all had enormous impact on the world.
…or is it analogy? or simile? or hyperbole? or plain silly?
you missed mine. Maybe next time they’ll bounce off each other in mid-air.
“Partisan?” Me? Uh, I don’t think so…. As a social liberal who, on this blog, has advocated more emphasis on using market dynamics in social policy, including defending experimentation with school vouchers, is an advocate of economic and political gobalization, and just recently has argued that the huge and growing discrepency between CEO salaries and worker salaries is at least in part due to a genuine market demand for the best CEO’s relatively hard-to-come-by talents, calling me partisan overshoots ridiculous and lands somewhere in the realm of whatever lies beyond…. But I appreciate the thought.
saying that I admired Bush’s loyalty to his friends, that Alberto Gonzales seems to be very well-liked (to his credit), that maybe I should take a closer look at Giulianni’s positive attributes, and I asked about one of the Republican names mentioned as a possible successor to Tancredo, indicating that I would be willing to vigorously support a palatible Republican here…. I’ve criticized the left as well as the right on this blog when they snipe at each other rather than debate ideas, and have fairly well proven my commitment to following an analysis wherever it leads, whether to the left, right, or off the spectrum completely. I’m a little boggled by the “your too partisan” line, coming, as it were, from someone writing in such a partisan tone, and directed at someone who is probably in contention for being the least partisan contributer to the blog. It just fascinates me!
The topic of the thread was “effectiveness of legislators” and how one should measure that. The point was that effectiveness should not simply be measured by how many bills one passes and as a further point, to measure effectiveness, it might be appopriate to determine what a particular legislator is trying to do or what his/her electorate might want him/her to do.
You have launched off on the merits of left and right and whether you are partisan or not–oh, I get it. Whatever the topic is, the subject is really YOU! Since the topic is YOU, permit me to say that you are not the most unbiased source for who is the least partisan contributor to the blog. How could one measure that any way on a blog dominated by the left wing? Oh, I’m sorry–I strayed from the topic, which is YOU and how great YOU are.
Can’t wait to talk about YOU some more soon.
these threads often meander, as one person responds to another, and it seems that, for the most part, we all enjoy and benefit from the free-flowing dialogue. It’s hard for me to imagine what would inspire such animus in this context: I’m just engaging in a friendly conversation here. I don’t know who you are, or anything about you, but it’s pretty clear that you’re the kind of person who requires a shrug and a roll of the eyes and a complete dismissal from all further thought, not because of your ideology, but because of your foolishly and unnecessarily antagonistic demeanor.
I’ll continue to participate on this blog: If you’d prefer me not to respond to any comment you make, I’d be happy to accomodate you. But I’d appreciate it if you keep your little hissy fits to yourself: It just makes life slightly less pleasant. And what, really, is the point of that?
While Colorado Confidential’s objective measurement certainly is one way to evaluate folks, I agree with the folks who have posted that there are many more ways to do so. Such other ways would of course be much more subjective and result in a different list. Your score card will look more positive if you always take on bills that are easy to pass or for which there is already a consensus. Taking on unpopular, ideas that have no one funding them at the moment, but need discussion, and have merit may not give you a great score card, but it is an important function and both legislators on the right and the left have their champions in that regard.