Grade inflation?

A congressional ratings clash

DID A WAVE OF FISCAL RESPONSIbility sweep Democrats in the 103rd Congress? Ratings compiled by Citizens Against Government Waste, the advocacy group formed in the 1980s to promote the Grace Commission's government-cutting agenda, show scores improved for congressional Democrats while Republicans fell behind. Other fiscal conservatives contend that CAGW may have given Democrats a free ride.

For the second session of the 103rd Congress, CAGW tallied 37 votes in the House of Representatives and 34 votes in the Senate. In both houses, Republicans scored higher than Democrats--74 percent to 38 percent in the House, 65 percent to 31 percent in the Senate. The gap between Democrats and Republicans is fairly consistent with those in earlier sessions of Congress. Even so, when compared with the 102nd Congress, Republican scores this session dropped by 2 percentage points in each house while Democrats increased their ratings by 12 points in the House and five points in the Senate.

The drop has some observers crying foul. CAGW "was either very naive or simplistic about which votes they chose to rate or they selected votes deliberately designed to boost Democrats' scores," says political economist Daniel Mitchell of the Heritage Foundation.

Any rating system is subjective. But CAGW included several curious items in their tallies while leaving out some potential budget busters. For instance, the group rated a vote to cut a $2.5-million marksman's training program. But it excluded votes on the president's national service program--a potentially open-ended entitlement for college students--and on the National Competitiveness Act, a bill that approved $1.9 billion in spending for industrial-policy planners (See "Competing Visions," July).

The House ratings included a unanimous vote to make the Social Security Administration an independent agency and to exclude substance abusers from the Supplemental Security Income program. Including unanimous votes in a ratings scheme says nothing about the behavior of individual legislators, unless the group conducting the ratings wants to boost everyone's score.

CAGW also included a 427-4 vote that requires House members to comply with civil-rights laws that apply to the private sector. But the group's ratings excluded an earlier vote on a more substantive House rule, uniformly opposed by Democratic leaders, dealing with that measure and other congressional reforms such as cuts in staff and term limits for committee heads.

Tom Schatz, president of CAGW, admits his group debated the wisdom of including those lopsided votes, but says the issues were too important to ignore. "If you win something big," he says, "why not [give Congress] credit?"