Blogger Candidate Forum: For The Record: Senator Bernie Sanders

Hello Everyone:

It is Wednesday, the Wednesday before Super Tuesday, March 3, 2020 and time for the weekly edition of Blogger Candidate Forum.  The Candidate Forum checked its registration status and is good to go.  If need you need any and all voter information, please go to either your state's secretary of state's website--sos.ca.gov for fan in California--or usa.gov and vote.  Who is feeling the Bern?

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
tvline.com

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (I) is a man on fire.  He came within a razor's edge of winning the Iowa Caucus, decisively won the New Hampshire primary, and scored a big in the Nevada Caucus last weekend.  The Gentleman from Vermont is currently sitting on of top polls and is on track to score major victories on Super Tuesday, March 3, 2020.  During yesterday evening's debate in South Carolina, Senator Sanders took some serious hits but manged ran out the clock.  What is it about the Gentleman from Vermont that has really caught on this election cycle?  With no viable moderate Democratic president nominee to challenge the Gentleman from Vermont, may be "The One."  Let us look at Senator Sanders' 2019 congressional report card in order to get an idea about kind of president Senator Bernie Sanders would. 

The Candidate Forum wants to begin here because this is The Candidate Forum wanted an objective gauge.  One caveat, the scores assigned to the Gentleman from Vermont, or any member of Congress, is a way to quantify aspects of his legislative in order for you to draw your own conclusions.  Keep this in mind, this post is not an endorsement for the Gentleman from Vermont or any candidate.  The information presented here is solely for advisory purposes.
   
Senator Bernie Sanders has been the junior senator from Vermont since January 4, 2007.  He is an independent who caucuses with the Democrats and is up for re-election in 2024.  Prior to joining the Senate, he served in the House of Representatives as his state's at-large representative, caucusing with Democrats from 1991 to 2006.  The congressional record tracking site govtrack.us (date accessed Feb. 26, 2020) compiled statistics for Senator Sanders based on a series of metrics.  Let us begin with his leadership score.

slideshare.net

In his over decade of service in the Senate, govtrack.us ranked the Gentleman from Vermont  "3rd bottom/follower compare to Serving 10+ Years" (Ibid).  Govtrack computed his score by looking at how often other Members of Congress co-sponsor their bills, based on PageRank, Google's algorithm for ranking pages on the internet.  The concept behind the score is "if X cosponsors Y's bill but Y does not cosponsor X's bill, then X is a follower relative to Y being a leader" (Ibid).  The foundation for each score is based on the number of links you have to your your website gets from other websites.  Obviously, the more times people clink on the link to your website, the higher the score.  The score is tabulated by forming a matrix with co-sponsoring data then input to PageRank yielding a number that is the score (Ibid).

Another factor that goes into assigning a leadership score is the number of years in service.  Currently their are 42 senators, including the Gentleman from Vermont, who have served in the upper chamber for over ten years.  Of those 42 distinguished men and women, the Gentleman from Vermont ranks 40th with a score of .30; putting him in the 5th percentile of all senators with similar tenure and in the 14th percentile for all senators (Ibid).  What this means is he ranked near the bottom of senators with ten or more years of service in getting influential co-sponsors but ranked 13th in the number of bills co-sponsored (312; Ibid).  As for introducing bills, the Gentleman from Vermont introduced 23 bills in over ten years, ranking him 31st for senators with similar tenure; tied for 72nd overall.  Of the bills he introduced, precisely 0 were signed into law.  This brings up the question of Senator Sanders' ability to work with colleagues from the Republican side of the aisle and with the House.

Cheers to bipartisanship
vera.org

    Once upon a time, Republicans and Democrats would argue policy by day and go for drinks afterward.  Sadly, those days went the way of the of iPod.  However, if Congress remains split: the House controlled by the Democrats and the Senate controlled by the Republicans, the next president will have to work across the aisle to get his or her agenda passed.  This is not wishful thinking out loud, this is fact.  How does Senator Bernie Sanders rate in the category of working with his Republican colleagues? Dismally.

The Presidents of The United States
posterenvy.com

Since 2007, of the 23 bills and resolutions he introduced in the Senate, exactly one has a co-sponsor from another party.  Among senators serving ten or more years, the Gentleman from Vermont is 41st out of 42 senators with ten or more years in the chamber; tied for 98th out of 100 senators overall for the fewest bipartisan bills (Ibid).  Another key metric is working with the House of Representatives.  Members of both chambers often work together on the same issue by introducing companion bills.  During his senate tenure, the Gentleman from Vermont introduced companion bills and resolutions 13 times; putting him in a tie for 16th among senators with ten or more years of service and tied for 31st among all senators (Ibid).

These statistics do not exactly inspire confidence in Senator Sanders' ability to get his agenda passed should he become the 46th President of The United States.  It also speaks to the inflexible nature of Senator Sanders' social democratic ideology.  As the second most ideologically liberal member of the Senate, the Gentleman from Vermont appears to have difficulty working with his moderate Democratic colleagues and Republicans, whose support is crucial to getting key agenda items, like Medicare for All, passed.  On the positive side,the low to middling scores suggest that there is room for improvement but he will have to step it up as the election cycle rolls on.  This means a more rigorous effort to expand his voter base to include soft Trump supporters and moderate Democrats with an agenda that demonstrates flexibility and path to get things done.