RALEIGH – Civitas Action has released its annual Conservative Effectiveness Ranking of North Carolina state lawmakers for the 2017 regular session.
“Civitas Action would like to commend Rep. Chris Millis for having the only perfect score in the House. Meanwhile, we congratulate the five Senators who earned a perfect score: Jim Davis, Ralph Hise, Wesley Meredith, Jeff Tarte and Jerry Tillman,” said Civitas Action President Francis De Luca. “We are also encouraged to find that this year’s Senate overall average score is higher than last year’s but disappointed that the House’s overall average dropped.”
The veto override of Gov. Cooper’s rejection of the state budget heads the list of scored bills, which also includes votes on important issues such as corporate welfare, eminent domain, state’s rights and regulation.
“This year there were several perfect scores in the Senate compared to none last year, but only one perfect score in the House compared to eleven last year,” added De Luca.
The 2016 overall average score in the Senate was 56.8, compared to this year’s improved 66.5. In the House, this year’s average of 54.9 was a fall off from last year’s average of 61.7.
The Civitas Action Conservative Effectiveness Ranking is the only rating system in North Carolina that allows the citizens of North Carolina to gauge how their state legislator actually voted on a broad range of important bills and offers a score to better determine the member’s overall ideological stance, in comparison to other legislators, on the pivotal issues. The current scores reflect votes in the 2017 regular session, but more scored votes may be added from the planned special sessions this fall.
New votes may be added to the list of scored votes upon further detailed review of the legislative session’s actions.
Civitas Action has been producing its annual legislative ranking since the 2008 legislative session.
Rankings dating back to the 2011 session are available on the site. To see the Conservative Effectiveness Rankings, click here. More information is available at www.nccivitas.org.
Civitas Action is a 501(c)(4) non-profit that educates and informs North Carolinians on policy issues and the actions of their elected officials.
Without a listing of the issues and votes on which these rankings are based, the citizen cannot know whether the rankings are meaningful.
David,
We agree, that’s why we provided a link to the website that lists all the bills that were scored, along with bill descriptions.
If you missed the link in the first sentence of the press release, here it is again: http://civitasaction.org/fullranking.php?mc_cid=735f33adce&mc_eid=00d347435c