Rating the Legislature: Beaufort County gets two B+'s and an F | Eastern North Carolina Now

    North Carolina's Civitas Institute does our state's preeminent rating of the legislature, analyzing the key bills and then looking at the voting records of each legislator on those bills as to whether they are liberal or conservative. The key bills are determined, and then the chips fall where they may in an objective fashion and the percentages are computed. The ratings are published after each session as the Civitas Conservative Effectiveness ratings.

    Beaufort County is represented in the General Assembly by one Senator, Bill Cook of Beaufort County, while the county is split between two House districts, one occupied by Mike Speciale of Craven County and the other by Paul Tine of Dare County. Among the county's legislators, Cook and Speciale both rated B+ while Tine was rated an F.
NC General Assembly, May, 2012: Above.    photo by Stan Deatherage
    The rating gives the precise percentages of the bills on which each legislator voted for the conservative position, and it was that number that determined the letter grades awarded. Bill Cook voted for the conservative position 88.9% of the time in the State Senate. Overall, the Senate was more conservative than the House, and 27 Senators, a majority of the body, achieved an A rating. Cook was right at the top of the B+'s as the 28th most conservative Senator.

    The House was less conservative, and no representative achieved an A. The highest rankings were B+'s, and Mike Speciale was tied for the very highest score in the State House at 89.7%. Paul Tine, however, received a score of only 41.4% and ranked as only the 80th most conservative member of the House. Another way to put that would be that he ranked as a moderate liberal.

    There is one other rating done of the legislature, a very subjective one by the NC Center for Public Policy Research, which looks at how liberal jounalists, special interest lobbyists, and fellow politicians view legislators. Given its high degree of subjectivity, that rating is not given much credence. Liberal journalists tend to look at things thorugh a leftwing prism, while special interest lobbyists prefer legislators who play ball for their clients.

    While politicians often try to spin how conservative or liberal they might claim to be, objective ratings like the Civitas Conservative Effective Rating allow voters to see through the smoke and mirrors of politics and see how their legislators are really representing them.