Your Congressman had a lousier Fiscal Voting Record than half the Texas Republican Delegation, thanks to his involvement in the DeLay/Abramoff Scandal!

You may have heard Sam Johnson has a conservative voting record, and there are even some folks like American Conservative Union and Americans for Tax Reform who'd agree and have ranking systems which would make one believe that. However, both outfits seem to have become easy graders. An outfit called Citizens Against Government Waste ranked all Congress members in 2004 and Sam Johnson wasn't even in the top half of Republican Congressional Representatives from Texas. A perfect score of 100 merited you Taxpayer Superhero status. 80 to 99 got you Taxpayer Hero status. Hensarling was at the top with a 97, Kevin Brady a 93, Ron Paul an 87, Pete Sessions and Michael Burgess an 85, William Thornberry and Randy Neugebauer an 83, Joe Barton an 81. Sam Johnson got a 77, putting him at 'taxpayer friendly' status. John Carter got a 72, Tom DeLay got a 60, John Culberson got a 54, Lamar Smith got a 53, Kay Granger and Ralph Hall a 48, and Henry Bonilla got a 40, by the way, Compare that to the 2004 ACU ratings. ALL THE REPUBLICANS IN THE TEXAS DELEGATION GOT 90 OR ABOVE!!!! Do you trust a professor giving all of Tom DeLay's students As, or one with a reasonable grading curve?

We've just seen that it is shown rigorously that Sam Johnson's alleged Conservatism on the budget is highly dubious. Citizens Against Government Waste give him and other Texans MUCH lower ratings than ACU and ATR. The CONNECTIONS between the DeLay scandal and the actual increasingly whorish spending patterns of ALL (but especially Texas) Republican Congressmen is most interesting. Democrats are pointing out how it is TRUE Conservatives who are outing DeLay and were his biggest whipping boys. Thus, ironically, for once in her life, Hilary Clinton was right - DeLay DID run Congress like a plantation, but it was the TRULY CONSERVATIVE Republicans who were the worst-treated field hands, while fake Conservative Republicans like Sam Johnson and of course cooperative Democrats who were the house servants. In other words, the DeLay scandal is not merely some dirt for the Air America types to throw, but a symptom of why the Bush Administration is NOT fiscally conservative. For example, why IS it that four out of five of Joel Hefley's bills (Roll Call 398, Roll Call 428, Roll Call 360, Roll Call 455) used as litmus tests by Citizens Against Government Waste were voted down by Sam Johnson when all they tried to do in one case was cut 1% of the budget? You'd think Sam Johnson would go for that! Sadly, he USED to go for that. His rating in 2003 by CAGW was an 89, and voted for Hefley's bills with great frequency. But this changes in 2004. You can almost see where "the divorce" happened. You see, the problem is that Hefley was one of the first Republicans to question DeLay on ethics. Indeed, the lack of ethics and the fiscal spendthrift ways of the Bush Republicans are connected since formerly conservative Contract with America advocate of Americans for Tax Reform fame Grover Norquist was mentored by Abramoff so that ATR's high ratings to Sam Johnson and others despite provable fiscal sleaziness is perhaps not surprising.

It should be pointed out that Citizens Against Government Waste is actually sort of 'unbiased' in the sense that J. Peter Grace (a corporate type) and Jack Anderson (a very liberal columnist) started it. How about organizations that are not 'to the left' in that sense of, say, ACU and ATR, but groups to the right like the John Birch Society? JBS has a fically oriented organization named TRIM (Tax Reform IMmediately!) which monitors Congressmen on tax and spending issues. Here is Sam's record for the following years: Spring 2005 with a net cost to taxpayers of $15,680, Summer 2004 with a next cost to taxpayers of $15678, Spring 2004 with a net cost to taxpayers of -$2458, Fall/Winter 2003-2004 with a net cost to taxpayers of -$1446, Summer 2003 with a net cost to taxpayers of -$1420, and Spring 2003 with a next cost to taxpayers of $93.

As mentioned earlier with the Citizens Against Government Waste studies, it's as if something 'bad' happened on fiscal matters to Sam Johnson in mid-2004, whether we look at the surviving body from the Grace Commission or the Birch SOciety - and that 'problem' is called DeLay/Abramoff. What's going on of course is that CAGW and JBS are very outside the mainstream of Republican Politics, while ACU and ATR are 'captives' of the very folks they're supposed to monitor.