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Voting-Record Rule

James Anthony
November 22, 2018

A previously-elected candidate shall qualify to run as a member of the party only if his Conservative Review Liberty Score is a minimum of 80%.

A scoring-measure requirement can improve brand purity.

Available scoring measures rate congressmen based on their voting on current legislation, which is mostly very far from constitutional. Agencies, for instance, write what are effectively laws, which is unconstitutional; but a given vote to fund such agencies will often still be scored by available scoring measures as constitutionally conservative, based on factors other than constitutionality. Because of this, the available scores make candidates’ voting look more constitutional than the voting is in reality; the scores do not measure candidates’ absolute levels of constitutional conservatism. In the future, we can do better. For now, the available scores do at least sort the candidates.

Given current representatives’ performance, a scoring measure that’s suitable won’t rate most current representatives very high.

By using a scoring measure that’s from a single source rather than using an average of scores from multiple sources, any mistakes will be easier to see, and scoring will be easier for representatives to anticipate and to make desirable adjustments for, so that they can improve their scores.

An independent source will be better than an internal party source because an independent source will be more-easily replaceable, and because an independent source will have strong incentives to be forthcoming and user-friendly.

Of the scoring measures that are currently available, the Conservative Review Liberty Score14 looks the most suitable as a starting point.

A Liberty Score cutoff of 80% will make allowances for some Liberty Score imprecision, which is unavoidable until the new party gains enough control over the agenda to make legislation more constitutional. In the meantime, a cutoff of 80% will require candidates to make 4 Constitution-supporting votes for every 1 Constitution-defying vote, while a cutoff of 70% would only require candidates to make 2.3 Constitution-supporting votes for every 1 Constitution-defying vote.

14 “Conservative Review – Scorecard.” Conservative Review.com, www.conservativereview.com/scorecard. Accessed 29 Jan. 2017.

Reference

Anthony, James. The Constitution Needs a Good Party: Good Government Comes from Good Boundaries. Neuwoehner Press, 2018, pp. 48-9, 212.  preview

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