House of Bad Cards: Methodology - How Did We Determine Placement in the Deck?

Why is it that all of the Republicans accused of 'being divisive' actually show greater unity with other Republicans than those who accuse them?

We looked at every record vote taken on the floor of the Texas House during regular session, and Republicans like Brian Harrison and Steve Toth vote with every Republican more often than they would ever vote with a Democrat. But Republicans like Charlie Geren and Dustin Borrows vote more often with some Democrats than all Republicans.

For example, Dustin Burrows, chairman of the powerful Calendars committee, unites more often when voting with the most leftist Democrat in the House, Ana-Marie Ramos, than with seven Republicans (Tony Tinderholt, Steve Toth, Briscoe Cain, Matt Schaefer, Cody Vasut, Brian Harrison, and Shelby Slawson). That's not unity at all. And do you think this affects which bills make it through his committee?

So we looked at which of our Republicans unite more with Republicans than with Democrats, using a metric like you see below.

Those who agree most with Republicans before agreement with Democrats scored 100%. Those who agree with some Democrats more than with Republicans got a lesser percentage. They show less Republican unity, so they should score lower.

This percentage was each Republican's Unity Score. From that, we subtracted for other indications of a lack of Republican unity.

Rather than pursuing more critical priorities, such as border security that stops those from entering our state illegally or securing trust in our elections, some Republicans decided that Ken Paxton was somehow a greater threat that deserved months of their attention and the expenditure of millions in taxpayer dollars. All the while, they themselves ignored the laws guiding an impeachment process!

If a representative served as a House impeachment manager, we deducted 10 points.

If a representative voted for impeachment, we deducted 5 points.

(For what it's worth, if a representative received $45K or more from Phelan in the 2022 election cycle, they were three times more likely to vote for impeachment.)

On November 10th, many Representatives did not show up for work. We pay them to show up for work. Not showing up for work, like the Democrats did on that day, is wrong.

Moral of the story: don't foolishly join Democrats. In this case, it cost you three points.

The Local and Consent Calendar is where supposedly non-controversial bills go to which everyone would consent. We know that sometimes controversial bills go there to force them to move forward without amendment or discussion because all bills bundled together on a Local and Consent vote will pass. (These are like omnibus bills - it will pass and you get the good with the bad.)

We like it when our representatives vote against bad bills. But here's the thing: some members register a No vote to suggest they opposed the bill, but it still passes. And rumor is that some use this to appear like they disagree more with Democrats than they actually do, which then might place them higher in some other rating systems.

It's disingenuous to register a No on more than half of these 'non-controversial' bills. Since the speaker places these bills into this committee, why would you vote for and defend a speaker who abuses Local and Consent so much that you disagree with over half of the bills placed into the committee? If these are bad bills, why are you not angry with a speaker who tries to squeak them through without debate?

For the record, the entire Democrat caucus - all 64 Democrats in the House - registered a No less than 50 times. Jared Patterson, all by himself, registered a No over 700 times.

So, we deducted a few percentage points proportional to the number of times to a representative registered a No when they did so for more than 50% of the Local and Consent bills.