I’ve been reading about The Drum Major Foundation. It has a web-site that scores legislators on how they vote on pro middle class legislation. The Foundation gives Mike Turner, OH-3, a grade of 50% , Steve Austria, Oh-7, a grade of 25%, John Boehner, OH-8, a grade of 0%, and Dennis Kucinich, OH-10, a grade of 94%.

The Foundation has a great name and a great history. Wikipedia says: “The Drum Major Foundation (later Institute) was founded in 1961 during Civil Rights Movement by Harry Wachtel, a New York City lawyer who was an adviser to Martin Luther King Jr..

“Dr. King often used the phrase “drum major instinct’ meaning the instinct to be a leader. In his sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, on February 4, 1968 he said: ‘If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice, say that I was a drum major for peace, say that I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter… I just want to leave a committed life behind.’”

The primary focus of the Foundation is “on the economic issues of the middle class and the idea that government can be a force for good.”

The Drum Major Foundation has a web-site that I just discovered today. At Middleclass.org it analyzes congressional votes and grades representatives and senators on how their votes helped the middle class. I was not surprised to see the Dennis Kucinich made a grade of “A”, but I was surprised to see that Mike Turner has a grade of “C”. I had guessed it would be “F”.

According to the Foundation’s scoring, over the last couple of years, Turner has really turned his grades around. His grade for 2003 was “F”, for 2004 his grade was “F”, then another “F”, another “F”. Then in 2007, he made a “D”, then, in 2008, he made a “C”. And according to the Foundation, in 2009 his current score is 50%. Turner is the highest scoring Republican in the Ohio Delegation The Foundation evidently grades on the curve — it gives a score of 50% a grade of “C”

Here are Foundation’s scores for the Ohio Delegation:

Austria, Steve(R-OH, District 7) 25%
Boccieri, John(D-OH, District 16) 100%
Boehner, John(R-OH, District 8) 0%
Driehaus, Steve(D-OH, District 1) 100%
Fudge, Marcia(D-OH, District 11) 100%
Jordan, Jim(R-OH, District 4) 0%
Kaptur, Marcy(D-OH, District 9) 100%
Kilroy, Mary Jo(D-OH, District 15) 100%
Kucinich, Dennis(D-OH, District 10) 94%
LaTourette, Steven(R-OH, District 14) 38%
Latta, Robert(R-OH, District 5) 0%
Ryan, Timothy(D-OH, District 17) 100%
Schmidt, Jean(R-OH, District 2) 13%
Space, Zachary(D-OH, District 18) 100%
Sutton, Betty(D-OH, District 13) 100%
Tiberi, Pat(R-OH, District 12) 40%
Turner, Michael(R-OH, District 3) 50%
Wilson, Charles(D-OH, District 6) 93%

Richard Sheridan, a former longtime head of the nonpartisan Legislative Budget Office who has studied Ohio budgets for more than three decades, in the latest “State Budgeting Matters” publication, says that Ohio’s Governor Ted Strickland an his Budget Director, J. Pari Sabety, “have thus far earned a well-deserved ‘A+’ when it comes to financial management.”

Sheridan says, “His (Strickland’s) first budget was enacted on time and with almost unanimous bipartisan support — a feat which none of the last six governors were able to achieve. The budget provided for the smallest increase in GRF spending in half a century and continued the phased-in tax reductions enacted just before Governor Taft left office. When it became clear that GRF revenues were not going to meet expectations for the biennium, swift action was taken to make targeted reductions in authorized appropriations. An easier course of action, and one frequently taken in the past, would have been to simply order an “across-the- board” percentage decrease in all budget constitutionally-protected spending objects. Instead each separate line item — not just agency — was scrutinized and cuts ordered based on the continuation of state spending priorities.”

But Sheridan tempers his praise by pointing out a big concern about one decision made by Strickland and the Ohio legislature. Sheridan writes:

“For reasons that are less than clear, the legislature did not provide additional requested appropriation authority to pay for the costs of the Medicaid program in FY 2008. Instead of returning to the legislature to seek legal appropriation authority to pay Medicaid bills owed in FY 2008, the administration chose to hold those bills and pay providers the day after the fiscal year ended. That action had several negative effects. First, it inflated the FY 2008 unobligated balance by that amount,making FY 2008 appear far better than it was. Second, it will improperly inflate spending in FY 2009. And third, it sets a dangerous precedent violating the cardinal budgeting principle that, by definition, an appropriation sets the maximum amount of money that can be disbursed for a defined governmental purpose.”

“To the credit of OBM, the June monthly report clearly and openly states what they did. Although it would be difficult to prove, the same kind of thing has probably happened in the past — but without being so openly revealed.
Nonetheless, such action of questionable legality serves as a blemish on what is otherwise a remarkable record of financial management by the Strickland administration.”

According to an article in The New York Times, it looks like the chance for health reform is in the hands of a bi-partisan committee of six senators. This committee has already rejected the notion of a government-run insurance plan that would compete with private insures and it has also dismissed a plan by House Democrats to pay for health reform via an income surtax on high income earners.

An article by Nathan Newman at Talking Points Memo analyzes this small, but evidently, crucial senate group. In “The Tyranny of the Tiny White States,” Newman identifies the senators and shows that they are from tiny states with mostly white populations:

• Max Baucus of Montana (pop 935,670- 89.2% white)
• Kent Conrad of North Dakota (pop 636,677- 90.1% white)
• Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico (pop 1,928,384- 42.8% white)
• Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming (pop 509,294- 88.8% white)
• Charles E. Grassley of Iowa (pop 2,966,334- 91.5% white)
• Olympia Snowe of Maine (pop 1,321,505 – 96% white).

Newman writes: “Altogether, this rump group of negotiators represent just 8.3 million Americans or less than 3% of the population and only 1.6 million non-whites. Subtract Bingaman and that last number drops to just 521,000 non-whites represented by this group of Senate negotiators deciding the fate of health care for a diverse population of almost 300 million Americans.

“Structurally, this is what bipartisanship means. The tyranny of tiny states and the exclusion of non-white concerns.

“This is the structural racism built into a Constitution two hundred years ago to exclude the voting power of slaves and to this day privileges the power of a handful of small, mostly white states to undermine the will of the majority in our nation.”