It’s been thought, hinted at, suggested, guessed, and implied numerous times that the members of Congress loved most by Republican spending hawks tend the same ones loved by the abortion hawks. Or, put a different way, that being more of a standard Republican on fiscal matters correlates well with being more of a standard Republican on life matters.
Today, right now, I have gathered some evidence that the guess is in fact true.
It was a simple enough exercise that I’m bound to be criticized, and such criticisms are always welcome, but here’s what I did this morning: I took the ratings from 410* members of the House given by the National Taxpayers Union for the second session of the 109th Congress, and plotted them against the ratings given by the National Right to Life Committee for those members for that Congress:
I then asked NeoOffice to give me the coefficient of correlation for the two sets of figures. The answer: 0.82. That’s not bad at all, is it?
So I say again: we need to unify for 2008 by finding candidates from the Presidential level on down that unify the major factions of our party, making us all happy and motivated to fight come the fall of next year. We have a White House to keep, and a Congress to fight for. Let’s keep it together.
*: Some members were excluded because of formatting differences in their names making it difficult to merge their statistics using my automated processes (NTU abbreviates long names such as Millender-McDonald, and NRLC omits accents). No, I didn’t feel like manually entering every member, sorry. It was enough work taking the data from the NTU’s PDF table and lining it up in a useful manner for automated extraction!