Is U.S. Rep. Don Beyer getting more conservative as his congressional career continues?
By one measure the answer is “yes,” although nobody is likely to confuse him with Barry Goldwater anytime soon.
Beyer (D-8th) garnered a score of 5 on a 0-to-100 scorecard detailed by the American Conservative Union Foundation on April 26, based on votes taken during the 2021 congressional session.
That’s up from 4 a year before and compares to a lifetime rating of 3 from the conservative organization – suggesting that, at his current pace, Beyer (who was first elected in 2014) will be a 100-percent conservative-voting legislator by the year 2116.
The American Conservative Union Foundation ranked all 535 members of Congress across a host of policy issues to come up with its 2022 scorecard. Beyer and most members of the House of Representatives were rated based on 38 separate votes taken during the year.
Unlike 2021, when Beyer was graded the most conservative of the three members of the House of Representatives from the local area, this time out he is least conservative.
Both U.S. Reps. Gerald Connolly (D-11th) and Jennifer Wexton (D-10th) garnered rating of 10 on the 0-to-100 scale, up from zero a year before. Connolly’s lifetime batting average from the organization is 6, while Wexton’s is 7.
A total of 74 federal lawmakers were graded at 90 or higher, including five (Sen. Rand Paul and Reps. Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert and Byron Donalds) scoring 100.
On the other end of the spectrum, seven members of Congress (Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Reps. Maxine Waters, Mark Pocan, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) didn’t garner a single point.
The complete ranking can be found at http://ratings.conservative.org/, which also has an archive going back to 1971.