The Polarized Congress

National Journal just released its 2008 congressional rankings. The most liberal senator? Washington's Patty Murray. The most conservative? A quartet of Republicans, including Wyoming's two GOP senators. The most liberal members of the House: twelve Democrats, of whom the most prominent is current Labor Secretary Hilda Solis. The most conservative: three House Republicans, including Georgia's Paul Broun, who claimed of Barack Obama's agenda,"That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany, and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did."

I agree completely with Brendan Nyhan that the individual rankings are of little value, largely because the Journal doesn't use enough votes and calculates absences in odd ways. (That's how the magazine came up with Barack Obama as the most liberal senator for 2007.) But taken as a whole, the rankings reveal some interesting trends. Take this graph prepared by Washington University political science professor Stephen Smith. It shows how, in both the House and the Senate, the most conservative Democrat is still more liberal than the most liberal Republican. The reverse side of the ideological equation holds true as well.

As recently as 1994, such a finding would have been inconceivable--giving a sense of just how much more polarized, along partisan and ideological lines, Congress became during the Clinton and Bush presidencies.