TAP: NY Senate Member Item Spending, by party - updated
Holy. Freakin. Crap.
I love visuals, graphs, all that kinda stuff. Because points that get fuzzy when you talk about them become quite obvious, like Joe Robach’s very conservative voting record, for example, offset by his ability to buy him some liberal votes with member item spending.
Speaking of, it’s often mentioned that there’s a disparity between what GOP and Dem senators get in terms of member items. Normally people shrug and say, “To the victor go the spoils”. Well, robinia at The Albany Project did a great graph showing that disparity.
I mean, come on, people. We need a new word for “disparity”
Update: apparently there was some missing info from the senate Dems that was provided to the majority office but never scanned in. In the meantime:
look at the graph, double the length of the blue lines (to approximate the 05-06 Dem member items)
I’ll update the graph when it shows up on TAP.
Related posts:
Holy smokes. Are the numbers on the left hand side of the graph matched up with each legislator’s Senate districts?
Yeah, sorry– should’ve made that clear.
[...] We did a piece a little ways back on how Joe Robach buys the goodwill of the community (despite his too-conservative-for-Rochester voting record) using member items. The Daily News reports that the rules on this form pork are being tightened a bit: Gov. Spitzer reached an agreement with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan) and Senate GOP Leader Joe Bruno (R-Rensselaer) to reveal exactly how each lawmaker intends to dole out “member items” before they are approved. [...]