The Republican Freshmen Class of 2011
***Site closing as of April 2011*** No updates or new info will be added due to a lack of interest. The existing data pages will remain for reference until after the 2012 election.
Holding Their Feet to the Fire
Welcome to the site. This site has been set up to track how our newest Republican members of the House of Representatives are doing when it comes to key legislation. Needless to say, it would be beyond a full time job to track all legislation that comes out of congress in any given year, and there are 87 new Republican members for the 112th Congress (although two won special elections in 2010 before the general election and some are recycled having held seats in the House before). This site will focus on mainly high-profile financial (spending) bills, as well as any of great interest or those that appear to violate our U.S. Constitution. Most if not all of the below members were elected to reign in the federal government's spending, and all have sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution. Let's see how they do over the course of their initial two year term.
To make use of the site, simply find your state on the menu above, and go to it. On each state's page, you'll see a listing with the following data:
- Name, state, and district
- Photo from their campaign website or other public site
- Occupation- I will note if they currently hold or have held elected office and for how long if more than 4 years. I'll also note if they were term-limited out of the office if this information is available.
- Link to their 2010 campaign website. A good gauge to see what they said to get elected. Have they measured up? If the site is no longer active, it may be archived. You can visit this site and see if the page was archived by typing in the address in the box under "Wayback Machine".
- Outcome of their election, Republican vs Democrat, expressed as a percent usually rounded to the nearest whole number (on the breakdown, if one of the votes was exactly halfway, i.e. 51.5, it will be shown as 51.5 and the other number will be shown in the same format). On the less than one percent wins (i.e. 50.1-49.9) where no independent or third party was in the race, I will attempt to list the number of votes that resulted in the outcome. If an independent or third party was in the election, I will try to list this data but will not break down the percentage. This data is being entered to show how close most of these races are, and how important it is that we vote.
- Link to their page on Open Congress, an excellent non-partisan research site (please consider donating to it to keep it going). This site deals with the current Congress only, so it will not be active until they are underway in January 2011.
- Link to their Legistorm earmarks page (see below to learn about earmarks and search other members). If they have held a congressional office before, there will be a link for them right away. Otherwise, this will be created next year.
- Link to their On the Issues page (non-partisan site that gauges members by their votes and statements). As with Legistorm, if they held a House seat in the past, they will have a link right away, otherwise it will be up next year.
- Contact information, to be drawn from their official page and other sources as I can find them. Note that some legislators in the past have had a"closed door" approach to contact from those outside their district, even though the laws they pass affect all of us. I will report on this here if I find that to be the case.
If you want to see how they voted on a certain bill, follow the Open Congress link to their page. If you want to see if they are using earmarks for their district, click on the Legistorm link and enter or click on their name where directed. If you want an independent assessment of where they generally stand based on votes and statements, click on the On The Issues link.
A Wordpress blog will be added later to facilitate commentary and easier dissemination of information.
Related educational and research sites for Congress
Notes on source data-
Information for the candidates was obtained beginning in November 2010 from Wikipedia and the candidate's campaign websites, with photos from the same sources or their Facebook page (don't blame me if it's a bad picture- I took the first full face picture available and sized it to fit here). If you are a candidate and would like the photo changed or if you believe the data is erroneous, please email me via the contact page. Be prepared to cite a reliable source of data for any correction. Voting data was from the USA Today Elections 2010 site. I found there is a variance in the several sites that report this data. Theirs was in an easy to use format, so it was chosen for consistency. Please use the contact page to give me any advice, suggestions, or criticism. Like all humans, I'm not perfect and can use the help.
Paul Henry, webmaster
November 2010
UPDATE February 2011
I have received no help in this project, so I will update the member pages as I am able. This is a slow and time-consuming effort due to a low speed connection. I'm going to exclude a widget from GovTrack that showed the recent votes of the members, as it was too time consuming to add and of limited value- it picked up obscure votes, and it is far easier to go to the Open Congress page to get the information you're looking for. Maintenance on this site will be infrequent. All member pages are complete and all member links active as of 2/16/2011. I hope you find this site helpful.
People have visited here to hold their
representative's feet to the fire
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