No, Tim Kaine is not the most liberal member of Congress

Last Friday, Dan Schneider and Larry Hart of the American Conservative Union (ACU) published an article in The Hill’s Contributors section in which they say Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine is a one of the most liberal members of Congress. They claim he is to the left of such liberal luminaries as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) — more liberal than President Obama and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, too.

{mosads}Schneider and Hart base their conclusion on a single factoid: that the Virginia senator “is the only Member of Congress — House or Senate — to compile a ‘zero’ lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union.” The ACU is no doubt qualified to rate members on how well they conform to conservative orthodoxy, and Kaine’s score certainly indicates that he is no conservative. However, the ACU’s credentials for assessing how liberal he is seem less strong, and skeptics might question its impartiality, too.

Several progressive and nonpartisan organizations seem better qualified than the ACU to scour Kaine’s record for liberal tendencies. I’ll use the lifetime ratings by ProgressivePunch, since they include votes taken during the current session of Congress, while most others do not.

So how does Kaine rank alongside the progressives Schneider and Hart claim are more conservative than he is? He is 40th of 46 Senate Democrats; that is, 39 are to the left of Kaine. Warren ranks third; Sanders, 10th; Boxer, 12th; and Schumer, 21st. Kaine is solidly among the Senate moderates.

Schneider and Hart also suggest the Virginia senator is an opportunist for altering his positions on issues during his 22-year political career. But in a representative democracy, elected officials’ positions are not supposed to be immutable. They are a voice of the people who elect them and obligated to adapt as their constituencies change, within the bounds of conscience. In other words, “representative” conditions “democracy.”

Kaine’s constituencies changed markedly during his career, as he rose from Richmond’s mayor to Virginia’s lieutenant governor and then governor to U.S. senator to, now, the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nominee. Since his first statewide office, his constituencies have become more progressive as, over time, he came to represent more diverse populations and as Virginia moved from deep red to light blue.

Of course, many conservatives change their positions, too. Anyone who has followed the Republican campaign this year knows the party’s candidates have not been models of consistency. They’ve contradicted themselves on immigration reform, abortion restrictions, reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank, granting trade promotion authority to Obama, and, of course, their pledge to support the Republican nominee. In many cases, their positions have morphed in a matter of weeks or months, which suggests the changes were driven by political calculation rather than changing constituencies.

To make their case that Kaine is an opportunist posing as a moderate, Schneider and Hart contrast the Virginian with former U.S. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen Jr. They write, “We … know what a moderate Democrat looks like,” citing the Texas senator’s lifetime ACU rating of 40.5 percent. This rating hides as much as it reveals.

Over his 22 years in the Senate, Bentsen’s voting record changed as Texas changed and as the state’s Democratic Party became more progressive. For example, the ACU gave him a rating of 57 percent in his first two years in the Senate. In his final two years, it rated him at 27 percent. This placed him among a half-dozen senators of the time whom the ACU would probably consider liberals today, including Republicans Mark Hatfield (Ore.) and Jim Jeffords (Vt.), and future Democratic Majority Leaders Harry Reid (Nev.) and Tom Daschle (S.D.).

But ACU ratings don’t really tell us anything about where Bentsen stood on specific issues. He was a stalwart defender of civil rights, women’s rights and labor, and he was a reliable pro-choice vote. He championed enactment of major pension reforms that protected American workers from companies that raided their pension funds or fired workers on the verge of retirement. He passed legislation that improved access to healthcare for low-income women and children, and he backed bills that increased funding to fight homelessness. He also passed legislation funding water and wastewater projects in impoverished communities along the border with Mexico.

Despite conventional wisdom that we was a certain vote for oil interests, he voted against opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration, the hallmark environmental issue of his later years in office. He opposed the Persian Gulf War Resolution authorizing the invasion of Kuwait, and he voted to deny Clarence Thomas a seat on the Supreme Court. As secretary of Treasury, he played a crucial role in passing the 1994 crime bill, which banned the sale of assault weapons.

In short, Lloyd Bentsen believed in an activist federal government, in the mold of Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. Over the past 30 years, conservatives have managed to haul the political spectrum so far to the right that the ACU would probably consider Lloyd Bentsen to be a liberal today. It should be no surprise, then, that they would likewise consider Tim Kaine to be a liberal.

Diehl was chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen and, previously, then-Sen. Bentsen’s (Texas) staff director of the Senate Finance Committee and legislative director. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Institutional Investor, The Atlantic and The American Conservative.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.