McCain and his record against the Vet population

[CrackerBarrel]

Originally Posted by Kevin

I checked it, I saw the "A" list consisted primarily of Democrats, whereas just about all (if not all) of their unacceptable folks were the Republicans who would self-identify as fiscally conservative.

The report card is based upon 22 votes by Congress and how the congressmen voted on those "key" 22 issues. It's not surprising that Republicans would be voting against these bills, drafted by Democrats, with God knows what else in them.

I can't get the website to show me what the particular 22 issues were (it stalls when I query the page), but I'm guessing we don't have links to the full bills or the explanation as to why someone might have voted the way they did and whether their motivation had anything to do with screwing veterans.

I can't get to the pages showing what their scored votes were or their legislative agenda either. But yeah their "A" list is most of the Democrats in the Senate which indicates that their scoring is probably not as well focused as some of the big scorecards on other issues. And since their main scored vote seems to have been the GI bill I looked up why Republicans voted against it:

From Politico.com at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0408/9966.html

Yet the former Navy pilot and Vietnam POW makes himself a target by refusing to endorse Webb’s new GI education bill and instead signing on to a Republican alternative that focuses more on career soldiers than on the great majority who leave after their first four years.

Undaunted, Webb, who was a Marine infantry officer in Vietnam, is closing in on the bipartisan support needed to overcome procedural hurdles in the Senate, where the cost of his package — estimated now at about $52 billion over 10 years — is sure to be an issue. But McCain’s support would seal the deal like nothing else, and the new Republican bill, together with a letter of opposition Tuesday from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, threatens to peel off support before the Democrat gets to the crucial threshold of 60 votes.

“There are fundamental differences,” McCain told Politico. “He creates a new bureaucracy and new rules. His bill offers the same benefits whether you stay three years or longer. We want to have a sliding scale to increase retention. I haven’t been in Washington, but my staff there said that his has not been eager to negotiate.”

So it seems that Republicans voted against it because the Secretary of Defense said that it would hurt troop retention and they had their own alternative which focused on troop retention but the Democrats just passed their version without trying to negotiate on it. That would explain Republican "No" votes on the bill which was the main focus of the scorecard and thus why Democrats have all the A votes and the most pro-military members of the Senate having a "D".