I am told by highly reliable sources the One True Senator has a perfect Senate record. This makes me wonder how these things happened.
10/18/2007 Prohibiting Funds for Groups that Perform Abortions NV
09/06/2007 Prohibiting U.S. Assistance for Groups that Support Coercive Abortion NV
10/26/2005 Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Funding Amendment N
11/01/2007 Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2007 (CHIP) NV
10/30/2007 Amtrak Reauthorization NV
10/25/2007 Amtrak Federal Subsidy Limits NV
09/27/2007 State Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) Reauthorization NV
09/10/2007 Bridge Repair Funding NV
07/26/2007 Implementing the 9/11 Commission Recommendations Act NV
07/26/2007 REAL ID Funding NV
03/07/2005 Minimum Wage Amendment N
07/19/2007 Sense of the Senate on Guantanamo Bay Detainees NV
09/07/2007 Student Loan Lender Subsidy Cuts and Student Grants NV
07/20/2007 Student Loan Lender Subsidy Cuts and Student Grants NV
06/21/2007 Energy Act of 2007 Y
11/08/2007 On the Nomination of Michael B. Mukasey for the Office of Attorney General NV
06/11/2007 Attorney General No Confidence Vote NV
12/06/2006 Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense Y
4/21/2005 John Negroponte, Director of National Intelligence Y
02/15/2005 Michael Chertoff, Secretary of Homeland Security Y
01/26/2005 Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Y
11/01/2007 Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2007 (CHIP) NV
09/27/2007 State Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) Reauthorization N
12/04/2007 United States-Peru Trade Agreement NV
09/26/2007 Expressing the Sense of Congress Regarding Iran and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps NV
6/21/2006 Increasing Minimum Wage Amendment N
03/02/2006 USA PATRIOT and Terrorism Prevention Reauthorization Y
09/19/2006 U.S.-Oman Free Trade Agreement Implementation Y
06/29/2006 U.S. -Oman Free Trade Agreement Y
Senator X voted
for Dick Cheney's energy bill. I don't know which energy bill was the one in dispute so it is not listed above but it is well known he voted for it. This bill was chock full of tax giveaways to the oil industry and their ilk. Presidential contender Hillary Clinton, who voted against it, has said it was practically written by Dick Cheney.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:SN5: Y This is known as the tort reform bill and did not appear in the database from which I got the other votes. The idea was to force class action lawsuits into the federal courts because the federal courts are dominated by pro-business conservative Republicans. The Nation on it:
"But federal courts are much more hostile to class actions than their state counterparts; such cases tend to be rooted in the finer points of state law, in which federal judges are reluctant to dabble. And even if federal judges do take on these suits, with only 678 of them on the bench (compared with 9,200 state judges), already overburdened dockets will grow. Thus, the bill will make class actions--most of which involve discrimination, consumer fraud and wage-and-hour violations--all but impossible. One example: After forty lawsuits were filed against Wal-Mart for allegedly forcing employees to work "off the clock," four state courts certified these suits as class actions. Not a single federal court did so, although the practice probably involves hundreds of thousands of employees nationwide."
"The bill, like the other anticipated tort "reforms," was produced by the same right-wing think tanks that gave us the proposed Social Security overhaul and Medicare privatization and was marketed by the US Chamber of Commerce, which along with a coalition of businesses has spent tens of millions of dollars on the effort. Much of that money has gone to support like-minded elected officials. In the 2004 election, for example, the Chamber helped spend millions in seven battleground states to pay for ads urging voters to support lawsuit restrictions endorsed by Bush and opposed by John Kerry
. Such efforts are part of a strategy embraced by Bush guru Karl Rove to drain cash from tort lawyers, who overwhelmingly support Democrats."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050307/zegart
Senator X has also written that he wanted to support CAFTA but voted against it as a protest vote because not enough attention was given to labor's concerns. That means he supported it in principle.
Funding the war: "Until he ran for president, Sen. X supported every funding bill for Iraq, some $300 billion. <2005 Vote # 117, HR1268, 5/10/05; 2005 Vote # 326, S1042, 11/15/05; 2006 Vote # 112, HR4939, 5/4/06; 2006 Vote # 239; 2006 Vote # 186, S2766, 6/22/06, HR5631, 9/7/06
Sen. X opposed a timeline for withdrawal. Sen. X said "I'm also acutely aware that a precipitous withdrawal of our troops, driven by Congressional edict rather than the realities on the ground, will not undo the mistakes made by this Administration. It could compound them."
Sen. X didn't introduce legislation to end the Iraq war until he started running for president.
I believe Senator X has a very good overall Senate record. Spare me the sanctimony, the deification, though. His record isn't perfect. Neither is that of the other 99 of his colleagues. 
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