The former Justice Department liaison to the White House Monica Goodling was questioned before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. Much of Rep. Steve Cohen, (D-TN) questioning dealt with Goodling’s education:

Rep. Steve Cohen: Miss Goodling, I've read your vitae, and it says that you grew up and you mostly went -- you went to public schools. Was that K through 12?

Goodling: Mm-hmm. Yes.

Cohen: And it says you went -- chose Christian universities in part because they -- value they placed on service.

Are there a lot -- an inordinate number -- of people from Regent University Law School that were hired by the Department of Justice while you were there?

Goodling: I think we have a lot more people from Harvard and Yale.

Rep. Cohen: Well, that's refreshing. Is it a fact -- are you aware of the fact that in your graduating class 50 to 60 percent of the students failed the bar (exam) the first time?

Goodling: I'm not -- I don't remember the statistics, but I know it wasn't good. I was happy I passed the first time.

The sole purpose of Cohen’s line of questioning was to potentially embarrass Goodling and denigrate the Christen law school she attended. It was nothing more than the 'politics of personal destruction' in action. And if passing the bar on the first try, as Goodling did, is the Democrat’s litmus test for public service, then Sen. Hillary Clinton, a Yale Law School graduate, is in trouble.

Hillary Clinton failed the D.C. bar exam after law school, something she hid from her best friends for 30 years until disclosing it in passing in her autobiography, "Living History." Bernstein suggests that blow to her ego may have played a role in her decision to move to Arkansas, where she had passed the bar.

The publicity hound, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), who has an undergraduate degree from Yale and a law degree from the University of Virginia Law School, also questioned Goodling:

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee: But allow me just to simply begin a series of questions, Ms. Goodling. And I would ask that they, your answers be as cryptic and as brief as possible, however truthful, because we do have a shortened period of time.

“Cryptic”? There’s nothing quite like being grilled by a bunch of condescending, sanctimonious politicians on a witch hunt.

National Journal's 2006 Congressional Vote Ratings

The Ridge Nightfly brings to our attention that the National Journal has released its 2006 congressional vote ratings. The Journal rates and ranks lawmakers on how they vote relative to each other on a conservative-to-liberal scale in both the Senate and the House.

The Journal’s scores are based on the members' votes in three areas: economic issues, social issues, and foreign policy. This year’s scores were based on 82 key roll-call votes in the Senate and 95 in the House during 2006.

Nightfly points out that it’s “interesting Mike Ferguson, who was portrayed by his opponent in last year's election as being a right-wing Neanderthal”, ranks right in the middle, at 221 of the 449 members of the House rated.

As you can see from the National Journal chart below, Ferguson’s liberal composite score was 47.2 and his conservative composite score was 52.8. Most people would consider those scores to reflect a moderate voting record, but not everyone.

BlueJersey blogger, huntsu, takes exception to Nightly’s observation in How The Ridge Nightfly Doth Spin:

Ferguson may vote for the occasional environmental bill or education bill that moves him to the left, but these positions are certainly right-wing and out of mainstream in this district.

Hunstu provides a list, sans links, to supposedly prove Ferguson is “out of the mainstream”. Readers are referred to the Dump Mike blog for details. The post concludes with this:

The point is that he may average to the middle because of a few carefully chosen votes, but when you are comparing him to perhaps the most conservative Congress in history (last year's, not this year's) being to the right of the middle is still pretty far to the right.

Don't forget also that we never compared Ferguson to Neanderthals -- it's too unfair to the Neanderthals.

If there’s something wrong with the 95 roll-call votes used, the methodology, the statistical analysis performed by the Brookings Institution or the final scores and rankings the National Journal published, hunstu doesn’t tell us. Hunstu apparently has another method for comparing voting records, but what it is we're not told.

It should be obvious the blogger doing the spinning is not Nightfly. The voting record of New Jersey’s Republican delegation would best be described as fairly moderate, with an average liberal composite score of 43 and an average conservative composite of 57. Ferguson voting record was to the left of that average, with composite scores of 47 liberal and 53 conservative.

The voting record for New Jersey's Democrats is decidedly liberal, with a delegation average composite score of 85 liberal and a conservative score of 15. Clearly, if there are New Jersey congressmen out of the mainstream, you’d find one or more of them among the Democrat’s delegation – not the Republican. We’ll be so bold to predict the same will be true next year, despite the new congress being controlled by Democrats.

Here are the ratings for New Jersey’s congressional delegation:

How To Read National Journal’s Ratings

A score of 94 on economic issues, for example, means that the representative was more liberal than 94 percent of his or her House colleagues on key economic votes during 2006. "N/A" means the member missed more than half of the rated votes. The designations "E" and "S" and "F" refer to the "economic" and "social" and "foreign" policy votes used to determine overall ratings.