‘Tis the season of scorecards.  First we had the California League of Conservation Voters, then the Sierra Club California.  Now Capital Weekly has produced one that purports to measure the voting performance of the state legislature on a Conservative – Liberal continuum.

Some comments below the fold.

It is interesting that the oft maligned (at least on Calitics) Able Maldonado has a more liberal voting record than several Democrats… notably Roderick Wright and Gloria Negrete McLeod.  That is a likely reflection on the makeup of their districts. That confirms the CW bias for contested districts and centrist legislators.

For all of its imperfections, once again, we found this scorecard to be a worthy exercise. Terms like “liberal” and “conservative” are crude political shorthand, but we think the results give a pretty fair representation of the ideological makeup of the Assembly and Senate.

Also, our scorecard reflects what most Capitol observers know to be true: Democrats in contested districts like Alyson Huber and Lou Correa earn more centrist marks than those lawmakers in more solid, partisan districts.

As for the environmental scorecards, the two major ones scored differently.  In some cases, they took the same position. e.g. AB 64.  Others, they were on opposite sides of the questions, most notably on the Special Session Water Legislation, where the Sierra Club scored SBX7.1 and SBX7.2 (oppose) and the CLCV did not include it.  Since this was the most publicly fought over ecological legislation of the year, it looks like the CLCV took the political stance of ducking hard choices, though they have put a lot of energy into promoting those two bills.

Typical of the results was a 100% score from the CLCV for Jared Huffman (AD-6) while the Sierra Club only gave him 12/15, reflecting his strong support of the water legislation.