Freshmen, Southerners Among Leading House Dem Dissidents

http://www.cqpolitics.com/2007/07/freshmen_southerners_among_lea.html

Freshmen, Southerners Among Leading House Dem Dissidents
By Greg Giroux | 8:00 PM; Jul. 09, 2007

House Democrats have generally shown strong unity over the six months since the party took control of Congress, based on their gains in the 2006 elections.

While the public’s attention so far has been focused on the highly divisive congressional debates over hot-button issues such as the Iraq war and immigration, House Democrats have encouraged party discipline by largely sticking to issues that, polls show, are generally popular with the electorate. Most Americans, for example, supported an increase in the minimum wage that House Democrats unanimously backed in January.

But, as is always the case, there are members who break with their Democratic leaders and colleagues more often than most — with longtime Mississippi Rep. Gene Taylor the leading party dissident, breaking with the Democratic position on nearly a third of House votes that fell mainly along partisan lines.

Of the 10 Democrats registering the lowest party unity scores so far this year, six — including Taylor — are from the strongly conservative-leaning South, while another is from the Republican stronghold of Utah.

Nine of the 10 represent districts that President George W. Bush carried for the Republican Party in 2004, in some cases by wide margins. The one exception is Georgia’s 12th District, but even there, Democrat John Kerry edged Bush by just six-tenths of 1 percentage point — the same margin by which Democratic Rep. John Barrow staved off defeat in his 2006 win for a second House term.

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