roanoke.com Real Politics / Preston Bryant

Preston Bryant is a Republican who has represented Lynchburg and part of Amherst County in the Virginia House of Delgates since 1996.

Each year, members of the General Assembly are rated by various special interest groups around the state. You’ll find education associations, environmental groups, business advocates, and social and cultural organizations, among others, getting in on the act.

By and large, these groups� scoring of legislators is predictable. Those who follow these ratings and rankings see the same trends year after year. Republicans are typically scored higher by this or that organization while Democrats generally get the nod of other groups. Insomuch as this is the case, these scorecards usually just make legislators yawn.

This year, however, the “pro-business” Virginia Foundation for Research and Economic Education -- commonly known around the Capitol as Virginia FREE -- raised more than a few eyebrows when their 2003 rating of state legislators was presented much differently than years past.

When Virginia FREE released its scorecard a week or so ago, a number of Republicans, long seen as reliably pro-business, were dumped on while many Democrats, who have had an undeniable history of being less friendly to business interests, were rated more highly than usual.

Republicans were legitimately befuddled. Democrats were deliriously giddy � so giddy, in fact, that they held a news conference to crow a bit.

But could it be that these out-of-power Democrats crowed too loudly, too quickly? Yeah, maybe.

Clayton Roberts, Virginia FREE�s longtime executive director, admitted shortly after mailing out the scorecard that his organization may well have messed up this year. And he didn�t rule out refiguring the scores and issuing a new report.

You see, Virginia FREE, which touts itself as a provider of “objective, non-partisan research and analysis” -- they even say their analysis is “scientific” -- scores members of the House of Delegates and the Senate based on how they voted on certain bills important to those individuals, trade associations, and businesses that make up its membership roster.

While legislators never know which bills will be the basis of Virginia FREE’s yearly scoring, they typically are pieces of legislation -- some high-profile, some obscure -- related to taxes, commerce and trade, workers’ compensation, insurance, and employment issues, just to name a few categories. It’s also not uncommon for some bills affecting education, environmental, and transportation policy to show up on the scorecard.

This year, however, such bills by which legislators were scored included, among others, allowing more cameras to be put at stoplights to take pictures of red-light runners, stiffening the state�s seatbelt laws, allowing the governor to succeed himself, and allowing concealed weapons in restaurants that sell alcohol.

Huh? Where in the heck did these bills come from?

Republicans, generally speaking, are a less-government-is-better bunch. So when many in the GOP voted against giving Big Brother the high-tech power to take pictures of drivers in their cars, and when a good number of Republicans voted against the proposed seatbelt nannyism, the normally less-regulation-is-best Virginia FREE scored them down.

And when a hearty number of Republicans felt strongly about preserving the balance of power between the full-time executive branch and the part-time legislature and voted against allowing a governor to succeed himself, the normally thoughtful and deliberative Virginia FREE scored them down.

And when Republicans, long the chief defenders of our Second Amendment freedoms, voted to allow law-abiding citizens with court-approved concealed weapon permits to responsibly carry their self-protection into establishments that happen to serve alcohol, the normally let-freedom-ring Virginia FREE, which listed this bill as a “miscellaneous” one, scored them down.

So if you�re not in favor of a camera-toting R2-D2 or your mother being in charge of your driving habits, and if you tend to like your constitutional balances and freedoms just the way they are, then, somehow, you�re anti-business? Yeah, according to Virginia FREE.

Conspicuously missing, however, from Virginia FREE’s list of scorecard bills was this year’s hotly debated effort to repeal the estate tax -- the so-called “death tax” -- that was strongly backed by a broad coalition of small and large business organizations. Go figure.

Hence Roberts remarking to the press last week that Virginia FREE probably �missed the boat� this year. His group put on its scorecard a number of bills that were questionable from a traditional business perspective while ignoring some that in any other year would be no-brainers for inclusion.

No special interest group that gets into the game of scoring and ranking legislators is going to hit the nail squarely on the head every year. It�s an imperfect science, not to mention politically dicey.

Virginia FREE did indeed mess up this year. The few new friends they may have won with some artificially inflated scores may well be offset by the number of old friends they lost.

So will Roberts and his cohorts try to regain lost footing by taking another look at their �scientific� analysis and putting out an amended scorecard? Dare they roll that dice again? We�ll see.

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