2007 Poverty Scorecard: Rating Members of Congress

Thirty-seven million Americans live in the state of poverty, but who cares and what are we going to do about it? As a country, we were forced to confront our progress when the Gulf hurricanes revealed places of deep poverty. Like the task of building levees and responding to an immense national catastrophe, the job of taking on the complex structural causes of poverty is well beyond what compassionate individuals can do. To address the root causes of poverty, Congress and the President must adopt the right priorities, enact needed laws, and adequately fund essential programs. This week the Shriver Center released its 2007 Poverty Scorecard to hold leaders accountable to that very task.

The 2007 Poverty Scorecard: Rating Members of Congress assigns letter grades to each member of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives according to his or her voting records on poverty-related issues that came to a vote in 2007—legislation on affordable housing, health care, education, labor, tax policy, and immigrants’ rights. With the help of a national advisory board and other antipoverty experts, the Shriver Center identified and analyzed fourteen Senate votes and fifteen House votes.

“This Scorecard is important because it looks at a whole range of critical issues, all of which have to be addressed by the country in order to deal with millions of Americans, more than the population of California, who live in poverty every single day,” said John Edwards, the former senator, Democrat of North Carolina, during the teleconference release of the Scorecard. “We can get the congressional leadership that we need, but it’s crucial that voters be educated, that they know who’s doing the right thing and who’s not.”

Edwards noted that many of the bills—such as increasing the minimum wage and making it easier for workers to unionize—that failed in Congress last year would have easily helped pull Americans out of poverty. These policy changes reflect the view that if you are working full-time, you should not be struggling to pay the bills, Edwards said.

“People who are working ought to be able to provide for their family,” he said. “People who are working full-time should not be in poverty.”

The goal of the Shriver Center’s Poverty Scorecard is not just to identify poverty-fighting initiatives that Congress acted upon in 2007 and grade each member on how they voted. The Shriver Center also hopes that the evaluation will shine a light on how Congress is doing, that it will elevate the issue of poverty on the national agenda, and that members of Congress will be moved to pay greater attention and perform better in the fight against poverty.

For further information, contact Joanna VanderWoude at jvanderwoude@povertylaw.org or 312.263.3830 ext. 253.