— Reprinted with Permission of The New American magazine —
The first Freedom Index scorecard for the 114th Congress is now available.
We live at a time when our federal government routinely usurps powers not granted to it by the Constitution. This is leading to an increasingly totalitarian government that routinely infringes on our basic rights.
The solution is for more and more voters to hold their representatives and senators in Congress accountable to the Constitution. Fortunately, The New American news magazine has been publishing “The Freedom Index: A Congressional Scorecard Based on the U.S. Constitution” for nearly 30 years. “The Freedom Index” provides scorecards for every member of Congress on ten key votes four times every two-year session of Congress.
You can help return our federal government to its constitutional moorings by using the “Freedom Index” to learn how constitutionally your representative and two senators are voting, taking the appropriate actions to influence them to vote constitutionally, and then spreading the word to others in your sphere of influence about how to use the “Freedom Index” to hold their congressmen accountable to the Constitution.
You can access the online “Freedom Index” by clicking on “Voting Index” in the menu bar on TheNewAmerican.com. Clicking on an individual congressman’s name takes you to a page with a photo of the congressman along with his average “Freedom Index” score for each Congress he has served in, all the vote descriptions for each vote cast from the original print “Freedom Indexes,” and a link for each vote description to a page showing how all the members of the House or Senate voted on that roll call vote.
Once you’re on the “Freedom Index” page a single click on the “Past Members” menu item takes you to a similar “Freedom Index” page with cumulative scores for past members of Congress who have served fairly recently. Clicking on one of these past members’ names gives you a new page with all the same details described in the previous paragraph.
Our latest online “Freedom Index” includes the first report on the 114th Congress (which appeared in the print version of The New American for July 20, 2015) with ten votes scored for the House and ten for the Senate. These will be the first ten votes you see when you click on an individual congressman’s name in the online “Freedom Index” and scroll down to see the detailed voting record.
Please contact your senators and representative and bring their online “Freedom Index” voting record to their attention along with thanking them when appropriate and asking for explanations when appropriate. Remember that it is your responsibility as a voter to hold your senators and representative accountable to the Constitution.
We recommend that you first go to the online “Freedom Index” and look at how your senators and representative have been voting so that you can personalize your email message to them with questions about their actual votes. Be aware that the one email message goes to both of your senators and your representative, so you’ll need to add something like “Attn: Rep. Blank” somewhere near the beginning of your email message in order to direct a question to your representative. Ditto for your senators. Click here to view “Breaking Down the Freedom Index for July 2015,” a new 3-minute video.
