GovTrack.us, a website that tracks the passage of bills through Congress and the voting records of legislators, recently confirmed that it had removed a 2019 report that tagged then-Sen. Kamala Harris as that year’s “most liberal” U.S. senator sometime within the last two weeks.
The organization that provides “thorough documentation of U.S. congressional voting” labeled Harris as the “most liberal compared to all senators that year,” outranking even progressive stalwarts like Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
The self-described “government transparency website” now displays a “Page Not Found” error prompt whenever the link is accessed. Moreover, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine illustrates that the webpage was yanked down sometime this month, the same month that Harris gained enough delegates to become the Democratic Party’s Presidential nominee after President Joe Biden’s announcement on July 21 of stepping down and endorsing Harris.
According to GovTrack founder Joshua Tauberer, the webpage removal was a consequence of the group’s policy shift enacted “several years ago” to end its single-year ratings of lawmakers to only do ratings based on Congressional sessions, which are two years. He did not disclose the exact date of the webpage removal.
“We determined that the limited data available in a single year was not sufficient to create a reliable portrait of the activity of legislators, particularly given the ebbs and flows of the legislative calendar, and therefore did not serve as a useful tool to our users and the American public,” Tauberer said. “We subsequently took down the previously published single-calendar-year statistics for the same reason.”
Tauberer told Fox News Digital that the organization was still publishing report cards based on two-year congressional sessions and pointed to Harris’ existing 2020 web page, which ranked her ideology as the “most politically left compared to Senate Democrats” for the 116th Congress. She was ranked the second most liberal in all the Senate behind Sanders.
Back in 2020, GovTrack reportedly said that the ranking was not reliable. “I think the short answer is that both things can be true: She can both be sponsoring/co-sponsoring left-leaning legislation, something with typically little risk, while also being pragmatic when push comes to shove on risky and impactful decisions,” Tauberer added at the time.
Hellbound and Down 