WASHINGTON, D.C. – During Tuesday’s debate on the Natural Resources Management Act, Congressman Steven Horsford (NV-04) took to the House Floor to urge Congress to pass the legislation which protects Nevada’s public lands.
Among other items the National Resources Management Act permanently reauthorizes the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), which protects, preserves, and develops our nation’s outdoor recreation areas. Nevada has received $40 million for local parks through the LWCF, and another $60 million to bolster federal public lands throughout the state.
In November 2018, Nevada received nearly $1 million from the National Park Service through the Land and Water Conservation Fund, including $318,889 to build park infrastructure for the Ice Age Fossils State Park in Clark County.
Remarks As Prepared For Delivery:
As Representative of Nevada’s Fourth Congressional District, a District that is home to over 50 thousand square miles of geographically diverse land, including several National Monuments and Parks, I am proud to voice my support for the Natural Resources Management Act.
As we’ve heard, this bill permanently reauthorizes the Land and Water Conservation fund, an integral conservation program that has provided the state of Nevada with $40 million for investment in local parks, and another $60 million to benefit our public lands.
Moreover, this bill expands access to outdoor recreation opportunities for communities across America.
Outdoor recreation is a vital aspect of Nevada’s economy. In 2017, it supported nearly 90,000 jobs, contributed $4 billion in wages and salaries, and spurred $12 billion of consumer spending in Nevada.
I am proud to vote for this bill to expand outdoor recreation opportunities for the American public, particularly for our underserved communities, many of whom depend on federal funding to develop parks and recreation.
As the 116th Congress continues, I look forward to continuing my efforts to foster conservation and development.
Senior Senator from Nevada Democrat Serving Jan 3, 2017 – Jan 3, 2023
These statistics cover Cortez Masto’s record during the 115th Congress (Jan 3, 2017-Jan 3, 2019) and compare her to other senators also serving at the end of the session. Last updated on Jan 20, 2019.
A higher or lower number below doesn’t necessarily make this legislator any better or worse, or more or less effective, than other Members of Congress. We present these statistics for you to understand the quantitative aspects of Cortez Masto’s legislative career and make your own judgements based on what activities you think are important.
Keep in mind that there are many important aspects of being a legislator besides what can be measured, such as constituent services and performing oversight of the executive branch, which aren’t reflected here.
Got the 3rd fewest cosponsors on their bills compared to Senate Democrats
Cortez Masto’s bills and resolutions had 96 cosponsors in the 115th Congress. Securing cosponsors is an important part of getting support for a bill, although having more cosponsors does not always mean a bill will get a vote. View Bills »
Got their bills out of committee the 3rd least often compared to Senate Democrats (tied with 1 other)
Most bills and resolutions languish in committee without any action. Cortez Masto introduced 3 bills in the 115th Congress that got past committee and to the floor for consideration.
Got bicameral support on the 5th fewest bills compared to Senate Democrats
The House and Senate often work on the same issue simultaneously by introducing companion bills in each chamber. 4 of Cortez Masto’s bills and resolutions had a companion bill in the House. Working with a sponsor in the other chamber makes a bill more likely to be passed by both the House and Senate.
Companion bills are those that are identified as “identical” by Congress’s Congressional Research Service.
Got bipartisan cosponsors on the 8th fewest bills compared to Senate Democrats
In this era of partisanship, it is important to see Members of Congress working across the aisle. 11 of Cortez Masto’s 23 bills and resolutions had a cosponsor from a different political party than the party Cortez Masto caucused with in the 115th Congress.
Held the 6th fewest committee positions compared to Senate Democrats (tied with 5 others)
Cortez Masto held a leadership position on 0 committees and 1 subcommittee, as either a chair (majority party) or ranking member (minority party), at the end of the session. For comparison to other Members of Congress, we assigned a score giving five points for each full committee leadership position and one point for each subcommittee leadership position. View Cortez Masto’s Profile »
Ranked the 9th bottom/follower compared to All Senators
Our unique leadership analysis looks at who is cosponsoring whose bills. A higher score shows a greater ability to get cosponsors on bills.
For more, see our methodology. Note that because on this page only legislative activity in the 115th Congress is considered, the leadership score here may differ from Cortez Masto’s score elsewhere on GovTrack.
Supported government transparency the 9th most often compared to All Senators (tied with 4 others)
GovTrack looked at whether Cortez Masto supported any of 14 government transparency, accountability, and effectiveness bills in the Senate that we identified in this session. We gave Cortez Masto 6 points, based on one point for cosponsoring and three points for sponsoring any of these bills.
Got influential cosponsors the 9th least often compared to Senate Democrats (tied with 6 others)
4 of Cortez Masto’s bills and resolutions in the 115th Congress had a cosponsor who was a chair or ranking member of a committee that the bill was referred to. Getting support from committee leaders on relevant committees is a crucial step in moving legislation forward.
Cortez Masto cosponsored 341 bills and resolutions introduced by other Members of Congress. Cosponsorship shows a willingness to work with others to advance policy goals. View Cosponsored Bills »
Cortez Masto introduced 3 bills that became law, including via incorporation into other measures, in the 115th Congress. Keep in mind that it takes a law to repeal a law. Very few bills ever become law. View Enacted Bills »
The legislator must be the primary sponsor of the bill or joint resolution that was enacted or the primary sponsor of a bill or joint resolution for which at least about one third of its text was incorporated into another bill or joint resolution that was enacted as law, as determined by an automated analysis. While a legislator may lay claim to authoring other bills that became law, these cases are difficult for us to track quantitatively. We also exclude bills where the sponsor’s original intent is not in the final bill.
Joining Bipartisan Bills
Of the 341 bills that Cortez Masto cosponsored, 27% were introduced by a legislator who was not a Democrat. View Cosponsored Bills »
Only Democratic and Republican Members of Congress who cosponsored more than 10 bills and resolutions are included in this statistic.
Additional Notes
The Speaker’s Votes: Missed votes are not computed for the Speaker of the House. According to current House rules, the Speaker of the House is not required to vote in “ordinary legislative proceedings.” In practice this means the Speaker of the House rarely votes but is not considered absent.
Leadership/Ideology: The leadership and ideology scores are not displayed for Members of Congress who introduced fewer than 10 bills, or, for ideology, for Members of Congress that have a low leadership score, as there is usually not enough data in these cases to compute reliable leadership and ideology statistics.
Missing Bills: We exclude bills from some statistics where the sponsor’s original intent is not in the final bill because the bill’s text was replaced in whole with unrelated provisions (i.e. it became a vehicle for passage of unrelated provisions).
Ranking Members (RkMembs): The chair of a committee is always selected from the political party that holds the most seats in the chamber, called the “majority party”. The “ranking member” (sometimes “RkMembs”) is the title given to the senior-most member of the committee not in the majority party.
Freshmen/Sophomores: Freshmen and sophomores are Members of Congress whose first term (in the same chamber at the end of the 115th Congress) was the 115thCongress (freshmen) or 114th (sophomores). Members of Congress who took office within the last few months of a Congress are considered freshmen in the next Congress as well.
Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Prior to Fletcher, he taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has previously held positions with Civic Education Project, the RAND Corporation and the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and received fellowships from the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Council on Foreign Relations, and Harvard University. Drezner has written five books, including All Politics is Global and Theories of International Politics and Zombies, and edited two others, including Avoiding Trivia. He has published articles in numerous scholarly journals as well as in several newspapers and magazines. He has been a contributing editor for Foreign Policy and The National Interest. He received his B.A. in political economy from Williams College and an M.A. in economics and Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University. His blog was named by Time as one of the 25 best blogs of 2012. His newest book is The System Worked: How the World Stopped Another Great Depression.
October 23: I’m the curator of the #ToddlerinChief thread on Twitter, a log of the times when a political ally of Donald Trump describes him like one would describe a small child. There are more than 535 examples in this thread since April 2017. But I have noticed a decided slowdown in the number of entries in recent weeks. There have been only 12 entries in October; Trump has averaged close to 28 entries since May 2017. Trust me when I say that has been a slow month.
Is there an explanation for this? Has Trump actually grown into the presidency?
Not exactly. As the midterm elections approach, and as Trump has devoted more and more of his time on the campaign hustings, he appears to have switched from general toddler-like behaviors to one specific toddler-like trait: lying.
Calling the president of the United States a liar used to be no small thing, but Trump’s record for lies, falsehoods and general untruths is genuinely impressive. Still, even the folks who fact-check Trump for a living have been surprised at just how bald-faced his recent lies have been.
It took thirty-four years before 80-year old Republican Senator Pete Domenici, admitted that as a 46 years old husband and father he fathered Adam Laxalt with 25-year old Michelle Laxalt, the daughter of a then-Senate colleague, Nevada Republican Paul Laxalt.
By keeping her secret, Ms. Laxalt, who never married, was able to work for Ronald Reagan, both George Bushes and held plum jobs at the State Department and Agency for International development (AID). She also built a lucrative practice representing corporations.
The relationship between Domenici and Ms. Laxalt would be a footnote in history if their son Adam had not decide to enter Nevada politics, and perform poorly as the states Attorney General. Now he wants to be Governor. Even 12 Laxalt family members oppose him. Here is why in their own words
According to Gabriel Urza, Kevin Nomura, Amy Nomura Solaro, Alexandra Urza, Kevan Danielle Laxalt, Michelle Terese Laxalt, Peter Laxalt, Michelle Janet Laxalt, Dr. Kevin Marie Laxalt, Dr. Kristin Laxalt, Monique Laxalt, and Meggan Laxalt Mackey, their family member Adam Laxalt is the wrong choice for Nevada governorship.
According to the Laxalt-12, “for those of us who were raised in Nevada, it’s difficult to hear him continue to falsely claim that he was raised in Nevada or has any true connections to Nevadans. The simple fact is that while he may have been born in Reno, he left as an infant and was raised on the East Coast, 3,000 miles away, in Washington, D.C., and moved here only in 2013, only one year later launching his political career. Aside from the occasional short visit, Adam never knew the state or its people. Perhaps if he had, he would stand for Nevada’s values rather than for those of his out-of-state donors.”
Consider the Adam Laxalt August 2017, Basque Fry Republican fundraiser. Attendees included Kellyanne Conway and Devin Nunes, with Laxalt dressed in jeans, a western shirt monogrammed with his campaign logo, his feet encased in “work” boots. Behind the stage was an orange tractor surrounded by hay bales.
The Laxalt-12 point out that Adam rallies against immigrants, the backbone on Nevada’s working force, thus denying his own immigrant family’s history.
His brief experience as a practicing lawyer was described as a “train wreck” by members of his own firm. His tenure in the attorney general’s office has been little more than a four-year publicity tour for his current campaign for governor. He even outsourced jobs in the AG’s office to out-of-state lawyers who were given special exemptions to practice law in Nevada.
According to the 12 family members, “Adam proceeded to undermine, time after time, not only twice-elected Governor Brian Sandoval but the welfare of all Nevadans. Most concerning is the ethical shortcomings that have come to light while Adam has been attorney general, and his willingness to ignore the law for self-serving political purposes. In his short time in public office, Adam has already demonstrated a servitude to donors and out-of-state interests that puts their concerns ahead of real Nevadans”.
The twelve family members argue that Laxalts shortcomings come down to a lack of real, authentic connection to our state, and a failure to understand what is important to real Nevadans.
Laxalt’s relatives point out that Nevada is a state driven by a modern economy and a diverse population, and we take deep pride in our rich, complicated history. Nevadans value their independence and their ability to share in the beauties of our wild state, while still respecting each other’s autonomy. “If Adam is elected governor, these values will be put in danger. Public lands will become less accessible for hunters and fishers and backpackers. Adam’s positions on health care and reproductive rights would limit how Nevadans care for their bodies or be free from government interference in relationships as sacred and personal as marriage. Adam wants to repeal hundreds of millions of dollars of education funding, even though he knows full well that Nevada is ranked 49th in the nation for pre-K-12 education”, the family says.
If Laxalt responds to this column at all, the twelve say, it will probably be to say that he hardly knows the people writing this column. “And in many ways that would be true. We never had a chance to get to know him, really — he spent his life in Washington, D.C., while we lived in Northern Nevada and grew up in public schools and on public lands. He moved to Nevada in 2013 so that he could lean on the reputation of a family that he hardly knew while tapping into support by donors who had no interest in our state or its people”, they say.
Trump and supporters at a rally in Muscatine, Iowa, January 2016. Multiple supporters hold up signs stating “The silent majority stands with Trump.”This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Trump emerged on the political scene. A 2016 Politico survey found that high authoritarians greatly favored then-candidate Trump, which led to a correct prediction that he would win the election, despite the polls saying otherwise.
2. In Trump’s speeches, he appeals to those with Social dominance orientation (SDO) by repeatedly making a clear distinction between groups that have a generally higher status in society (White), and those groups that are typically thought of as belonging to a lower status (immigrants and minorities).
Nevada Senator Dean Heller with Donald Trump
A 2016 survey study of 406 American adults published this year in the journal Personality and Individual Differences found that those who scored high on both SDO and authoritarianism were those who intended to vote for Trump in the election.
3. Trump’s are sometimes shockingly direct. There’s no denying that he routinely appeals to bigoted supporters when he calls Muslims “dangerous” and Mexican immigrants “rapists” and “murderers,” often in a blanketed fashion. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a new study has shown that support for Trump is correlated with a standard scale of modern racism.
4. A 2016 study found that “…the racial and ethnic isolation of Whites at the zip-code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support.” This correlation persisted while controlling for dozens of other variables. In agreement with this finding, the same researchers found that support for Trump increased with the voters’ physical distance from the Mexican border.
5. There is no doubt that some Trump supporters are simply angry that American jobs are being lost to Mexico and China, which is certainly understandable, although these loyalists often ignore the fact that some of these careers are actually being lost due to the accelerating pace of automation.
He is not a Trump fan. Share Tyler Linfesty wore a plaid shirt, a hand-me-down from his brother, at the Trump rally in Montana When President Donald Trump took the stage on Thursday… Soynadia.net
If such data is accurate, the portrayal of most Trump supporters as “working class” citizens rebelling against Republican elites may be more myth than fact.
Bobby Azarian, Ph.D., is a cognitive neuroscientist and science writer in the Washington, D.C. area. Online: www.bobbyazarian.com
