I am an expert on Congress, and if you're reading @californiadem20's thread evaluating AOC's legislative effectiveness, you should understand that not only is it wrong but it fundamentally misunderstands what Members of Congress do.

For example, @AOC was responsible for the creation of a select committee on the climate crisis. Do you know how hard it is to create a committee? Especially on a signature issue? And as a freshmen? With unanimous Democratic support?

Members of Congress have three major areas of responsibility: legislation, oversight, and constituent service. Let's take these three things in turn.

Legislative efficacy is hard to measure. Not because you can't count up the bills that you've cosponsored that become law, but because that is a stupid metric for doing so.

How do legislators affect legislation? Some do it by having their amendments adopted, or by defeating other measures. Some do it by inserting report language. These are all a big deal and doesn't happen all that often.

A few Members of Congress introduce bills that are enacted. For freshmen, usually leadership hand-drafts bills and gives it to vulnerable members so they can have a legislative accomplishment. This isn't about the member's savvy, but about their political vulnerability

One of the most effective tools, though, is when you can change the terms of the debate. This is when a member, through their platform, advocacy, and organizing, sways a significant part of the caucus to move a measure or block it. It's collective action.

This is pretty hard to measure. But the collective victories belongs to all those involved. And there were a number of progressive victories on legislation that passed the House.

There weren't many bills that became law because bills rarely become law and the Senate wasn't in the bill passing business in the 116th. So the denominator isn't big here.

Was @AOC effective in changing the terms of debate on legislation? Certainly seems like it. That why we see leadership and corporate Democrats punching down on her and her colleagues.

Let's move on to oversight. Does *anyone* question @AOC's ability to ask touch questions at hearings and get results? She is a phenom at this. (She's not the only one: looking at you, Katie Porter.) I could add a dozen clips of this, but do I really need to?

I mean, it'd be fun. But I don't want to punch down, either.

I can't speak to her constituent service skills. But her re-election rate in her district against a well-funded opponent suggests she's doing many things very well.

I have great suspicion's about @californiadem20's motives here. Anyone who is a Spanberger-stan makes me nervous. Warmed over centrist policies that fail to energize the base are one big reason why Dems lose elections (or don't do as well as they should).

We saw this same type of stupid-ass argument when people tried to compare Hillary's versus Bernie's legislative records. To do so fundamentally misunderstands Congress and the roles they play in the ecosystem. I've written about this before. https://medium.com/@danielschuman/washington-post-s-money-cage-just-published-a-crap-article-measuring-legislative-effectiveness-b46913462fc1

In conclusion, anyone who purports to do a deep-dive into evaluating legislative effectiveness without understanding the deficiencies in their methodology and the fundamental lack of data should be understood as a polemicist with a giant axe to grind.

I, in fact, do have an axe to grind, which is why I write about how Congress is broken and how to fix it, and do it at length on a weekly basis. An important starting point is to strip away the BS about what it means to be an effective legislator. https://firstbranchforecast.com/ 

PS. Lol.