Inani Ludibrio

Fun & Rewarding

The most fun and rewarding job in my career was the two years I spent in Chicago doing opposition and vulnerability research for local, state, and federal campaigns.

I never made more than $33,000 a year doing it.

I loved the data collection, the public records investigation, information synthesis, and narrative reporting.

Some clients and opposing candidates had been in Congress since the 90’s.

Reading Congressional roll calls going back 10+ years was a regular activity.

That’s how I became radicalized.

Vote Tracking

It was possible to track the votes of representatives across the makeups of different Congresses, with marked inflection points in 1995, 2001, 2002, and up to 2006, which is when I left that professional domain.

Depending on the demographics and gerrymandering of a given district, from the Roll Call it was clear how Democrats failed to unify and betrayed coalitions much more readily than Republicans.

Bad Faith

On the other hand, the nature of the votes confirmed that the Republicans were almost always operating in bad-faith.

If you didn’t trust Republicans before, analyzing roll call votes was enough to make you actively despise them.

In my case, one particular vote broke me: to increase death benefits for Gold Star widows of fallen servicemembers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Post 9/11, yellow-ribbon-wearing, American flag-pinning, Toby Keith-blaring Republicans voted it down in party line.

What I learned was that Republicans were much more disciplined and shameless.

When Democrats were in the majority, their coalition shattered.

The most glaringly obviously morally good, harm-reducing, fiscal-surplus generating stuff would languish in committees or get voted down.

The Democratic Whip was a thankless job.

When I obliquely refer to the Democrats as Rois Fainéants, that is why.