Russ Pulliam of the Indianapolis Star does a profile of Mark Souder under the headline "Incumbent doesn't walk the party line."
Souder is taking some heat not so much for his own conservative record, but for daylight-saving time and the state's leasing of the Toll Road to raise highway construction money.
Where do political pundits get this stuff? Souder voted with the Republican Party about 95 percent of the time last year. The congressional-watching Web sit GovTrack rates him a "rank and file Republican." If Souder has seemed to lose his way at times, it's not because he's been abandoning the GOP; it's because the party itself, on things like No Child Left Behind and the drug-prescription plan, seems less than committed to smaller government. And certainly Republicans might lose the Indiana House because of DST and the toll road, but I haven't heard anybody mention him in connection with those state issues.
The article also contains this gem: Souder is "fundamentally an intellectuall" who "reads more than 50 books a year." Gollleee! 50 books a year, that's, wait a sec, let me try to do that math in my head, a book a week! I hate to point it out to the Intellectual Admiration Society, but Isaac Asimov practically wrote that many books.
Here, by the way, is a Washington Post database with which you can check out the voting record of all members of Congress going all the way back to 1991.
