Not so long ago, if Heritage Action announced that it would be “key voting” a vote in the House or Senate, conservative lawmakers could be counted on to line up and do whatever Heritage Action demanded.
Now when the political partner of the Heritage Foundation alerts a “key vote,” barely anyone blinks. The organization’s once-powerful “scorecards” have been supplanted by a more important metric: the approval of Donald Trump. “The teeth are not there in the way that they used to be,” a former senior official at Heritage told NOTUS. “That’s because of the whole shift in conservatism. It’s like, you can be bad on the Heritage Action scorecard, but if, you know, Trump thinks you’re awesome … it doesn’t really matter.”
With a Heritage Action score of only 49% this term, Pennsylvania Rep. Mike Kelly is currently one of the lowest-scoring Republicans in the House. But he’s a close ally of the former president, who calls Kelly “a great congressman” and helped him with his reelection campaigns. Kelly said he’s not stressed about his Heritage Action score, which is down from his lifetime average of 67% — and much lower than the 96% he got last session, the highest he has received in office. “I don’t follow any of it actually,” he told NOTUS.