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Rep. Robert (Marion) Berry [D-AR1]
U.S. Representative, Arkansas’s 1st District

Photo of Berry
State:Arkansas [map]
District:1st Congressional District [map]
Party:Democrat
Birthday:Aug 27, 1942 / 67 years old

To contact Robert Berry, visit his official website. (Read our tips for communicating with Congress.) See the Project Vote Smart page for Berry for more biographical and issue information.

Congressional Service

Robert Berry has represented Arkansas’s 1st congressional district since 1997.

Below are the past and present terms in the Senate, House, and White House held by Robert Berry:

WhenRoleRepresenting
1997-2010
U.S. RepresentativeArkansas’s 1st
(was preceeded by Sen. Blanche Lincoln [D-AR])

Sponsorship Analysis

"Ideometer"Berry is a moderate Democrat according to GovTrack's own analysis of bill sponsorship.

These labels come from the Political Spectrum statistical analysis that we have carried out. The statistical analysis puts members of Congress on a scale based on patterns of bill sponsorship, and is blind to party affiliation and the content of bills. From there, we have somewhat arbitrarily divided the Members of Congress into far-left/right, rank-and-file, and moderate (i.e. centrist). For each party, the most extreme 23% of Members of Congress are labeled far-left or -right. The most centrist 30% (i.e. those closest to the other party) are labeled moderate. The remaining 47% are labeled as rank-and-file.

"Leader-Follower Score"
Berry is a leader according to our statistical analysis of bills in this legislative session. Other Members of Congress tend to cosponsor Berry’s bills. For more, see congressional statistics.

To compute the leader-follower score for Berry, we make a table that lists all other Members of Congress. Each row has the number bills sponsored by Berry and cosponsored by the other Member of Congress divided by the number of bills sponsored by the other Member of Congress and cosponsored by Berry.

This is a measure of who is following who. The higher the number, the more times others are cosponsoring Berry's bills without Berry returning the favor. We then take the mean of (the logorithms of) these ratios. Thanks to Joe Barillari for the idea.

Voting Record

Voting RecordRobert Berry missed 163 (2%) of 8603 votes since Jan 7, 1997. The graph to the left shows the number of missed votes over time. Click for a larger chart and a list of recent votes.

Committee Membership

Robert Berry sits on the following committees:

Bill Sponsorship & Cosponsorship

Robert Berry has sponsored 79 bills since Jan 7, 1997 of which 75 haven't made it out of committee and 2 were successfully enacted. Berry has co-sponsored 1108 bills during the same time period. (The count of enacted bills considers only bills actually sponsored by Berry and companion bills identified by CRS that were themselves enacted, but not if they were incorporated into other bills, as that information is not readily available.)

Some of Berry’s most recently sponsored bills include...

H.R. 3634: To designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 109 Main Street in Swifton, Arkansas, as the "George Kell Post Office".
H.R. 3979: Protecting Americans from Drug Marketing Act
H.R. 1298: Pharmaceutical Market Access and Drug Safety Act of 2009
H.R. 2753: To delay the implementation of new Medicare hospital geographic wage reclassification criteria until the Secretary of Health and Human Services issues a proposal to revise the hospital wage index classification system that addresses certain considerations.
H.R. 684: Medicare Prescription Drug Savings and Choice Act of 2009

View All... (including bills from previous years)

Photo from the Congressional Pictorial Directory.