To be honest, he hasn't been in national politics as long as the other candidates so his record of votes is bound to be comparatively slim.
However, that whole NO on the Iraq war vote was pretty good stuff, I'd say.
And for the record:
The following are just a few of the votesBarack Obama made.
Senator Obama cast a vote against the ironically named Protect America Act. The Protect America Act is a law now passed by both houses of Congress which replaces judicial warrants with executive prerogative and substitutes blank checks for reasons. The Protect America Act gives the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence the power to spy on your emails, your web surfing, your telephone calls and other electronic communications. All this is carried out without a warrant, which is required by the 4th Amendment to the United States Constitution. There is no supervision of the spy programs put in place by the Attorney General and the DNI, except by these two indivivuals themselves. No one has the power to stop them any more. They can search your records, sift through your private messages, watch you go from web page to web page, on the pretext of protecting America from terrorists, all without a search warrant. No one has the power to tell them no.
The AttorneyGeneral and the DNI, both political appointees of the President, have the power under the Protect America Act to order any American to help them conduct their electronic spying against other Americans. Under the new law, if they order you to take part in their spying operations, and you say no, they can throw you in prison. If you do not keep their spying on other Americans a secret, even from your family, they can throw you in prison. The Protect America Act institutes Big Brother government in the United States. It betrays American liberty. It is a shame that the Act passed, but thanks are due to Senator Obama for casting a vote against it.
S. 1175, The Child Soldier Prevention Act, prohibits the government of the United States of America from providing military aid to any foreign government that uses child soldiers in its military, paramilitary forces, or other official or sanctioned armed groups. The Child Soldier Prevention Act also requires the Executive Branch to research and publish reports on the use of child soldiers around the world, providing important information that can be used to more effectively counter the use child soldiers. There are some clauses that make the bill less strong than it could be. One gives the President of the United States to issue a waiver to the law when he decides that giving military aid to a government that uses child soldiers is in the interest of the United States. However, the President is required to register every such waiver, and report on the justifications for each waiver to the Senate and to the House of Representatives. Another clause permits support for armies that recruit volunteer child soldiers as young as 16 -- because that's what the U.S. Military currently does. These clauses make the Child Soldier Prevention Act of 2007 an imperfect piece of legislation, but it's pretty darned good, and it's the only legislation to even address the issue. It is therefore a piece of legislation that all decent Americans ought to be willing to support, regardless of political party affiliation. Senator Barack Obama has shown that basic sort of decency by signing his name in official, public support of this bill.
On March 27, 2007, the United States Senate defeated a Republican attempt to strip language placing an end date on the seemingly interminable occupation of Iraq. With Roll Call Vote 116, the Senate defeated Amendment 643 to H.R. 1591, an amendment offered by Senator Thad Cochran from Mississippi. Amendment 643 would have allowed the Bush White House to continue its open-ended military occupation of Iraq without any accountability. The amendment would have eliminated the provision from the legislation that requires the Bush Administration to begin withdrawing military troops 120 days after the legislation is passed, and end the occupation by March 2008. It is time to put a finite limit on warfare as a policy tool in Iraq and time to begin pursuing other methods of change there. By voting against Senate Amendment 643, Senator Obama stopped clinging to a violent policy that just has not worked, and instead moved toward more peaceful and more realistic alternatives.
Senator Obama has cosponsored S.2, a bill that increases the minimum wage, which is currently at its lowest point since the 1950s. The bill would not raise the minimum wage to new highs. It would only return the minimum wage to a level comparable to that of the 1980s, which is in turn much lower than the minimum wage level of the late 1960s. Senator Obama did the right thing in cosponsoring this bill.
Sometimes good things come as amending packages. Senate Amendment 1094 to Senate Amendment 1065 to H.R. 1495, brought from the House all the way to the Senate, may have had a Byzantine route for introduction, but it contained a good idea nonetheless. Senate Amendment 1094, if passed, would have required the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to consider the impact of climate change when designing water projects. The impact of climate change upon water projects is likely to be considerable, when it comes to matters such as the effect of storms and flooding. The Army Corps of Engineers has a bad record of taking relevant factors into account when it comes to such matters, and the amendment sought to strengthen their work and make public works projects more reliable. Unfortunately, the amendment gained too few votes for passage. But at least Senator Obama did his part by voting YES on the amendment.
Senator Barack Obama has done the right thing in cosponsoring S.5, a bill that would permit federal funding to be used for research on lines of stem cells taken from a handful of blastocysts: non-thinking, non-breathing, blastocysts with thirty undifferentiated inner mass cells. These are just a handful of blastocysts out of the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of abandoned blastocysts that will never be implanted in a uterus and are currently slated to be simply thrown in the trash. This research, using cell lines from blastocysts, is aimed at the big health care challenges of the 21st century: stopping cancer, curing Parkinsons and Alzheimers, ameliorating diabetes, stalling the aging process.
Oh Yeah, and he voted NO on this wretched Iraq war business. And , I’d like to point out that he voted NO because he refused to allow fear to drive him into acting hastily on attacking Iraq. He is still intent on cleaning up the Al-Quaeda mess that actually does exist in Afghanistan. You remember Afghanistan, where the actual terrorists were. Something the Bush administration found it pretty easy to put on a back burner when they realized that they could line their pockets much more effectively in Iraq which has huge oil reserves.
