elections

Eric's friend Amanda (who works at Gotham Gazette, a place to find information about city policies) dug up this quote from Renée Paradis at the Brennan Center:

"New York is one of only nine states in the country, however, that has a party affiliation deadline that is earlier than the voter registration deadline, requiring voters who are already registered who want to switch their party enrollment to do so well before most people are thinking of the primary election or the media is covering it. Moreover, New York is one of only five states that require even those voters who are not currently affiliated with a party to meet these early deadlines. Of these five states, New York has the longest advance deadline, which is twenty-five days before the prior general election, in early October, for both the February presidential primary in presidential election years and the regular September primary in other years." --Testimony of Renée Paradis Before the New York State Elections Committee, April 24, 2009

See also Shhh, Or Independents Might Actually Get to Vote by Ms. Paradis

Amanda also points out that a candidate is not actually required to be a member of any one party to run in that party's primary. Witness NYC Mayor Bloomberg's recent efforts to secure lines on multiple primary ballots. Mayor Bloomberg is registered as "unaffiliated" but is hoping to appear on the Independence, Republican and Democratic tickets in this year's primary elections.

More articles and commentary from Gotham Gazette on NYC elections:
http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/voting/20060929/17/1987
http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/feature-commentary/20030526/202/403
http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/voting/20030122/17/196

This answer is more or less directly from Amanda, with a little editing from Jenna, your Radical Reference Librarian (who would welcome Amanda to our ranks anytime).

I may be misunderstanding your question, but there have not yet been any full Congressional votes regarding sentencing disparity.

As of 3/11/08, Barack Obama is a cosponsor of S.1711 ("A bill to target cocaine kingpins and address sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine.") Search Thomas by this bill number for more details, as well as links to related bills in the House and Senate and their current statuses.

In April 2007, the US Sentencing Commission released new guidelines for federal sentencing of crack cocaine offenses. On December 11, the commission voted unanimously "to give retroactive effect" to these guidelines.

The viewpoints of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama appear in news reports, such as:

• "Obama's caution on drug sentencing" by Derrick Z. Jackson; Boston Globe, 8/15/07
• "Obama says he would relax drug sentencing, address inequalities in justice system" by Nedra Pickler; Associated Press, 9/28/07

  [excerpt]
  "'If you're convicted of a crime involving drugs, of course you should be punished,' Obama said in a speech at Howard University's opening convocation. 'But let's not make the punishment for crack cocaine that much more severe than the punishment for powder cocaine when the real difference is where the people are using them or who is using them.'"

• "Drug Ruling Not Likely to Free Many" by James Oliphant; Chicago Tribune, 12/17/07

  [excerpt]
  "The issue has split the Democratic presidential candidates. Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York has come out against retroactivity, while Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois supports it. In a speech in September, Obama said, 'Let's not make the punishment for crack cocaine that much more severe than the punishment for powder cocaine when the real difference between the two is the skin color of the people using them.'"

• "Crack-Sentencing Reductions Decried;
  Mukasey: Gang Members Would Be Let Go" by Darryl Fears; Washington Post, 2/7/08

  [excerpt]
  "Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) said she was against making the guidelines retroactive. 'In principle, I have problems with retroactivity,' she said. 'It's something a lot of communities will be concerned about, as well.'

  "Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) wavered. 'Even if we fix this, if it was a 1 to 1 ratio, it's still a problem that folks are selling crack. It's still a problem that our young men are in a situation where they believe the only recourse for them is the drug trade.'"

• "Where they stand on crime, death penalty;
  Differences are greater between parties than between candidates" by Bob Egelko; San Francisco Chronicle, 2/10/08

This one does not appear to be a quick job of research, unless you get very lucky with a newspaper database via your local library. Free web news I don't think will go back nearly far enough, maybe not even the current year. Individual papers often have archive searches, but it's rare that they don't charge at least a small fee for articles.

Your best place to try is probably Roll Call Votes in thomas.loc.gov. They include Congresses back to the 101st (1989-90), with the House having only the 2nd session (1990) for that Congress. But it appears to me you would need to try many different searches using "find in page" (CTRL-F), to find words such as "war", "Iraq", "terror" etc., in those actual page listings of all roll call votes. The Search function in the upper right of the Roll Call Votes page gets many hearing pages, not just votes. Even if you try: "roll call" war, you get hundreds of announcements of upcoming votes, etc.

Another approach would be the Appropriations bills listings, which are broken down by major categories. For example, the 2002 listing includes 1 "Public Law" under "Defense" and 9 under "Supplemental Appropriations". When you click on the "Public Law" links, then on "Bill summary and status", you can get "major congressional actions", "all congressional actions" and "all actions with amendments". No doubt some of the war funding bills will be well buried inside amendments or other bills, so it might even be worth a search in Usa.gov to see if there is a nice summary of how senators have voted over the course of these wars. Even the Democratic or Republican National Committee sites might possibly have a summary - but you would for sure want to use those mainly as a short cut to double check against your searches in Thomas