As noted below, voters in Nashville and Tennessee's 5th Congressional District overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama in the 2008 Presidential election, and have supported Democratic presidential candidates for years.

So one would have expected Rep. Jim Cooper to have been a strong supporter of President Obama's first big initiative after he was elected, the economic recovery act for which the White House was desperately attempting to garner bipartisan support immediately following his inauguration.

Instead, Jim Cooper was one of only 11 Democrats in the entire House of Representatives to vote against the economic recovery act.

At the time, one local blogger in Nashville reacted by noting that Cooper seemed to be making good on a not-so-veiled threat he made in a the Wall Street Journal days earlier to swing the Blue Dogs in the House to vote with Republicans if he didn't get his way:

Sitting in his office a stone's throw from where the festivities will take place, I ask about his role in the big transformation coming to Washington. He's one of the leaders of a gang of moderate Democrats called the Blue Dogs. They're meeting their first Democratic president in a while, and Mr. Cooper may have a big effect on the agenda. He smiles gently and says, "If we were to ally with the Republicans, we could swing any vote in the House of Representatives." He hastens to add, "We don't want to do that, we aren't planning on doing that."

This was the continuation of a longtime pattern: instead of representing his Tennessee constituents, Cooper's first act under President Obama was to threaten opposition to Obama's first major piece of legislation.

Welcome to the Cooper Uncovered blog!

This blog will be dedicated to holding Rep. Jim Cooper accountable to his constituents in Tennessee's 5th Congressional District and uncovering whether or not he is truly representing them in Congress.

The verdict so far? It isn't pretty.

Jim Cooper may say he stands up for the welfare and desires of his Tennessee constituents, but his long record in Congress reveals that seems to care a lot more about pleasing the corporate interests that fund his campaigns than the Tennesseans he currently represents.

Here’s just some of what that record reveals:

• During the last big health care fight in the 1990s, Cooper actively worked against the efforts of President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton to pass health care reform. Cooper consistently showed he cared more about working with Republican lawmakers than ensuring that every American had good health care coverage.
• Cooper has received nearly $1 million from the health care industry over the course of his career. His sixth biggest donor is a health care organization founded and run by Former GOP Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.
• Cooper now says he doesn’t think bloated health insurance charges are at the root of the problem of the health care crisis in America. Instead, he thinks Americans should just be able to pay more on their own for their routine care.
• As a key leader of the conservative Democrat Blue Dog coalition in Congress, Cooper has frequently boasted that he has more power to sway the terms of debate in Washington than President Obama does – a fact that he seems to relish.
• As one of his first actions in Congress under the Obama Administration, Cooper worked against President Obama’s efforts to bring the country out of the recession by voting against the economic stimulus plan which aimed to stabilize the U.S. economy and help the Americans hit hardest by the economic downturn

Up until 1994, Jim Cooper represented another, conservative Congressional District in Tennnessee. Since being elected to his current seat in the 5th District in 2002 - a district that gave President Obama 56% of the vote in 2008 -- his record has hardly changed from the days when, as a Clinton White House insider said, "no Democrat did more to destroy our chances in that fight than Jim Cooper" did.

If you are surprised by all of this, or if you think it's time Nashville-area voters had their views truly represented in Congress, then take a few minutes to look around the site and check back here often as we uncover how out of step Jim Cooper's record has been with his Tennessee constituents.