This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, February 15th, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

Who are the free traders in Congress? A new web tool at Cato's free trade.org website will help citizens separate the wheat from the

chaff on US House and Senate votes on trade going back more than a decade.

Dan Griswold, the director of Cato's Center for Trade Policy Studies, offers details.

The Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute has just launched a powerful new interactive

web feature called Free Trade Free Markets rating Congress.

And this web feature allows users to search the votes of every member of Congress, House and Senate,

going back to NAFTA in the early 1990s, and it shows what their real record is on trade over time. And this interactive feature builds on a series of

studies that we did, starting with 105th Congress in the late 90s through the 108th

Congress a couple of years ago that systematically

analyzed congressional votes not just on trade barriers but what we call

trade subsidies. Those are things like the Export

Import Bank, agricultural commodity subsidies, using anti-dumping duties to

subsidize petitioning industries. These are not your classic trade bearers, but they nonetheless distort trade.

Some of them even done in the name of promoting trade, and yet they're distorting markets taking

money from people that they wouldn't spend otherwise.

So we reveal who the real free traders are in Congress,

those who oppose not just trade barriers,

but trade subsidies, and it can be quite revealing.

Now, how far back does this go?

One or fifth Congress?

Back to the 105th Congress, which was 97 and 98.

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