Republican junior U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner, that’s who. In fact, the first-termer from Yuma is the 12th-most-effective Republican in the entire Senate.

That’s according to the Center for Effective Lawmaking – and, no, that’s not some GOP front that gins up rave reviews for swing-state party members with an eye toward the next election. Indeed, 2nd Congressional District Democratic U.S. Rep. (and gubernatorial contender) Jared Polis of Boulder does almost as well by the center’s standards.

The center is in fact described as “a joint initiative between the University of Virginia’s Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and Vanderbilt University” that debuted in the nation’s capital last month. From a Vanderbilt University press release touting the center’s just-released rankings of individual lawmakers’ effectiveness:

The center, co-directed by Craig Volden, professor of public policy and politics and associate dean for academic affairs at Batten, and Alan Wiseman, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt, utilizes a data-driven approach to study the causes and consequences of each Congress member’s ability to advance agenda items through the legislative process and into law.

In other words, it looks at how good a given lawmaker is at getting his or her bills through the twists and turns of the entrenched system on Capitol Hill. Without regard to party or political views, it uses a complex formula you’d expect of guys with Volden and Wiseman’s credentials (no doubt backed by a team of researchers). They employ, among other devices, mathematical symbols we ordinary folk vaguely associate with calculus though they could be ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics for all we know. Heavy stuff.

The rankings, by the way, are for the latest Congress for which a full set of stats is available, i.e., the one that concluded last year.

So, how does the rest of Colorado’s D.C. delegation stack up? Check it out:

The most meaningful numbers for most of us are in the column on the right – each lawmaker’s ranking relative to the rest of the members of his/her party in that chamber. Gardner is 12th out of the 54 Republican senators seated in the 114th Congress. Polis ranks 47th out of the 193 Democrats in the House at that time. Arithmetically, that puts Gardner in a slightly higher percentile than Polis.

Without delving too deeply into the numbers crunching by the researchers, it’s worth looking at the data in the middle column. That’s where the analysis assigns lawmakers a raw score for their “legislative effectiveness.” If the number in that column is between a half and one and a half the number in the next column over – that’s the “benchmark” for where members of the same party with similar tenure and duties are expected to be – then that member is deemed by the analysis to meet expectations. If the number is more than one and a half of the benchmark, the member is said to be above expectations. And if the number is less than half of the benchmark, the member falls below expectations.

OK, so we did delve a bit deeply into the numbers crunching, but the upshot is only two members of Colorado’s delegation – Gardner and Polis – are above expectations. Four meet expectations, and three – Democratic senior U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet as well as 5th Congressional District Republican U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn, of Colorado Springs, and 1st Congressional District Democratic U.S. Rep. Dianna DeGette, of Denver, are below expectations. Well below, it seems.

The analysis is neutral to ideology and party, and it offsets whether a lawmaker’s party is in the majority or minority because it assesses their work only against that of their fellow party members. So it moots the advantage typically enjoyed by majority party members in getting their work through the legislative pipeline.

Yet, there’s another kind of skew – one sure to be perceived on the political right – that the analysis can’t offset: a bias in favor of lawmakers who, well, make more laws. By definition, that’s how a senator or representative scores well by the reckoning of the Center for Effective Lawmaking. Which is why some on the right may be tempted to dismiss the ratings outright. After all, any conservative Mr./Ms. Smith who goes to Washington with the aim of drawing the line at government’s growth is more likely to vote no than to ask his/her peers to vote yes. By that measure, the less “effective” a lawmaker on the Center’s scale, the more commendably conservative the lawmaker is by the lights of some on the political right.

Could that conceivably make Cory Gardner a lib … a liber … naw, we can’t even say it. But might it at least suggest he’s not quite the unyielding conservative some might make him out to be?

And, by some stretch of alternative reasoning, could the unrelentingly liberal DeGette’s low effectiveness rating maker her – a conservative?