PolitiFact Bias (PFB) has recently posted on a comparison of rulings which it insists are very much alike, but totally inconsistent when it comes to the Truth-o-Meter grade, having to do with congressional pay raises. Its recent post states the supposed contrast:
So let's take a look at these rulings, plus a few others, to see if PolitiFact, according to PFB, is really being (unfairly) inconsistent. It turns out, PolitiFact Bias may have selected the wrong rulings to compare....which isn't too unusual.
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| The difference is the specificity. |
The PolitiFact Ohio "False" rating is on senatorial candidate Josh Mandel, who said that his opponent, Senator Sherrod Brown, "voted six times to raise own pay." Now, it needs to be mentioned that the Brown campaign responded to Mandel's accusation by stating that it was just the opposite, that Brown had instead voted against pay increases seven times...which turned out not to be quite the case, either, when PolitiFact Ohio checked it out. These votes, from 1997 through 2012, were part of "broad pieces of legislation...[not] focused purely on the pay raise issue."
The PolitiFact Florida "True" for the Florida Democratic Party (FDC) said that 2010 governor candidate Bill McCollum voted for a pay increase four times, by the specific amount of $51,000, as well as having a $75,000 pension. This was based on an ethics law passed in 1989, which put automatic pay raises into place, as well as the amount of the raise received at the time as specified in the ad ( actually $55,000) along with the congressional pension. All following raises were automatic unless freezes were put into the "broad pieces of legislation" mentioned above--and if the broader bill was voted against, it was deemed voting "for" a pay raise.
The "False" for Josh Mandell completely left out the 1989 ethics law, the initial $55,000 raise and the congressional pension. As described in this very similar ruling from 2011, where Republican primary candidate for Florida Senator George LeMieux said that opposing candidate Representative Connie Mack "voted to raise his own pay several times," found Half True:
In 1989, Congress passed an ethics reform law that included an annual cost of living adjustment. The automatic pay raise was created in exchange for not getting paid for private speeches. The pay raise, based on a formula, is automatic unless Congress took a vote to stop it. The law -- even if it had the best of intentions -- created a system where members of Congress receive raises without having to be on-record voting for them.
And this very fact is noted in the "take home" conclusion on the Josh Mandel ruling (emphasis added):
Congress, though, essentially built a system, before Brown arrived, that allows for pay raises without direct votes by members. That can make it difficult to say who voted for or against raises, which were a tiny part of much larger appropriation bills.
So McCollum was there to vote to set up this system, while Brown wasn't. The two votes held in common from the FDC/McCollum and Josh Mandel/Sherrod Brown rulings were #435 from 1997 and #419 from 2000. Both of these were "order the previous question" votes--they "in effect foreclosed the possibility of instructing conferees to omit the pay adjustment from the conference report." In other words, Brown voted for NOT having a pay freeze, in effect voting for a wage adjustment. All writer Lou Jacobson did in the case of FDC/McCollum was to verify that he voted Yes--which he did. Whether the raises were automatic is beside the point: the ad said $51,000 which was within 10% of the amount of the raise in 1989, and then the rest of the context--the pension--had to be considered.
In his original criticism of FDC/McCollum, my conservative counterpart thinks that missing the "underlying argument" is all that is needed to tear apart the review of who seems to be his favorite PolitiFact writer, Lou Jacobson, stating that he "has all the information he ought to need in order to pin down the argument underlying the ad" and that he "misrepresented the facts" because it was really about McCollum's being "just another greedy politician" and gives him his usual meaningless "F" for "fact-checking while blind."
But other PolitiFact rulings of this nature, while mentioning the gist of the "greed" as the politics of the ad, only sought to verify the votes and the bills in the same way, and most come to the conclusion that, aside from the 1989 ethics law which was what set the other bills in motion, that the bills covered other issues for which the pay raise or freeze was a minor aside that made the claim misleading.
The conservative Club for Growth was also given a Half True for saying ""[Former Georgia congressman] Bob Barr voted ... to raise his own pay." Again, this was because of the bigger picture:
Barr did vote in favor of motions that allowed several bills to move forward that gave members of Congress a pay increase. However, these were bills that were part of much larger appropriations bills, and Barr voted against the final version of those bills.
If PolitiFact Bias was going to cite a ruling as a comparison, there were several similar, much better rulings which seem to push the boundaries of contradictory PolitiFact ratings that it could have used.
It might have left the 2010 DFC/McCollum rating alone and compared the PolitiFact Ohio Josh Mandel/Sherrod Brown ruling to a PolitiFact Virginia ruling on a Tim Kaine statement about Senator George Allen. Tim Kaine, running for Senate for the first time like Josh Mandel, says his opponent George Allen, a former senator (running for senate again), "voted four times to raise his own pay." Now we may have something more similar: in this case, the Democrat Tim Kaine, instead of getting a False like Josh Mandel for saying a Senator voted six times for a pay raise, gets a Mostly True for saying a Senator voted FOUR times for a pay raise. So, what's going on here?
Well, I said we "may" have something because in the case of George Allen, he was a senator when he cast his votes. In the case of Sherrod Brown, he was not a senator but a representative when he cast the votes Mandel is talking about. The distinction is that Senator George Allen voted against amendments to bills specifically preventing raises (in the senate), whereas Representative Sherrod Brown voted on broad pieces of legislation not "focused purely on the pay raise issue" which may have resulted in his either voting against a pay freeze (for an increase) or for a pay freeze (against an increase) as part of the bill.
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| While the rating is not as significantly different, this IS a much better comparison. |
Then there's a PolitiFact New Hampshire ruling which amplifies Mandel's number of votes, and merited better than a False for a Democrat. Ann McLane Kuster was rated Half True for her statement that her encumbent Republican opponent Rep. Charlie Bass, R-NH voted to "raise his own pay" eight times. It was for "procedural" bills as described, but since "Kuster left out the fact that Bass has voted for pay freezes" as well, and the reasons sound roughly the same as the False for Josh Mandel. Maybe my conservative counterpart has an argument here, but Kuster pointed out Bass's votes correctly when PolitiFact inquired, while it was shown that Josh Mandel exaggerated the record of Sherrod Brown.
So while Josh Mandel might really deserve a Mostly False or Half True, PFB needs to make sure again that it gets its apples-to-apples right in terms of ruling comparison. Because the ruling PFB previously criticized in 2010 is nothing like the ruling in 2012.
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