This past June, PolitiFact (PF) published a Pants on Fire ruling on a statement by Jim DeMint : "Ninety-four percent of the bills that pass the Senate have no debate, no vote, no amendments, no reading of the bill, no online disclosure." They concluded DeMint “stacked the deck” with the total number of bills he used (from which he got the 94%) from the CRS (Congressional Research Service).
This PF ruling was quite confusing, as there were two versions (here's the first) PF published because of all the complaints it received. I kept reading both of them and got very, well, confused, too, as it seemed to me their initial analysis was turned on its head. And it took me a while to get this written up to where it made sense to me.
Part of my condensed “critique the critique” is to re-state what Bryan White would want PF’s ruling to be based on his interpretation.
This would be MY initial PF interpretation: "Ninety-four percent of the bills that pass the Senate have no debate, no vote, no amendments, no reading of the bill, no online disclosure." It was found that of these 911 bills to which he refers, 535 were non-binding, concurrent resolutions. 122 of the remaining were non-debate, non-voting resolutions. That’s 657 bills out of 911, or 72.1%, that had no debate, no vote, no amendments, no reading of the bill, no online disclosure. That’s fairly close to 94%.
