Republicans objected to a Democrat-backed ‘budget gimmick,’ not to helping vets.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact-Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we explain Republican opposition to a veterans’ health bill, look at Politico’s White House PR, and hit more media misses.
Republicans Smeared as Cold-Hearted Veteran-Haters
Senate Republicans last week voted down a bill that would provide funding for health care and benefits for veterans injured by exposure to toxins. The measure failed in a 55–42 vote in the Senate after previously passing the upper chamber in an 84–14 vote.
The mainstream media has had a field day peddling a misleading narrative that Republicans are playing politics with sick veterans.
Here’s the framing from an NPR headline: “The Senate passed a bill to help sick veterans. Then 25 Republicans reversed course.”
Jon Stewart, the comedian and former host of the Daily Show whose decline we have documented in this column, called Republican senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania a “f***ing coward” for leading the opposition against the PACT Act.
“Mitch McConnell yesterday flipped. I’m used to the lies. I’m used to the hypocrisy. Senator Pat Toomey won’t take a meeting with the veterans groups, sends out his chief of staff. I’m used to the cowardice. I’ve been here a long time. The Senate is where accountability goes to die,” Stewart said.
Democrats seized on a clip of GOP senators fist-bumping on the floor after blocking the bill. Many have claimed that the Republicans changed course after Senator Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) reached a deal with Democratic leadership for a nearly half-trillion-dollar spending package targeting energy and climate, health care, and increased taxes on the wealthy.
Without the surrounding context, that looks pretty bad.
But as Toomey explained, it is not Democrats’ support for a massive spending bill, or an ideological opposition to spending money on veterans’ health care, that is causing him to oppose the PACT Act as proposed. Instead, Toomey and other Republicans hope to fix a “budget gimmick” that is open to exploitation by Democrats.
“That’s so absurd and dishonest for anyone to suggest that it has anything to do with BBB,” Toomey told CNN of Democrats’ spending bill, which was initially titled Build Back Better. “Who knew about BBB, you know, previous weeks when I’ve been raising this issue for all this time and I’m very clearly on record about this. So someone has to be willfully ignorant of the facts or dishonest.”
Toomey voted against the veterans bill both times. He and other Republican opponents of the measure argue that an accounting provision that would move certain benefits spending from the Department of Veterans Affairs discretionary budget to its mandatory budget would “create room in future budgets for $400 billion of totally unrelated, extraneous spending on other matters,” he said during a Sunday interview with CNN.
“My concern about this bill has nothing to do with the purpose of the bill,” Toomey said on the Senate floor before the vote.
Toomey’s opposition is not new; he has been pushing for an amendment to close the budget loophole since June. The senator hopes to amend the bill so that funding is handled through the annual appropriations process rather than being mandatory spending as is prescribed by the current bill.
The pseudonymous A. G. Hamilton, a lawyer, explained, “Now when you take $390B out of the discretionary budget that does not mean the overall budget goes down by $390B, it more likely means that $390B will just be spent on something else in those years. That is the source of the dispute and has nothing to do with funding 4 veterans.”
Senate minority whip John Thune (R., S.D.) confirmed that Republicans have been advocating for the accounting change since the bill first went through the Senate in June.
“The Democrats knew full well what it was we were trying to get and they denied an amendment,” Thune said. “And I think if the Democrats are willing to give [Toomey] a vote on that amendment, it gets done.”
“His argument is that what that does is that frees up a lot of room under the caps for Democrats to spend more money through the regular appropriations process,” Thune said of Toomey. “So his argument is this is the right policy, we can take care of our vets, but we ought to do it in a way that is consistent with fiscal policy around here, or sound fiscal policy.”
McConnell similarly said: “As written, the legislation would not just help America’s veterans as designed. It could also allow Democrats to effectively spend the same money twice and enable hundreds of billions in new, unrelated spending on the discretionary side of the federal budget.”
While critics of the Republican effort to change the bill argue that the senators supported a “nearly identical” version of the bill before it was sent to the House for a minor tweak, Marc Goldwein, senior policy director at the nonpartisan Committee for Responsible Federal Budget, said in a tweet that the flaw was present in the Senate-passed bill but not in the original House or Senate bill.
“It WAS in the most recent Senate-passed bill, which was rushed through pretty quickly before most noticed. We noticed and said it was bad at the time. It still is,” he said.
He added in another tweet: “The bill and CBO score exposing it came up very fast, and I think a lot of folks didn’t understand it at the time. But just because it isn’t new, doesn’t mean it isn’t problematic. It effectively backfills up to $390b of approps.”
Toomey went back and forth with VA secretary Denis McDonough on Sunday after McDonough said on CNN that he could not support the Pennsylvania Republican’s amendment because it could create a scenario in which Congress changes or caps the amount the department spends on veterans’ health care annually. He also said funds would be terminated after a decade.
Toomey responded that McDonough “either misinformed about my proposed amendment or willfully dishonest.”
“It would not reduce spending on veterans by one penny,” Toomey said. “It would not force care to be rationed. It would not end any veterans program.”
Headline Fail of the Week
Politico drafted what could have been a White House press release upon the announcement of the agreement between Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Senator Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) on a new social spending bill centered on climate and health-care initiatives. “Biden enters the Always Be Closing phase of his first term,” declared the Beltway-based outlet, before leading with the assertion that “somehow, someway, Joe Biden is back in the game.”
Leave aside the fact that the White House played a key role in alienating Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.) and keeping a deal off the table until now, as well as the fact that Sinema has not yet pledged to support the bill. There’s little evidence that the spending package — simultaneously too big to be viewed as a solution to soaring inflation and too small to match the White House’s pledges to progressives — will do much of anything to lift Biden’s approval rating, which is the lowest at this point in his presidency of any post–World War II commander in chief.
Somehow, someway, Joe Biden is back in the game.
After enduring a brutal year, Biden is suddenly on the verge of a turnaround that, the White House believes, could salvage his summer — and alter the trajectory of his presidency. https://t.co/XlQT2QNKoy
— POLITICO (@politico) July 28, 2022
Media Misses
• Elie Mystal, a justice correspondent for the Nation, suggested that Republicans are backing Herschel Walker for U.S. Senate in Georgia despite his being “so clearly unintelligent” and not having “independent thoughts” because “Walker’s going to do what he’s told and that’s what Republicans like.”
“That’s what Republicans want from their negroes, to do what they’re told,” he added.
“Herschel Walker will do what he’s told and that’s what Republicans want from their negroes.”
MSNBC is truly having a normal one. pic.twitter.com/e1Sx1qMAg0
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 1, 2022
• American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten’s attempt to rebut claims from the Republican National Committee that she “forced schools closed and supported mask and vaccine mandates on kids” backfired on her.
“Correction, we called for vaccine availability for kids and masking when necessary to keep our children safe . . . get your facts right !!!” she replied to the RNC Research Twitter account.
The RNC account fired back, armed with a trove of evidence:
You tweeted in support of forced masking many, many times.
Stop lying, Randi. https://t.co/EoM0KNiTDb pic.twitter.com/a7DHcCPNFJ
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 29, 2022
• White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre could not be bothered to decry a suggestion by an official associated with Chinese state media that Nancy Pelosi’s plane could be shot down if she tries to visit Taiwan.
Doocy: “An official who is associated with Chinese State media is suggesting that if Speaker Pelosi tries to go to Taiwan that her plane could be shot down. Does the president have a response to that?”
Jean-Pierre: “I’m not going to speak to a hypothetical.” pic.twitter.com/dXdoui5wZI
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) July 29, 2022
• Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer confusingly vowed to fight to keep abortion legal “for my kids, your kids, and the future of our great state.”
Abortion is still legal in Michigan, and I’ll never stop fighting to keep it that way.
For my kids, your kids, and the future of our great state.
— Governor Gretchen Whitmer (@GovWhitmer) July 29, 2022
• Economist Phillip Magness called out Facebook’s seemingly partisan censorship after his post giving the true definition of recession was flagged. He shared a screenshot of a White House webpage that offered an altered definition of recession.
“Economists have typically defined this term as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth,” he said. “And yet, just sharing that caused Facebook to flag it and put a fact-check notice on my page.” He accused Politifact, which partners with Facebook for fact-checking, of carrying water for the Biden administration.