Last week PolitiFact checked a couple of claims in the special election to fill Tom Price’s seat in Georgia’s 6th congressional district. Neither presented the whole truth. We also looked at a Democratic senator’s statement about Republican filibusters, and the whole truth was elusive there, too.
Abbreviated versions of our fact checks are below. Full versions can be found at www.politifact.com.
“Al Jazeera, a media outlet that has been described as a mouthpiece for terrorists, has been paying Jon Ossoff thousands of dollars. But Jon refuses to tell voters exactly how much money he’s received. Just like Jon refuses to tell voters the truth about his experience.”
— web ad by the Congressional Leadership Fund
Some people have a bad opinion of Al Jazeera and others think it's done good work. The ad aimed at Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, cherry-picked images and a quote that cast Al Jazeera in the most dubious light possible. That characterization was the basis for the rest of the ad.
When the conservative website The Washington Free Beacon asked Ossoff to go beyond the federal requirements on his financial disclosure form and say how much he received from Al Jazeera. He didn’t respond.
Technically, according to experts we reached, the Al Jazeera payments went to the firm, not Ossoff.
Our ruling
Some Americans have called Al Jazeera a mouthpiece of terrorists. Others, including a U.S. senator, have praised it as a beacon of reporting in the Middle East and Africa. Al Jazeera did pay Ossoff's company.
The ad suggests Ossoff is hiding something. Given the evidence at hand, it appears he is unwilling to open the books of his business beyond what the law requires. The ad’s description of Al Jazeera strikes us as particularly selective and central to the suspicions the ad raises.
We rate this claim Mostly False.
“As chairman of the Fulton board of commissioners, I turned a $100 million deficit into a balanced budget.”
— Karen Handel, in an interview March 21
While Karen Handel was able to help balance the county budget without raising taxes, her specific claim ignores some critical facts about the Fulton County budget process.
When Handel became chairwoman of the county commission, a proposed 2004 budget was a balanced budget because, by law, it had to be. But in two of the county’s largest funds, spending topped revenues by a combined total of nearly $90 million. They didn’t call those deficits; they called them shortfalls. Additional shortfalls in other funds added well over $10 million to the gap, for the $100 million “deficit” in Handel’s claim.
Handel used a mix of spending cuts and deeper draws into cash reserves to deliver a balanced budget that avoided a property tax increase. Overall, her budget reduced spending by $46 million from the plan she saw when she took office. But that still didn’t close the gap between spending and revenues. She filled that gap with money saved from past years and kept in reserve, not with more property taxes.
When we spoke with Handel, she rejected the idea that her plan included a “deficit” but agreed with the numbers.
Our ruling
Handel’s statement ignores that she was required to balance the budget, and her definition of deficit is inconsistent.
We rate this claim Half True.
“We’ve seen more filibusters on judicial nominees by the Republicans under President Obama than we saw in the whole history of the United States Senate.”
— Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., on Sunday, April 9th, 2017 in comments on “Fox News Sunday”
Cardin used the term "filibuster," but Senators tend to consider any type of obstruction to a nomination a filibuster, said Steven Smith, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis.
One way to approximate filibusters is to count the times the Senate attempts to break a filibuster by forcing a vote through a process called cloture. Of those, 50 were before President Barack Obama took office in 2009, and 36 were between 2009 and when the Democrats changed the rules in 2013.
So through that prism, Cardin is off. But he is closer if you look at individual judicial nominees who were subject to a cloture filing. Pre-Obama, 36 judicial nominees were subject to a cloture filing, we found. From 2009-2013, it was the same — 36 judicial nominees.
Our ruling
By our count, cloture was filed on 36 judicial nominations during the first five years of Obama’s presidency, the same total as the previous 40 years combined.
On balance, we rate this claim Half True.
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