U.S. Reps. Phil Gingrey and Jack Kingston have “even changed votes to what I voted, multiple times.” -- U.S. Rep. Paul Broun, R-Athens, during an interview March 25
To hear one Georgia congressman tell it, he’s the pied piper of some of his colleagues in the U.S. House.
“It’s become a joke in Congress how Dr. (Phil) Gingrey and Mr. (Jack) Kingston have been following my votes,” U.S. Rep. Paul Broun, R-Athens, told The Daily Beast, a news and lifestyle website. “They’ve even changed votes to what I voted, multiple times. Members of Congress are laughing about it.”
Broun, Gingrey and Kingston, veteran Georgia Republicans serving in the House, are vying this year for the same seat in the U.S. Senate, along with several other candidates.
PolitiFact Georgia wanted to find out whether Broun is correct that Gingrey and Kingston are following his lead.
All three have attempted to claim title as the most conservative candidate in the crowded GOP field. They have voted the same way all but a handful of times since 2013. Broun, though, has been the most vocal of the three men against some GOP initiatives, usually saying they are not conservative enough.
To make his case, Broun directed us to a handful of votes among the more than 700 votes taken by the House since the beginning of 2013.
Through spokesmen, both Gingrey and Kingston said Broun’s claims were absurd. But this fact check really got interesting when we interviewed another member of Congress who told us a story about a recent vote concerning Broun and Kingston.
On March 6, the House was preparing to vote on an aid package for Ukraine when Broun told U.S. Rep. Thomas Massey, R-Ky., about his plan to play cloak and dagger in the U.S. Capitol.
“I’m voting no on this, but I’m going to wait until the end to see if (Gingrey and Kingston) change their votes once I vote,” Massey said, quoting Broun.
Gingrey and Kingston voted in favor of the legislation early during the voting period, Massey recalled. With one minute left, Broun followed through with his vote against the bill. As time expired, Massey said he looked up at the electronic board tracking how each member voted and noticed that Kingston voted against the legislation, House Resolution 4152.
“Hey, look at the board!” Massey said.
“I told you so,” Broun replied.
Massey said he decided to share his story about the March 6 vote with PolitiFact Georgia after Gingrey and Kingston said that Broun was wrong in his assertion.
“To say Paul Broun is misleading would be false,” Massey told us.
Broun and Kingston did vote no, records show. Gingrey voted in favor of the legislation that day.
Kingston campaign spokesman Chris Crawford said Massey may have been looking at the vote change of another congressman.
“I don’t ever recall him voting for it,” Crawford said of Kingston. “I think Congressman Massey is mistaken. Perhaps he mistook something, but Jack never voted for that bill.”
Former Georgia Congressman George “Buddy” Darden said some members will change their votes during the 15 minutes they have to vote on legislation. Darden, a Democrat, stressed that a member’s vote is not official until it is recorded in the Congressional Record.
So did Kingston switch his vote on House Resolution 4152, and did he do it because Broun voted no?
“The only person who knows for sure is Jack Kingston,” Darden said.
About four weeks later, on April 1, the House took another vote on the Ukraine legislation. Records show Broun again voted no and Gingrey again voted yes, but Kingston did not vote. Kingston, though, did not vote on other legislation that came before the House afterward, records show.
The Broun campaign also directed us to news coverage to support his argument. The first was an article on the popular Washington news site Politico. It was written in March 2013, before Kingston announced he was running for the U.S. Senate. The article was about Broun “yanking much of the congressional delegation to the right and throwing their votes and the support of leadership into a daily flux.”
The Politico article reported that Kingston admitted that Broun’s rightward leanings were changing his voting pattern. Crawford, the Kingston spokesman, noted that the article “doesn’t provide a quote from Mr. Kingston but the impression of the reporter.”
Broun’s case against Gingrey focused on news coverage such as the Politico story and a 2013 vote on raising the federal debt ceiling. Broun’s campaign shared a couple of tweets from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Washington bureau. The first tweet, on Jan. 22, 2013, showed that Gingrey was prepared to vote yes while Broun was the only Georgia lawmaker in the tweet who was planning to vote no.
The second tweet, posted on Jan. 23, 2013, showed Broun and Gingrey voted against raising the debt ceiling.
Gingrey spokesman Cameron Harley said the congressman’s votes were not being manipulated by Broun’s votes.
To sum up, Broun said in the article that fellow U.S. Reps. Gingrey and Kingston have “even changed votes to what I voted, multiple times.”
In general, the three candidates have voted the same way all but a handful of times since 2013. Broun needed more examples to prove this has happened multiple times. He may be correct about what happened concerning Kingston and the Ukraine vote, but there’s no way to know for sure. And if Kingston and Gingrey changed votes, there’s no way to know whether they did it because of Broun. Thus, his evidence is thin. Therefore, we rate Broun’s claim Mostly False.
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