Raleigh, N.C. — Congressman
Mike McIntyre, a Democrat, and Republican rival David Rouzer both
referenced their faith in God as they made opening remarks during this
week's "On the Record" program.
From that point on, the two men
spent much of their time on WRAL's weekly public affairs show repeatedly
accusing each other of bearing false witness about the other's records.
"My
faith has affected everything that I do," McIntyre said, making note of
his participation in the Congressional Prayer Caucus. Meanwhile, Rouzer
said "the Lord's given us an opportunity to make a real change for the
betterment of our country with this election."
Host David
Crabtree moderated what amounted to a debate between McIntyre, who is
seeking his ninth term, and Rouzer, a two-term state senator hoping that
newly redrawn district lines will allow him to win the seat for the
GOP.
McIntyre and Rouzer share views on a number of issues, so
much of the campaign has been focused on contrasting the two men's
personalities and voting records. Politico
says the race is the fifth most expensive congressional race in the country this year,
and much of that money has been spent on intensely negative television
spots. Those campaign ads, both from the candidates themselves and the
national parties, have traded charges about being soft on immigration
enforcement, favoring overseas outsourcing of jobs and threatening
health care programs for the elderly.
Those same charges and the generally acrid campaign environment was on full display during the debate.
When
asked after the debate if he believed Rouzer was intentionally
misleading voters about his record, McIntyre said, "Absolutely." One of
Rouzer's main lines of attack was that McIntyre voted more liberally
than the conservative image he projects would lead voters to believe.
Citing endorsements by the NRA, the National Federation of Independent
Businesses and other conservative groups, McIntyre says it is
"materially dishonest" to suggest his voting record is as liberal as
Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's.
"Come on, let's get real," McIntyre said.
For
his part, Rouzer said after the debate that it was the Democrat who did
not tell the whole truth. In one example, McIntyre suggested that
Rouzer had been a lobbyist for Japan and had helped send American jobs
overseas.
"Japan Tobacco is allowing farm families to stay on the
farm," Rouzer said. "If he's going to say that I did work for Japan, he
ought to be honest and say Japan Tobacco. That's different than saying I
worked for Japan or am trying to take jobs away from this country."
Many
of the accusations traded during the program were similar to aspersions
cast in campaign ads. The following is a fact check of some of the most
headed exchanges on this week's program.
McIntyre and Pelosi?
"My
opponent in this race has been in Congress for 16 years," Rouzer said
during his opening statement. "During that time, we've accumulated $11
trillion more in debt. In addition to that, he voted four straight times
for Nancy Pelosi to be speaker. And while she was speaker, he voted
with her more than 90 percent of the time." Piling on the criticism,
Rouzer touted his own sponsorship of a bill that restricts how and when
state agencies can pass new rules. "While (McIntyre) has been in
Congress, he's not been able to pass one bill of which he was the
primary sponsor and gotten it signed into law."
Does McIntyre vote lockstep with Pelosi?
Among
conservatives, California Rep. Nancy Pelosi's name is a political
epithet and saying someone votes like her 90 percent of the time is a
lowdown thing to say. But is it true in McIntyre's case?
Up to a point.
After
the debate, McIntyre said that Rouzer was being "mathematically
misleading" because U.S. House speakers don't cast votes on all bills
before the body. McIntyre suggested that Pelosi's votes that year were
mainly procedural. By that measure, he said, even some hardcore
Republicans would be labeled liberals.
FactCheck.org vetted a similar claim about members of Congress in 2010, and it did note that speakers limited their votes.
"By
tradition, speakers don’t vote on everything. Pelosi largely limits her
votes to substantive bills, skipping the less controversial or less
important bills," fact checkers for the site wrote. That contradicts
what McIntyre said regarding the importance of votes, but confirms his
assertion about the math.
Other fact checkers have used
Open Congress.org
to compare McIntyre's and Pelosi's voting records since 2007. That
website calculates McIntyre votes for Pelosi 67 percent of the time, or
roughly the same amount of time he votes with the majority of members in
his party. It's also worth noting that
National Journal's rankings of partisanship,
which are based on selected votes, place McIntyre in the middle of both
the liberal and conservative scales. From 2009 through 2010, his
conservative ranking was actually slightly higher than his liberal
ranking.
So it's true that McIntyre voted for Pelosi to be
speaker, but the impression that he votes in lockstep with the
Democratic leader is a mischaracterization of his record.
Is McIntyre's record light on accomplishments?
The
first thing to be said here is that comparing work in the state General
Assembly and the U.S. Congress is not a fair comparison. While it is
not easy to get a bill through either body, shoving legislation through
the federal body is a far more difficult task. Seniority matters a lot
in terms of whose name goes on a final bill. And frequently, Congress
will roll a number of pieces of legislation into one bill so that the
standalone measure doesn't pass.
So while it's true that none of
the bills McIntyre filed as a primary sponsor has made it into law
during the current session of Congress, the same can be said of other
lawmakers, including Rep. Howard Coble, the longest-serving House
Republican in North Carolina history.
McIntyre can point to
having run some successful amendments to bills, some of them significant
pieces of legislation. And when asked for his signature legislative
accomplishment, McIntyre's chief of staff points to the tobacco buyout.
"After
introducing a tobacco buyout bill in 2002, Mike worked in a bipartisan
fashion with tobacco state congressional colleagues to pass this
historic measure in 2004. The final bill, named the Jenkins-McIntyre
bill, was a historic accomplishment that other lawmakers before had not
been able to achieve," reads McIntyre's website. News reports from the
time seem to validate this claim, noting McIntyre's part in pushing the
buyout.
None of this says the McIntyre is the most powerful
member of Congress. However, the claims that he has never gotten a bill
for which he was the primary sponsor through Congress is true without
being meaningful and does not give credit where it is due.
Health care
A
question Crabtree asked about taxes and the economy quickly veered
toward a discussion of the Affordable Care Act, the health care law
pushed by President Barack Obama.
"Obamacare is a huge impediment to the economy," Rouzer said. "We need to repeal it."
On this point, he and McIntyre seem to agree. "I voted for repeal. I voted against it in the first place."
This glimmer of comity didn't last, as Crabtree asked about alternatives to the Affordable Care Act.
"(Rouzer's)
alternative I don't think accurate describes what I would do," McIntyre
said. "The first thing I would not do is turn Medicare into a voucher
system. We've got to protect Medicare," McIntyre said. "The budget he
supports would turn it into a voucher system and put your Medicare
dollars you have earned at risk and take away your guaranteed economic
benefits for your health care."
After a commercial break, Rouzer wheeled around the Medicare issue.
"All
this nonsense of how we're going to add costs to seniors and Medicare
is not true. If you do not make changes to Medicare goes bankrupt in 12
years. And that's their plan for Medicare," Rouzer said.
In response, McIntyre doubled down on the idea that Republican plans for Medicare would end guaranteed benefits.
"Plus," McIntyre said, "it costs seniors $6,400 more a year, money that many, many of our seniors do not have."
Rouzer shot back, "That's a lie, Congressman. That is a flat out lie....It does not affect one person who is 55 or older."
Would Republican plans end guaranteed benefits for Medicare? Would seniors really pay $6,400 more annually for health care?
In a word, no.
FactCheck.org calls the claim "out of date," while
PolitiFact
rates it as "half true." Both groups were vetting an Obama campaign
claim very similar to what McIntyre said on air. Here's what PolitiFact
said:
"The Obama ad would have been
more accurate if it had specified that it was referring to a previous
Ryan plan for Medicare rather than the current one. We simply don’t have
enough details to know how much extra money seniors might have to pay
under the current Ryan plan."
The same holds true for McIntyre's statement.
The
bigger problem with much of the campaign discussion about Medicare
– from McIntyre and others – is the inference that various plans would
take benefits away from seniors. Virtually all political leaders working
on this problem stay away from scenarios that change how benefits are
administered for retirees already on the program. Rather, Ryan's plans
and others change how those who have not retired yet would receive
benefits. And as FactCheck notes about the latest version of the Ryan
budget, "Ryan made his Medicare proposal considerably more generous when
he unveiled a new budget plan in March for fiscal year 2013. A key
difference is that the new Ryan plan wouldn’t force Julia and other
future seniors to accept subsidized private insurance. The current plan
allows her to choose “a traditional Medicare fee‐for‐service plan” if
she prefers."
Stimulus and Death Taxes
"My opponent here
voted for the failed Obama stimulus," Rouzer said during another
exchange on the economy. "He voted to keep in place the death tax, which
he fails to mention. "McIntyre said that's not true, telling Rouzer, "I sponsored getting rid of the death tax." Crabtree pressed Rouzer on his description of the stimulus. "Is there any way of knowing what would have happened had we not had the stimulus?" He asked. "How can you say it failed?"
Rouzer said lower taxes and less government spending creates jobs, not stimulus spending. "But how did it fail?" Crabtree asked. "It
failed because it added to the debt," Rouzer said. "It failed because
we're still in a recession. Have you seen any stimulus job growth?
Absolutely not."
Did McIntyre vote to continue inheritance taxes that fiscal conservatives refer to as "the death tax?"
Asked
to back up this claim, Rouzer's campaign pointed to several bills,
including H.R. 4151 in 2009. U.S. House records do show that
McIntyre voted for Permanent Estate Tax Relief for Families, Farmers, and Small Businesses Act of 2009, which did lock in the current scheme of taxing assets when someone dies.
Republicans sent the following as part of summary for their members at the time:
H.R.
4154 would permanently extend the estate tax on assets transferred
following a death at the current level. The legislation would exclude
amounts up to $3.5 million and permanently set the tax, commonly
referred to as the "death tax," rate at 45 percent. Under current law,
the death tax is set to expire in 2010 and then go back into effect in
2011.
[snip]
Under
current law, the tax is set to expire on January 1, 2010, and then come
back in 2011, with an exemption of $1 million and a rate of 55 percent.
According to reports, H.R. 4154 would reduce revenues by $234 billion
over the next ten years by raising the exemption and lowering the tax
rate scheduled to take effect under current law.
So while the
bill extended what had been the current law, it would have averted the
return of the death tax in 2011 in a form that would have targeted more
families. The bill McIntyre supported would have collected $234 billion
from estates over 10 years.
For someone who would rather see the
estate tax phased out, this vote puts you between a rock and a hard
place. Voting against the 2009 bill would have allowed the tax to expire
for one year, but it would have returned all the stronger two years
later. In the alternative, voting for the bill, as McIntyre did, meant
you were trading continuation of the tax for ensuring that threshold for
taxing estates didn't get lowered.
This is another case where Rouzer's statement is factually accurate but may not tell the entire tale.
McIntyre's
retort to Rouzer was that he had sponsored legislation to phase out the
"death tax." Asked to back up this claim, McIntyre's campaign sent a
list of 12 bills filed over the past 16 years, including four in the
current Congress, for which McIntyre had been a co-sponsor.
Did the stimulus fail to create jobs? And did Rouzer balance the state budget?
Writers for the
Washington Post,
Politico,
Slate CNN and
FactCheck.org
all say that the claim the stimulus created no jobs is spurious. Yes,
it added to the debt. Whether the United States is in a recession or
not, that's a question for economists to argue over. The technical
definition of a recession is "two consecutive quarters of negative
economic growth as measured by a country's gross domestic product." By
that measure, the U.S. is not currently in a recession. Others define
the term more broadly, so Rouzer gets a pass on that one.
One
final note: Rouzer claims that he, or at least his Republican
colleagues, balanced the state budget. That's true and it's a claim that
North Carolina politicians – Republicans and Democrats – have used for
decades. It's also no measure of a politician's fiscal prudence, since
the state constitution requires that the General Assembly create a
balanced budget. Unlike the federal government, North Carolina is not
allowed to borrow in order to balance its books.
Immigration
Both
McIntyre and Rouzer say they oppose the DREAM Act, which would provide a
path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who were brought here
while they were children. But each accuses the other of being soft on
immigration policy.
"Those who break the law should not be
rewarded. And that's why it's interesting my opponent, as a lobbyist,
has lobbied for illegal immigrants," McIntyre said. Illegal immigration,
he said, costs the state billions of dollars for health care, education
and law enforcement. "I have an opponent who has advocated for amnesty
for illegal immigrants, including those who committed a crime."
Rouzer shot back, "I'm not the one who has been in Congress and has voted for amnesty. You did in 1997."
That's
not true, McInyre said. "That bill he's talking about was for
high-skilled tech workers in the Research Triangle Park," McIntyre said,
trailing off enough that Rouzer could jump in and appear to finish his
sentence.
"That allowed for adjustment of status for those who applied by a certain time," Rouzer said of the 1997 bill.
Did McIntyre vote for immigration amnesty?
In
1997, McIntyre voted against a motion that would have told House
conferees to reject a Senate measure extending the 245(i) program. In an
e-mail, immigration lawyer Elissa Taub explained, "245(i) was a program
that was created to allow individuals who were unlawfully present in
the U.S. (either because they entered without inspection or overstayed a
valid visa) to obtain green cards (permanent residence." In other
words, those were not people who sneaked across the border, but came
here legally and allowed their paperwork to expire.
Whether that
is considered "amnesty" may be a matter of semantics. However,
McIntyre's vote for the bill did not stop the anti-illegal-immigration
group ALIPAC from endorsing him. However, Taub said McIntyre's
explanation for backing the bill didn't completely wash. She wrote,
"245(i) was not specifically enacted to cover highly skilled workers,
although highly skilled workers are eligible to take advantage of the
program. If it was the Congressman’s aim to benefit a certain group of
highly skilled workers who could benefit, then his aim was not
incorrect, but that wasn’t the sole or even a primary reason for the
legislation."
I asked McIntyre's chief of staff, Lachlan McIntosh to clarify the congressman's remark. He wrote:
"High
skilled workers are necessary to fuel the growth and innovation in the
pharmaceutical, software, information technology and biotechnology
industries in North Carolina’s Research Triangle. Section 245(i) allowed
companies in the Research Triangle to hire high skill employees that
needed to adjust their status as H1-B visa holders. An H1-B visa is a
"non-immigrant visa that allows US companies to employ workers in
specialty occupations that require theoretical or technical expertise in
specialized fields such as in architecture, engineering, mathematics,
science, and medicine." Under the visa program, an American company can
employ a foreign worker a maximum of six years.
"This
legislation, from 1997, wasn't about amnesty. And it passed 288-183.
Several NC Republicans voted for including Burr, Coble and Myrick."
Rouzer
can certainly point to this measure as giving some leniency to those
who violated certain immigration laws. The bigger question may be how
strict is strict enough.
Did Rouzer lobby on behalf of illegal immigrants?
McIntyre's
counter-charge against Rouzer was first made during the Republican
primary by Ilario Pantano, who said Rouzer "advocated amnesty for
illegal aliens" during the 2007 Agricultural Jobs Act.
Rouzer says he did, in fact, lobby for that bill and did so at the request of farmers.
Like
the 1997 bill McIntyre voted for, this measure allowed for workers that
support a key North Carolina industry – in this case farming – to
remain in the United States as long as they were still working.
Again,
whether one considers this an amnesty bill might be a matter of
perspective. During a spring debate against Pantano on a WECT-produced
debate, Rouzer said, "This isn't a black or white issue, but there is a
path forward ... The path forward is to take those who are working, and
let them continue to work. Then it's much easier to identify those who
are not here for the right reasons, who are causing trouble, who are
driving drunk, and deport them immediately." In some ways, that sounds very close to what McIntyre had to say about the 245(i) bill.
Was Rouzer a lobbyist for "a foreign country?"
Crabtree
asked about charges the pair had traded over Rouzer's lobbying work and
whether either one is responsible for shipping jobs overseas. Both men,
Crabtree pointed out, have been supportive of North Carolina farm
exports.
"That's a different situation than lobbying for a foreign
country, for their agenda, instead of for the agenda of our American
farmers," McIntyre said.
But Rouzer said his overseas lobbying work was on behalf of farmers. "Yes,
I have done work for Japan Tobacco. But guess what? Japan Tobacco is
the No. 1 buyer - foreign buyer - of U.S. Tobacco. I'm not apologizing
for that. For you to put in an ad that I was a lobbyist for Japan is 100
percent factually untrue."
Half of Japan Tobacco is owned by
Japan's ministry of finance. The government recently sold off a chunk of
its stake in the company to help pay for earthquake recovery.
According
to business news services such as Bloomberg and Hoovers, the company is
profitable and acts as a corporation rather than an arm of the Japanese
government. However, until this year, most of the company's top
leadership was made up of former Japanese bureaucrats.
Japan
Tobacco Inc. acquired the non-U.S. operations of tobacco company R.J.
Reynolds in 1999 to form the current iteration of JTI.
So the
company definitely has strong ties to the Japanese government. However,
to call Rouzer a lobbyist for Japan is a stretch. And it's not clear
what lobbying position Rouzer might have advocaed for that would have
hurt the interest of U.S. farmers.
