September 29, 2016 02:26 PM UTC

Stupid NRCC Pet Tricks: Colorado Budget Edition

• 11 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: Another damning fact-check of a pro-Mike Coffman ad from 9NEWS today, this one based on false claims we discussed in this space last week:

Republican Rep. Mike Coffman hopes his latest television ad convinces voters his Democratic opponent, state Sen. Morgan Carroll, can’t be trusted.

The four-term incumbent’s 30-second spot claims Carroll – who works a personal injury lawyer at Bachus & Shanker — pushed bills “making it easier to sue doctors, small businesses, even nurses.”

Accusing a lawmaker of pushing legislation to line her own pockets is a serious claim, and the Coffman campaign doesn’t have the facts to back it up…

To support this claim, the Coffman campaign is pointing to Carroll’s vote against an earlier draft of the same good Samaritan bill in a committee hearing February 2006.

Carroll did vote against the bill in committee, but she voted for it when it came to the House floor.

Just like we said when we discussed the same attack on Morgan Carroll in a mail piece last week. But more interesting still is the response from Coffman’s campaign to 9NEWS:

Why no one takes fact checks seriously. [Pols emphasis]

And there’s a quote that needs to be in a mail piece, folks! Original post follows.

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Alan Gathright at Denver7’s Politifact Colorado fact-checking outfit takes a look at a new National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) ad targeting CD-6 Democratic candidate Morgan Carroll over…well, it’s a little bit convoluted:

The dark, grainy ad begins with an image of the U.S. Capitol building and the narrator saying, “Washington has a spending problem — and Morgan Carroll would make it worse.”

“In the (Colorado) Legislature, Carroll racked up $11 billion in new spending, nearly doubling the state budget,” the narrator continues…

In this latest NRCC attack ad, the apparent goal is to hit Carroll for being a lawmaker of either party in the Colorado General Assembly. After all, the “$11 billion in new spending” they’re referring to is from the state budget, which is one of the most bipartisan exercises in Colorado politics today:

Lawmakers exercise most of their control over the state’s general fund, which was $9.6 billion in the 2015-16 fiscal year — or 38.4 percent of the overall budget.

Yet Carroll did vote for the Senate conference committee’s budget bill, which passed on a bipartisan 31-2 vote. What the NRCC ad doesn’t mention is that Republicans control the Senate — not Democrats like Carroll. [Pols emphasis]

Both Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper and Republican Senate leaders praised the bipartisan collaboration on the $25 billion budget that was described as “reasonable, responsible and delivered on time,” by Sen. Kent Lambert, the Republican chairman of the the Joint Budget Committee.

Much like the mail piece we highlighted earlier this week attacking Carroll for voting against a bill she in fact supported ten years ago, this ad depends on the viewer not knowing anything about the state legislature–above all the fact that a majority of the budget is not under control of legislators at all, and the budget passed by Colorado lawmakers Carroll is under attack for was supported nearly unanimously by Democrats and Republicans alike.

In other words the ad is complete bullshit, and very deliberately so. Whoever brainstormed this ad knew enough about the process to find Carroll’s vote, which means they knew enough to know this ad is 100% wrong from letter to spirit. It’s worse when the totality of the falsehood is such that it’s impossible for it be an accident, and that’s the case here.

As always, here’s hoping the debunking spreads as fast and far as the lie.

Fat chance, we know.