Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV) said that his opponent, Rep. Jacky Rosen (D-NV), skipped a vote for veterans, which she did, so naturally that got him a “mostly false” rating from the left-leaning fact-checking website Politifact.
Heller positions himself as a champion of veterans and knocked his Democrat opponent for apparently not being as pro-veteran as he is.
“Congresswoman Jacky Rosen went AWOL on Nevada’s veterans once again yesterday when she skipped work to attend a publicity stunt instead of voting to expand coverage for Vietnam War heroes who are literally dying from exposure to Agent Orange – a bill Dean Heller has cosponsored in the Senate,” Heller’s campaign said in a press release on June 26.
He went on to say in the press release that Rosen could have waited until after the vote to travel to the southern border but instead “chose to pal around Nevada with Elizabeth Warren and — at the expense of these veterans — ignore the job she was elected to do.”
Bring on Politifact’s nitpicking.
Did Rosen skip a vote on a bill intended to help veterans, which is the crux of Heller’s claim? Yes, yes she did. Forty-five members of congress missed or skipped the vote, Rosen among them.
Politifact admits this immediately, but goes on to say it didn’t matter because the bill passed 382-0 “under rules reserved for sure-to-pass bills, a status known three days before the vote.” This means that Rosen saw the posting and knew the bill was going to pass so she decided to go to the Mexican border to a “child detention center” while President Donald Trump’s administration was being heavily criticized for its immigration policies.
So, did she skip work for a photo op? Yes, yes she did. But, as Politifact notes, the “publicity stunt” claim is “in the eye of the beholder,” and since we’re talking about Politifact, that means they get to rate it as they see it, so that gets counted against Heller. Given how the media treated the family separations — sharing photos from the Obama administration to attack Trump and highlighting photos as evidence of separations that showed no such thing — it’s easy to see how one might think a Democrat traveling to one of the holding facilities could be seen as a publicity stunt.
“The thread of accuracy here is Rosen missed a vote. We rate this claim Mostly False,” Politifact ruled, even though it said earlier that “Yes, Rosen was absent for the vote.”
This follows multiple times over the years — including these two that I documented — that Politifact has unnecessarily ruled against the Right for making true statements.