PolitiFact turns incoherent Obama statement into "Half True" claim

 Behold:

Remember President Obama the constitutional scholar?
 
Here, the constitutional scholar makes the ability of 30 percent of the U.S. population to control a majority of Senate seats conditional on filibuster reform.

It's a completely preposterous argument, yet somehow PolitiFact arranges the tea leaves so they spell out "Half True."

As for what Obama got wrong, PolitiFact admits it only obliquely (bold emphasis added):

In the transcript of the interview with Klein, this passage about the filibuster included a link to a Washington Post analysis of the differences between population and representation in the Senate. However, the Post article doesn’t precisely support what Obama said. 

...

While the article’s conclusion is generally consistent with Obama’s point, it doesn’t have anything to do with the filibuster or the 60-vote threshold to end one. Rather, the article looked at representation throughout the entire chamber.

PolitiFact tries to make it "Obama's point" that Senate can magnify the power of small populations. But that wasn't really Obama's point. Obama was arguing for filibuster reform.

There is no filibuster reform that changes that basic feature of the Senate. Obama's argument doesn't even count as coherent.

PolitiFact makes a great show of explicating Obama's claim that "30 percent of the population potentially controls the majority of Senate seats." But that's true regardless of the filibuster. We could keep 1,000 people in each of 49 states and have everybody else move to Alaska. That would give a tiny percentage of the U.S. population a supermajority of Senate seats.

So what? There's no argument for filibuster reform in there.

One might use the above scenario to argue for changing the Constitution itself to make it more democratic. But we would hope that somebody would remember that the undemocratic features in the U.S. Constitution were put there deliberately, specifically because the framers considered democracy in the form of popular rule an exceptionally bad form of government. That's why they set up a republic with a federalist system dividing up political power in a variety of ways.

Watch PolitiFact argue Obama's point was something other than filibuster reform (bold emphasis added):

(W)e crunched the numbers from the 2020 Census and concluded that Obama’s overall point had merit but that he misstated the details.

In particular, Obama said that states with a small percentage of the population could control "the majority of Senate seats." Given today’s partisan tendencies in each state, controlling an actual majority of seats would not be feasible for that small a percentage. However, a small percentage of the population could control enough seats to successfully wield the filibuster, which effectively gives them control over whether a majority can pass legislation.

As illustrated above, a small percentage of the population could potentially wield a supermajority in the Senate. It has nothing to do with the filibuster, and the need for filibuster reform was Obama's point.

Check out PolitiFact's summary version of Obama's point:

Obama said, "The filibuster, if it does not get reformed, still means that maybe 30% of the population potentially controls the majority of Senate seats."

In the Senate’s current makeup, senators representing 29% to 39% of the U.S. population would be sufficient to mount a filibuster and block a vote on legislation, in a sense controlling what can be passed in the chamber.

In the first paragraph PolitiFact relates what Obama actually said. In the second paragraph PolitiFact translates what he said into something completely different. "Majority of Senate seats" turns magically into the number of seats needed to successfully filibuster.

Obama's argument was elaborate window-dressing for the real and truthful argument for filibuster reform: "If we change the filibuster we can pass more of the legislation we want to pass." That statement could earn a "True" from PolitiFact, eh?

It was completely ridiculous for Obama to try to suggest filibuster reform would affect the constitutional ability of small-population states to potentially control a majority of Senate seats. The one is independent of the other. That leaves Obama's true point, the supposed need for filibuster reform, without any coherent support.

It was nice of PolitiFact to overlook that fact in rating Obama's spurious argument "Half True."

It's flatly false that the filibuster, reformed or not, allows a minority population to control a majority of Senate seats. That's a feature of the Constitution, not the filibuster.

A constitutional scholar ought to know that.


Correction June 8, 2021: Removed a redundant "the" from "and the the need for filibuster reform." Hat tip to the the Eye Creatures.

PolitiFact Georgia's kid gloves for Democratic candidate

Did Democratic Party candidate for Georgia governor Stacey Evans help win a Medicare fraud lawsuit, as she claimed? PolitiFact Georgia says there's no question about it:

PolitiFact defines its "True" rating as "The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing."

Evans' statement misses quite a bit, so we will use this as an example of PolitiFact going easy on a Democrat. It's very likely that PolitiFact would have thought of the things we'll point out if it had been rating a Republican candidate. Republicans rarely get the kid gloves treatment from PolitiFact. But it's pretty common for Democrats.

The central problem in the fact check stems from a fallacy of equivocation. In PolitiFact's view, a win is a win, even if Evans implied a win in court covering the issue of fraud when in fact the win was an out-of-court settlement that stopped short of proving the existence of Medicare fraud.

Overlooking that considerable difference in the two kinds of wins counts as the type of error we should expect a partisan fact checker to make. A truly neutral fact-checker would not likely make the mistake.

Evans' claim vs. the facts

 

Evans: "I helped win one of the biggest private lawsuits against Medicare fraud in history."

Fact: Evans helped with a private lawsuit alleging Medicare fraud

Fact: The case was not decided in court, so none of the plaintiff's attorneys can rightly claim to have won the lawsuit. The lawsuit was made moot by an out-of-court settlement. As part of the settlement, the defendant admitted no wrongdoing (that is, no fraud).

Evans' statement leads her audience toward two false conclusions. First, that her side of the lawsuit won in court. It did not. Second, that the case proved the (DaVica) company was guilty of Medicare fraud. It did not.

How does a fact checker miss something this obvious?

It was plain in the facts as PolitiFact reported them that the court did not decide the case. It was therefore likewise obvious that no lawyer could claim an unambiguous lawsuit victory.

Yet PolitiFact found absolutely no problem with Evans' claim on its "Truth-O-Meter":

Evans said that she "helped win one of the biggest private lawsuits against Medicare fraud in history." The lead counsel on the case corroborated her role in it, and the Justice Department confirmed its historic importance.

Her claim that they recovered $324 million for taxpayers also checks out.

We rate this statement True.

Indeed, PolitiFact's summary reads like a textbook example of confirmation bias, emphasizing what confirms the claim and ignoring whatever does not.

There is an obvious difference between impartially evaluating evidence in order to come to an unbiased conclusion and building a case to justify a conclusion already drawn. In the first instance one seeks evidence on all sides of a question, evaluates it as objectively as one can, and draws the conclusion that the evidence, in the aggregate, seems to dictate. In the second, one selectively gathers, or gives undue weight to, evidence that supports one's position while neglecting to gather, or discounting, evidence that would tell against it.

Evans can only qualify for the "True" rating if PolitiFact's definition of "True" means nothing and the rating is entirely subjective.



Correction July 17, 2017: Changed "out-court settlement" to "out-of-court settlement." Also made some minor changes to the formatting.
Correction Oct. 8, 2017: Changed "Shelley Evans" to "Stacey Evans" in the opening paragraph. Our apologies to Stacey Evans for that mistake.