The dishonest spin coming from the White House blaming Republican lawmakers for the crisis at the southern border was too much for even the normally friendly Washington Post.
In a stinging rebuke of White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and deputy press secretary Andrew Bates, the paper’s fact-checker awarded President Joe Biden’s mouthpieces with “three Pinocchios” for their misleading claims about House Republicans voting to eliminate 2,000 Border Patrol agents.
On Friday, in his column titled “White House spins GOP ‘cuts’ of 2,000 Border Patrol agents,” the WaPo’s Glenn Kessler highlighted the remarks from Jean-Pierre and Bates which he proceeded to dismantle by putting the distortions in their proper context.
New #FactChecker: White House spins GOP ‘cuts’ of 2,000 Border Patrol agents https://t.co/JjL4eGPImy
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) January 12, 2024
“House Republicans continue to ‘do political stunts. They get in the way. They voted in May to eliminate 2,000 Border Patrol agents. That’s what they’re doing,’ Biden’s diversity hire Jean-Pierre is quoted in one notable fib highlighted by Kessler.
“House Republicans took numerous votes that would have damaged economic growth and harmed our national security, like attempting to eliminate over 2,000 Border Patrol agents,” Bates says in another quote used by the WaPo.
“But there is a big problem with this number,” the fact checker wrote. “It’s not based on an actual vote on the Homeland Security budget. Instead, it’s a White House estimate on the impact of a bill the House passed in 2023 as an opening bid in budget talks with the Biden administration. When it came to an actual vote for border security, the House in September passed an appropriations bill that funded an additional 1,795 Border Patrol agents. That was four times the increase (350 agents) that President Biden had requested in his own 2024 budget proposal.”
Kessler informed readers that the bill, called the Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023, was “vague” and that “House GOP leaders crafted the bill that way because specifics on which programs would be targeted for cuts would have probably translated into fewer votes, potentially making it impossible to win approval for the bill.”
“Administration officials saw the House bill’s vagueness as an opportunity to go on the attack,” he pointed out.
“With defense off the table, Republicans essentially would have needed to double the cuts in nondefense discretionary spending to achieve the $1.5 trillion annual spending target,” Kessler wrote. “The White House assumed that required a 22 percent reduction in spending across all other agencies, such as Homeland Security. As a result, the administration calculated, the size of the Border Patrol would need to be slashed by 2,000 through layoffs, attrition and furloughs to meet the 22 percent target. If Republicans wanted to spare Border Patrol as they did the military, then the cuts would increase elsewhere in the government.”
“It’s a classic Washington game to misleadingly cite a lawmaker’s past votes. The Republican primary debates have been a good example of that. But the White House is going too far here,” he added,
“Past votes can certainly be fair game and White House officials generally are careful to note they are referring to a vote that took place last May. But such nuances may be lost on Americans not conversant with the federal budget. House Republicans once may have backed a tough budget plan but they never cast a vote that specified they would cut 2,000 Border Patrol agents; instead, they have voted to increase the total by nearly 2,000. That’s spin worthy of Three Pinocchios,” Kessler concluded.
You know that the regime’s lies are getting bad when even The Washington Post is calling them out.
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