Checking first group of Dems’ debates
Here’s our rundown of questionable statements at Tuesday’s Democratic presidential debate in Detroit.
Beto O’Rourke, former Texas congressman: “The Centers for Disease Control (is) prevented from actually studying the issue (gun violence) in the first place.”
This is an outdated Democratic talking point. For two decades, spending bills included something called the Dickey Amendment that said, “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”
That language remains, but in 2018, lawmakers added, in a separate report, the words “the Secretary of Health and Human Services has stated the CDC has the authority to conduct research on the causes of gun violence.”
Even the original Dickey rule did not totally forbid research. For a short while at least, the CDC continued to fund studies into the links between firearms and injuries.
But after 1999, gun research plummeted. David Hemenway, director of Harvard’s Injury Control Research Center, told PolitiFact last year that the politics, not the law, drove the CDC’s agenda. — Jon Greenberg
Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts senator: “So, the problem is that right now the criminalization statute is what gives Donald Trump the ability to take children away from their parents.”
The statute that Warren is referring to doesn’t explicitly say immigrant children can be separated from their parents, but she’s right that it can have that consequence.
Her campaign told PolitiFact she was referring to Section 1325 in U.S. Code. That section of federal law allows the prosecution of individuals who improperly
enter the country. If a parent and a child arrive at the border together and the parent is referred for prosecution, the child is taken away from the parent and transferred over to the custody of the Health and Human Services Department.
In April 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero-tolerance” policy directing U.S. attorney’s offices along the southwest border “to adopt a policy to prosecute all Department of Homeland Security referrals of section 1325(a) violations, to the extent practicable.” More than 2,000 children were separated from the adults they were traveling with in summer of 2018.
Section 1325 has been around for decades and prosecutions under it have ebbed and flowed over different administrations, a legal expert told us. — Miriam Valverde
Marianne Williamson, author, on the cost of slavery reparations: “What makes me qualified to say $200 (billion) to $500 billion? I’ll tell you what makes you qualified, if you did the math of 40 acres and a mule, given there was 4 (million) to 5 million slaves at the end of the Civil War, and there were probably 40 acres and a mule for every family of four, if you did the math today it would be trillions of dollars.”
Williamson’s price tag of between $200 billion and $500 billion for a reparations program is well below some other widely cited estimates, which put the figure in the trillions.
Her calculation reached back to the first — and last — time there was a federal call for reparations in the United States, which came during the waning months of the Civil War. Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman ordered 400,000 acres of Southern land along the Atlantic coast to be confiscated and subdivided into “plot(s) of not more than forty acres of tillable ground,” to be given to formerly enslaved families, along with mules on loan from the army. (Hence the historical reference “40
acres and a mule.”)
One of the foremost scholars on reparations, Duke University’s William Darity, estimated the United States would need to spend several trillion dollars to redress its historical wrongs, according to Vox, which noted that other estimates put the cost from $6.4 trillion to $14 trillion. — John Kruzel
Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana: “Science tells us we have 12 years before we reach the horizon of catastrophe when it comes to our climate.”
While there is overwhelming consensus among scientists that something needs to change to curb global warming, scientists don’t agree that Earth faces a hard 12-year deadline to do so.
Here’s what scientists do say: A 2018 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report predicted that, if warming continues at its current rate, global temperatures are likely to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels between 2030 (12 years from the release of that report) and 2052.
The U.N. Paris Agreement, which was signed by nearly 200 countries, set the goal to keep temperatures from rising over 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels to reduce the risks and impacts of climate change, including minimizing extreme weather events.
Kristie L. Ebi, director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington in Seattle, told the Associated Press that, while adding greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will result in a continued rise in temperatures, “the earth does not
reach a cliff at 2030 or 2052.” — Sophie Austin
Bernie Sanders, Vermont senator: “Right now, we have a dysfunctional health care system. Eighty-seven million uninsured or underinsured, 500,000 Americans every year going bankrupt because of medical bills, 30,000 people dying while the health care industry makes tens of billions of dollars in profit.”
That’s a lot of numbers, and as confidently as Sanders stated them, they rely on complicated data and, arguably, fuzzy math.
In claiming there are 87 million Americans who are uninsured or underinsured, he appears to be citing 2018 data released by the Commonwealth Fund. Compared to the 27.4 million uninsured in 2017 according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, this includes those with insurance who nonetheless experienced high medical costs compared to their household income.
It is not clear how Sanders calculated the number of medical bankruptcies every year. He may be referring to a study released in February that found an estimated 530,000 families file for bankruptcy each year due to medical bills.
And though he did not complete the thought, this is not the first time that Sanders has claimed that 30,000 people die every year because of the high cost of health care. When he tweeted that claim last month, we rated it Half True.