Little Twisting Of The Facts

There is a  Linda McManhon ad about Chris Murphy missing committee meetings, I don’t doubt that Rep. Murphy did miss those meeting, but anyone who has attended a hearing knows the whole truth.

That there are many reasons why, not just Rep. Murphy, but all Congresspersons miss so many hearings…

1. They might be attending another committee meeting because they are usually on several committees.
2. They could be meeting with a constituent.
3. They could be watching the committee meeting from their office
4. They might watch the video recording of the meeting at a later date.
5. They could be caucusing with other congresspersons
6. They could have had one of their aides sit in on the meeting

When I attended state legislative committee hearings, legislators were going in and out of the hearing all the time. When I met with my legislator it was during a floor debate in the House, he came out to talk to me about the bill that I was interested in. Many of the Republican legislators sit on multiple committees because there are fewer of them to fill committee positions.

The same was true when I went down to lobby for a federal bills, the hate crime and ENDA bills, I meet with Sen. Lieberman, even though I just talked to him briefly and then I talked to his aides for a longer period. I also met with Rep. Murphy’s staff about the bills.

Another, time I met with Rep. Murphy up here in Hartford about DOMA, DADT and ENDA in a two hour meeting. There were a number of LGBT organizations that he invited to talk with him about the bills.

So when Linda McManhon ads say that Rep. Chris Murphy missed 80% that is only a very small bit of the whole story and if you look at the attendance records for all congresspersons, you could probably say the same thing about all of them. But like all politicians they tend to bend the truth and take things out of context.

Update: 8/21/12 9:30AM
The Hartford Courant had an article yesterday on the Linda McMahon ad and they rated the ad “Generally Accurate” but they said…

The ad comes closer to a direct accusation with the narrator's final line: that Murphy "didn't show up for the job you paid him to do." Serving in Congress involves far more than showing up at committee hearings, and it is an extraordinarily broad statement to conclude that failing to attend those hearings is equivalent to not showing up for the job. But while Murphy's supporters and some savvy Washingtonians may object to the McMahon camp's conclusions regarding the significance of committee hearings, the main factual assertion here is on target. As such, we rate this ad Generally Accurate.

They pointed out that...

The ad gives something of an impression that Murphy's subcommittees were involved in desperate efforts to save the teetering economy. But some of the hearings Murphy skipped would hardly be described as focused on avoiding a financial meltdown. On June 8, 2007, he passed on a hearing titled "Can Internet Gambling Be Effectively Regulated to Protect Consumers And The Payments System?" and on July 29, 2008, he didn't make it to "Affordable Housing In West Virginia: Challenges In The Eastern Panhandle" – a hearing that not only concerned West Virginia, but was held in West Virginia.

But other missed meetings were more directly related to the nation's broad fiscal problems, including hearings on monetary policy, mortgage foreclosures, risk in the financial markets, stabilization of the auto industry and the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers.

Were those meetings "urgent?" That's a subjective word, and generally beyond the scope of fact-checking.