The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee just released a series of attacks against Ricky Gill in his bid to defeat incumbent Democrat Jerry McNerney. Lying about the Taxpayer Protection Pledge isn’t a new tactic for the DCCC, nor is ignoring the fact that independent organizations have called them out on their fallacious claims. Americans for Tax Reform calls on McNerney to denounce the DCCC’s false claims.
The attacks suggest that as a Pledge signer, Ricky Gill has signed a pledge to “protect special tax breaks for corporations that send American jobs overseas.” Unfortunately, when the same claim was levied against Pledge signers in 2010, the Associated Press labeled the attack as “one of the wildest claims of the 2010 campaign.” Adding insult to injury, the non-partisan FactCheck.org rated the attacks against the Pledge as “blatantly false.”
As FactCheck.org has noted, “[The Pledge] leaves ample room for the elimination of any number of special tax breaks so long as the overall level of taxation is not increased. To claim that this ‘protects’ a particular provision is simply untrue.” The overall goal of Pledge signers is to reduce the size of the government by focusing on spending alone.
When the DCCC said the exact same thing against Republicans in 2010, another independent fact-checking organization weighed in. To the accusation that the Pledge “protects” companies who ship jobs overseas, Politifact noted that the claim about the Pledge included a “spurious connection” that requires a “huge leap of logic,” concluding that the DCCC’s claim was “False.”
Despite the fact that the DCCC has pledged financial support for Jerry McNerney’s reelection, Rep. McNerney should denounce this proven false claim so that both he and Gill can focus on what California voters care most about: curbing rising gas prices, unsustainable government spending, and the looming tax hikes that take effect on January 1st of next year.
“I applaud Ricky Gill for taking the Taxpayer Protection Pledge. Taxpayers in California are fed up with tax-and-spend policies that are bankrupting cities and scaring businesses out of the state, policies that the DCCC champions,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. “The most recent false claims by this group further demonstrates the difficult time national Democrats are going to have defending the Democrat ‘plan’ for economic recovery: higher taxes and more government spending,” continued Norquist.