walkingdead

Iowa voters must be wondering if they are experiencing a case of déjà vu as the Democrat Senatorial Campaign Committee has revived a completely phony line of attack against GOP senate candidate Joni Ernst for making a written commitment to the people of Iowa to oppose tax hikes.

The claims in the TV ad have been rehashed every election cycle since 2010 and fact-checkers such as the Associated Press, Factcheck.org, and Politifact have all rated the claims FALSE.

The most recent fact check came August 5 when Politifact reviewed identical claims made by Leftwing Billionaire Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate SuperPac and found them to be false:

Even though the ad is new, this claim — that a person who signs the Americans for Tax Reform’s pledge is in favor of tax breaks that encourage outsourcing — is not…

Ernst signed the Taxpayer Protection pledge, a promise promoted by Americans for Tax Reform, which is a broad vow to oppose all tax increases. It does not specify protecting tax loopholes for companies that have employees overseas.

We rate this claim False.

Factcheck.org had this to say in 2010 about the same attack used against a candidate four years ago, in a previous election cycle:

But we find the ad to be false. The pledge only protects corporations from an increase in taxation overall. It explicitly allows elimination of any specific tax deduction or credit if matched dollar-for-dollar by an overall cut in rates. And it says nothing about jobs.

The fact check continues:

 To characterize his opposition to raising taxes as protecting tax breaks that send jobs abroad is wrong. Any tax benefit can be eliminated and offset by a rate cut or by other benefits without raising taxes overall, and without violating the terms of that pledge. This attack ad is false.

Politifact came to the same conclusion as Factcheck.org in a separate race in 2010:

But the fact that someone signed the pledge doesn’t necessarily mean they are opposed to closing loopholes for off-shore companies.

Our friends at FactCheck.org have been knocking down this claim since April, when the DCCC ran a TV ad against a Republican House candidate in Hawaii. They recently debunked the same claim in an ad in the Massachusetts gubernatorial campaign.

Here’s the problem: The taxpayer pledge doesn’t prevent a signer from opposing any tax break as long as he or she finds a way to offset the resulting increase in taxes.

[The attack is] a huge leap of logic and it doesn’t prove Hurt supports the offshore loopholes. So we find the claim False.

It’s sad that the DSCC’s best line of attack against Ernst is to channel their inner-George Romero and once again resurrect this patently false monster.