McCarthy's attacks on Swalwell and Schiff don't add up House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is the man of the hour as Republicans took charge of the House and started pushing their agenda. So we devoted two fact checks to his statements — and found them highly misleading. First, McCarthy announced that he would block two prominent California Democrats — Reps. Eric Swalwell and Adam B. Schiff — from serving on the House Intelligence Committee. This apparently was payback for when, in the last Congress, Democrats took the precedent-shattering step of barring two Republicans from committee assignments because of statements that seemed to celebrate violence against Democrats. But we found McCarthy's reasoning to be specious and vague, especially compared to the actions of those two Republicans, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul A. Gosar of Arizona. McCarthy made insinuations that Swalwell was compromised because he had once known a woman who was a Chinese spy — though every account suggests the FBI found he did nothing wrong. And he claimed Schiff lied about knowing the name of the whistleblower who triggered former president Donald Trump's first impeachment. But there is no evidence Schiff knew the name. McCarthy earned Four Pinocchios. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. New debt limit fight, same bad spending math McCarthy has a shiny new talking point he has rolled out as Republicans seek a showdown with the White House over raising the debt ceiling: "Just in the last four years that Democrats were in the majority, they increased discretionary spending by 30 percent. When Republicans were in the majority for the eight years prior, they didn't increase it by $1." This is one of those cleverly misleading claims designed to flummox people who do not closely follow the budget debates in Washington. Discretionary spending, only about 30 percent of the federal budget, refers to annual appropriations approved by Congress to fund the military, government operations and the like. A glance at the historical tables of the White House budget office and the Congressional Budget Office would suggest that McCarthy has a point when he says that discretionary spending did not increase at all from 2010 to 2018, when Republicans last controlled Congress. But raw numbers don't tell the whole story. A bipartisan budget deal in 2011 kept a cap on spending for many years. But then in 2018, when Republicans controlled the White House, the House and the Senate, they decided to blow through the bipartisan spending caps set in 2011 — and boosted discretionary spending by 16 percent. Then, of course, when Democrats took control of the House in 2019, the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 tanked the economy, and the federal government scrambled to fund a vaccine. That really sent spending through the roof. McCarthy earned Three Pinocchios. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP and @AdriUsero) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | 
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