The Washington Post finally caught up to The New American today when its fact checker, Glenn Kessler, gave California leftist Senator Kamala Harris (shown) four Pinocchios in a fact check that destroyed her lie about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
The genesis of Harris’ lie was Kavanaugh’s answer to a question from Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, who asked about Priests for Life vs. United States Department of Health and Human Services during the judge’s confirmation hearings last week. Kavanaugh answered. Hysterics began.
Kavanaugh had, the pro-abortion left averred, called birth control drugs “abortion-inducing,” which means he opposes contraception and is anti-woman.
It was another day, TNA reported, and another big lie.
Question and Testimony
As TNA and then Kessler noted, the lies began when Cruz asked Kavanaugh about his dissent.
Answered Kavanaugh:
[Priests for Life] was being forced to provide a certain kind of health coverage over their religious objection to their employees, and under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the question was first, was this a substantial burden on the religious exercise? And it seemed to me quite clearly it was. It was a technical matter of filling out a form, in that case with — that — they said filling out the form would make them complicit in the provision of the abortion-inducing drugs that they were — as a religious matter, objected to.
Thus did the meltdown begin, with pro-aborts everywhere shrieking that Kavanaugh had “just referred to birth control as ‘abortion-inducing drugs.’”
Kavanaugh told an “anti-science lie,” said the supporter of the idea men can become women, and in harmony with Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren, offered Kavanaugh the “newsflash” that “Contraception is NOT abortion.”
Of course, Kavanaugh said so such thing. He was clearly referring to what Priests for Life argued, not his own opinion. That much is clear from his dissent, in which he stated that providing access to contraception is a compelling government interest, a point he also made to Cruz. “The second question was did the government have a compelling interest nonetheless in providing the coverage to the employees and applying the governing Supreme Court precedent,” Kavanaugh told Cruz. “I said that the answer to that was yes.”
Harris Lies
But that didn’t stop Harris. She joined the Twitter mob with an edited video of Kavanaugh’s answer, cutting out the words “they said” to misportray what the judge said. Then she added this preposterous comment:
Kavanaugh chooses his words very carefully, and this is a dog whistle for going after birth control. He was nominated for the purpose of taking away a woman’s constitutionally protected right to make her own health care decisions. Make no mistake — this is about punishing women.
Even without “they said” Kavanaugh’s point was clear. Still, tacitly acknowledging the deceit, Harris provided the full video a day later. Yet even more preposterously, she still claimed she was right. “There’s no question that he uncritically used the term ‘abortion-inducing drugs,’ which is a dog whistle term used by extreme anti-choice groups to describe birth control.”
Said Harris’ spokesman to Kessler, “Our point in the original tweet is unchanged, which is that he uses this term that is extremely political and medically inaccurate with no critique or effort to note any type of disagreement.”
Post: Four Pinocchios
Harris’ spokesman “challenged The Fact Checker to obtain a statement from the White House that Kavanaugh believes that the term ‘abortion-inducing drugs’ is inaccurate.”
In other words, Harris supposedly wanted to know whether the judge agreed with the plaintiffs’ characterization that some birth control drugs are abortifacients. Kessler did just that, and received the expected answer:
Judge Kavanaugh was asked specifically about his dissent and cited the plaintiffs’ position. The fact that critics removed the phrase ‘they said’ from his answer shows that they knew he was citing the party’s opinion and were deliberately trying to mislead the public. As Judge Kavanaugh’s opinion stated, based on the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act, it’s the court or a judge’s job to determine “only the sincerity of a plaintiff’s religious belief, not the correctness or reasonableness of that religious belief.”
Again, Kessler gave Harris four Pinocchios for the whopper she tried to peddle.
Here’s a better way to say it: She lied.
Image of Kamala Harris: Screenshot from senate.gov
