MSNBC's Chris Hayes Falsely Names Paul Ryan 'Deciding Vote' for Medicare Prescription Drugs

August 11th, 2012 11:02 AM

In the coming days and weeks, the job of the Obama-loving media is to blame all that ails the nation on newly-appointed Republican Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan and to at every turn impugn his record as a member of Congress.

Doing his part Saturday was MSNBC's Chris Hayes who falsely claimed Ryan in 2003 "cast the deciding vote" for Medicare's prescription drug benefit "because it passed by one vote in the House" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

CHRIS HAYES: We’re talking about the Ryan budget and we’re starting to get a little bit – which I delight in - into the weeds of what it looks like in terms of Medicare, and you made this point about the cuts to Medicare that are already in the Affordable Care Act, right? I think that's, the reason that I think that's a really key point is, A, people forget how central those were in the political argument that folks who were elected as essentially Tea Party insurgents used in running against the Affordable Care Act. The one line distillation of why the Affordable Care Act was bad in swing districts around this country in the election of 2010 was that it cut Medicare.

And the reason that's important is because there seems to me this desire on the part of Mitt Romney, on the part of Paul Ryan, on the part of the Wall Street Journal, and even in some ways the Democrats to talk about this election as this grand battle of competing visions, about how big government is going to be. And there is zero evidence the Republican Party is committing to cutting government in any way. It is a question of who that government benefits.

Government as a percentage of GDP did not go down under Ronald Reagan. Government as a percentage of GDP did not go down under George W. Bush and Tom DeLay when they had all three branches of government. And Paul Ryan was sitting there along with Rick Santorum voting time and time again for things like for instance the Medicare Part D Prescription Drug Benefit, a completely unpaid for new very costly bit of social insurance that Paul Ryan cast the deciding vote for because it passed by one vote in the House. So the idea that before we even get to the question of which vision of government do we want to choose between this grand ideological – Ayn Rand here and some, I don't know, collectivist strawman here - I just refuse to concede the premise that the Republicans are interested in cutting government because there is no record that they are.


Actually, the measure passed in the House by a tally of 220 to 215.

Maybe more importantly, as a proud progressive who certainly loves this "costly bit of social insurance," why not credit the sixteen Democrats that actually decided the fate of this bill which  certainly would have died without their support?

Why let facts get in the way when you're a liberal shill getting paid to disparage Republicans on a so-called "news" network?