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Never mind the $200B, it’s the fish that matter |
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By Jackie Kucinich
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Posted: 06/08/07 07:37 PM [ET] |
The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) expected Democratic pushback after it ran a radio ad campaign during the Memorial Day recess criticizing freshman lawmakers’ voting records, but the only two letters the committee received from angry lawyers focused on the same topic: tropical fish.
In Rep. Chris Carney’s (D-Pa.) district, the NRCC ran an ad that said he and his Democratic colleagues “vot[ed] for one of the largest tax hikes in history, over $200 billion. They have voted for outrageous pork barrel spending; on peanut storage and transporting tropical fish.”
In March, Democrats promised strong retribution against insinuations that their members had voted to raise taxes.
Instead, in a letter to a Pennsylvania radio station obtained by The Hill, Patrick J. Brier, counsel to the Carney for Congress Campaign, took issue with the reference to exotic marine life. A letter from a lawyer for Rep. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) was similar to the one written by Carney’s attorney, according to a source familiar with the correspondence.
“Now a year and a half before the next election, the NRCC has resumed this campaign of false advertising,” Brier wrote. “In the ad offered to your station it says that Chris Carney ‘voted for … transporting tropical fish’… to the contrary [he] provided relief to fisheries when the government prohibited them from moving fish from Ontario, Quebec, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin.”
The ads were run in 18 freshman Democrats’ districts and questioned the lawmakers’ records on a range of issues based on votes they cast during their first four months in the House.
A Democratic campaign aide explained that Carney and Donnelly seized on the fish angle because it was the most obviously false information, a common tactic used to get misleading ads pulled from the air.
“Generally speaking, if a you are trying to get an ad pulled down, you have to go with the strongest case,” the aide said. “The fish were not tropical — that was blatantly untrue.”
The aide explained that while Democrats stand by their budget as a sound piece of legislation, stations could argue otherwise.
Neither Donnelly nor Brier could be reached for comment.
A spokesman for the NRCC, Ken Spain, was wary of the letters’ intent.
“House Democrats claimed they would take on anyone who asserted that there were tax hikes in their budget, but when they realized they didn’t have a legal leg to stand on, they resorted to a petty battle over semantics,” he said. “I guess you could say they were fishing for ways to hide from their records.”
A spokeswoman for the House Democratic Caucus, Sarah Feinberg, said Democrats have been diligent in their efforts to dispel Republican interpretations of the budget and brushed aside comments to the contrary as partisan attacks.
The Democratic Caucus has had “constant and ongoing conversations with reporters and members to remind them that just because the NRCC says it, doesn’t make it true,” Feinberg said in an e-mail. “The reality is that their facts don’t back up their rhetoric. Republicans are constantly referring to tax increases in certain years that aren’t even included in the budget.”
A spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Doug Thornell, said, “The NRCC has a history of running false and misleading ads — ads that some of their own members disavowed. They were up to their old tricks and they failed miserably.
“Our members went back and highlighted their strong records of accomplishments during their first five months in Congress,” he said.
The so-called “tropical fish transport” was a frequent topic in March during the debate on the Iraq supplemental spending bill. One after another, members of the Republican minority used the reference to highlight what they characterized as an example of excessive spending in a bill meant to fund the Iraq war.
“Instead of reaffirming our commitment to victory, this bill concedes defeat while piling on billions in unrelated pork. So while tropical fish get $5 million, our troops get a steady Democratic diet of limitations and pullout deadlines,” Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said during floor debate.
Democrats contended that the added projects were not earmarks and that the fish were not tropical.
Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.) responded, “There is nothing in this bill whatsoever that has anything to do with tropical fish, unless he thinks that Lake Erie is in the tropics.”
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