Fact check: Breaking down Biden’s exchanges with Republican senators over Social Security and Medicare

President Joe Biden has gone on the assault over Social Safety and Medicare.

In speeches and tweets this week, Biden and his White Home have singled out explicit Republican senators – notably together with Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin – over proposals from these senators that might have an effect on the retirement and well being care applications.

The Republican senators have responded forcefully, accusing Biden of deceiving the general public about the place they stand. Here’s a fact-check of the exchanges.

Biden and his White House focused Lee on Wednesday over a video clip of Lee saying, “I’m right here proper now to let you know one factor that you just in all probability have by no means heard from a politician. Will probably be my goal to part out Social Safety, to drag it up by the roots and do away with it.” The clip has gone viral on Twitter this week; a second viral clip options Lee saying moments later, “Medicare and Medicaid are of the identical type and should be pulled up.”

The movies are genuine, although Biden didn’t inform his Wednesday speech viewers in Wisconsin they’re from greater than 12 years in the past – an occasion in 2010, when Lee was working for the Senate however earlier than he was first elected. And as Lee noted in Wednesday tweets responding to Biden, Biden didn’t point out that Lee added on the identical 2010 occasion that present Medicare beneficiaries ought to have their advantages “left untouched” and that “the subsequent layer beneath them, those that will retire within the subsequent few years, additionally in all probability must be held innocent.”

Nonetheless, whereas Biden may have included extra context, he was correct in saying Lee had referred to as for Social Safety to be phased out.

And whereas Lee mentioned in a tweeted statement on Wednesday that, throughout his 12 years as a senator, he has not referred to as for “abolishing” Social Safety, Medicare or Medicaid advantages, just for “options to enhance these applications and transfer them towards solvency,” he has supported profit cuts. For instance, he has endorsed numerous proposals over time to lift the Social Safety retirement age.

Since final yr, Biden has criticized Scott over explicit elements of what Scott calls his “12 Level Plan to Rescue America.”

Within the State of the Union tackle on Tuesday and in speeches on Wednesday and Thursday, the president referred to part of Scott’s plan that claims, “All federal laws sunsets in 5 years. If a regulation is price maintaining, Congress can move it once more.” Biden appropriately asserted that “all federal laws” would come with Social Safety and Medicare, which don’t at the moment require congressional re-approval.

Scott responded by accusing Biden of being dishonest and confused. Scott argued on Twitter on Wednesday that whereas his plan does say that “all” federal laws ought to sundown in 5 years and change into topic to a brand new vote by Congress, “That is clearly & clearly an thought geared toward coping with ALL the loopy new legal guidelines our Congress has been passing of late.”

However the plan itself doesn’t say that.

The plan’s official textual content, which stays on-line on a devoted web site, says “all federal laws,” interval, needs to be sundown in 5 years – not all latest laws, all loopy laws or all laws aside from the legal guidelines that created Social Safety and Medicare. When Senate Minority Chief Mitch McConnell rejected Scott’s plan final yr, McConnell too mentioned that the plan “sunsets Social Safety and Medicare inside 5 years.”

Final yr, Biden typically overstated the assist for Scott’s sundown proposal amongst congressional Republicans, which seems very restricted. Biden has been extra exact in his speeches this week, attributing the proposal to Scott himself or precisely saying within the State of the Union that “some” Republicans – “I’m not saying it’s a majority” – assist it.

Biden might have created an inaccurate impression, nevertheless, by mentioning the sundown proposal throughout the part of the State of the Union wherein he mentioned the battle over the debt ceiling. There isn’t a indication that Home Republicans are pushing this proposal as half of the present debt ceiling negotiations with the Biden administration, and Home Speaker Kevin McCarthy has, extra typically, mentioned cuts to Social Safety and Medicare are “off the desk” in these negotiations.

Scott, in flip, has tossed a false declare into the controversy with Biden this week by repeatedly accusing the president of getting reduce billions from Medicare in final yr’s Inflation Discount Act. The Inflation Discount Act didn’t reduce Medicare advantages; relatively, it allowed the federal government and seniors to spend much less cash to purchase pharmaceuticals – and, the truth is, concurrently made Medicare advantages extra beneficiant to seniors. The declare of a Medicare reduce was repeatedly debunked final yr, when Scott and a Republican marketing campaign group he chaired used it throughout the midterm elections.

On Friday afternoon, the day after McConnell informed a Kentucky radio station that Scott’s proposal will probably be a “problem” for Scott’s personal 2024 re-election marketing campaign in a state with a big inhabitants of seniors, Scott announced he’s introducing a brand new invoice that may make it tougher for Congress to make any cuts to Social Safety and Medicare and that may ship the Inflation Discount Act’s $80 billion in Inside Income Service funding to Social Safety and Medicare as a substitute.

This week and in quite a few earlier speeches, Biden has castigated Johnson for saying final yr that Medicare and Social Safety needs to be handled as discretionary spending, which Congress has to approve yearly, relatively than as everlasting entitlements.

Biden has precisely cited Johnson’s remarks this week. Right here’s what Johnson informed a Inexperienced Bay radio present in August: “We’ve bought to show every thing into discretionary spending, so it’s all evaluated, in order that we will repair issues or repair applications which might be damaged, which might be going to be going bankrupt. As a result of, once more, so long as issues are on computerized pilot, we simply proceed to pile up debt.” When Johnson confronted criticism for these remarks on the time, he stood by them and mentioned that was his constant longtime place.

Johnson, nevertheless, claimed Wednesday that Biden was “mendacity” when the president mentioned Johnson’s feedback shortly after saying that some Republicans wish to “reduce” Social Safety. Johnson has repeatedly mentioned that his proposal to require annual approval for Social Safety spending, and to “repair” and “save” Social Safety in gentle of its poor fiscal form at current, doesn’t imply that he needs to place the applications on the “chopping block” and even to “reduce” it.

“The Democrats have been accusing me, for the reason that first time I ran for workplace, of wanting to finish Social Safety, wanting to chop it, eager to intestine it, eager to – I’ve by no means mentioned that. I’ve at all times been constant: I wish to put it aside,” he mentioned in a radio interview this week.

It’s unimaginable to definitively fact-check this explicit dispute with out Johnson specifying how he needs to “repair” and “save” this system. His workplace didn’t reply to a CNN request for remark.

White Home deputy press secretary Andrew Bates famous in an e mail to reporters on Thursday that, although Johnson accused Biden this week of mendacity about his stance on Social Safety, Johnson additionally said in interviews this week that Social Safety is a “authorized Ponzi scheme” and that “Social Safety is perhaps in a extra steady place for youthful staff” if the federal government had proceeded with Republican President George W. Bush’s controversial and ultimately deserted proposal within the mid-2000s to permit staff born after 1949 to divert a portion of their Social Safety payroll taxes into personal accounts wherein they may purchase into the inventory market and make different investments.