Phony Baloney Fact Checkers

I’m not sure how you can maintain credibility, when you investigate a claim like “NRA attacks Bill Nelson for voting to confirm Sonia Sotomayor to Supreme Court,” which is pretty much a yes or no proposition, and a matter of public record, and then rate it as “Mostly True” instead of absolutely and irrefutably true. So why the “Mostly?”

What’s missing from this attack is the context that Nelson voted to confirm Sotomayor before she signed the opinion in McDonald. That context slightly dulls the connection between Nelson and Sotomayor’s position.

Um, no it doesn’t. Sotomayor had already ruled on a Second Amendment case in her capacity as a Judge sitting on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. That case was Maloney v. Rice, the well-known Ninchaku case. In the opinion she joined, the 2nd Circuit refused to recognize the Second Amendment as applying to the states:

The Fourteenth Amendment similarly provides no relief for Appellant. “Legislative acts that do not interfere with fundamental rights or single out suspect classifications carry with them a strong presumption of constitutionality and must be upheld if `rationally related to a legitimate state interest.'”

So she ruled the Second Amendment was not protecting any fundamental right, essentially. This is what NRA’s opposition to her confirmation was based on. This is not a mostly true proposition, it is completely true, and there was ample basis for belief that Sotomayor was not friendly to the Second Amendment. This is just a hatchet job on the part of the media, and it’s not surprising.

2 thoughts on “Phony Baloney Fact Checkers”

  1. Search on that site for anything gun related and you can see they are biased. And if they are not biased their research is poor in this feild.

    They still say that 70-80 percent of the guns recovered in mexico are from US gun shops. But then again they don’t count all the other confiscated guns that were never given to the ATF since it was obvious they didn’t come from the US. A nice way to say it’s true by only giving less than half of the story. And said that the ‘AWB’ DID IN FACT prevent the sales of military weapons to civilians.

  2. I believe Fact Check said the NRA was lying for quoting Sarah Brady saying “Obama is working behind the scenes on gun control”? Since she denied it later, they pined the lie on the NRA instead of Sarah Brady, or the reporter who quoted her. Yeah, no bias there.

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