U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, R-FL, is giving up his seat to run for president -- and the battle has begun to take his job.
Two Democratic Congressmen are among those fighting for the nomination: U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Orlando, and U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Jupiter.
Grayson has been going after Murphy, saying his fellow lawmaker hasn't passed a single bill out of committee during his time in Congress, and even suggested he watch the Schoolhouse Rock video “I’m Just A Bill” to try to learn how to do his job.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFroMQlKiag&feature=youtu.be
According to Amy Hollyfield of PolitiFact Florida, the claim that Murphy "hasn't passed a single bill out of committee" is False, because Grayson relied on an article from InsideGov.com that just doesn’t tell the whole story.
“For one thing, it doesn’t even go up through current times, and two, it doesn’t really give Murphy credit for some of the complicated ways that Congress works,” she said. “If you look just at did Murphy write a bill and did it go through committee, then you are going to find a zero, but if you look at did Murphy write a bill, did it get amended onto another bill, there’s a couple examples of that. There’s an example of him co-authoring a bill and getting that advanced. “
Meanwhile, as candidates are fighting to take Rubio’s job, he’s busy campaigning for president. At a stop at the Iowa State Fair, he said, "we have an Army that just cut 40,000 spots."
That claim is Mostly True, Hollyfield said.
“Rubio is pretty on with his talking point here,” she said. “Army officials have been talking for some months about reducing the size of the force, and in July they announced that they’re going to cut the size from 490,000 to 450,000. The hitch here is that they’re going to do it by fiscal year 2018, so they’re expecting the cuts to come through attrition, early retirements and layoffs, and this is all a part of the sequestration that Congress made certain for government a few years ago.”
She said it was bumped down to a Mostly True because, “yes, the number is right, but it’s sort of dependent on another Congress, and another president even, whether these plans will come to fruition.”
