“Fact-checking night 4 of the Democratic National Convention”, CNN
CNN — August 23, 2024
For the third straight night, there wasn’t much material to fact check from the Democratic National Convention on Thursday.
Speakers, including Vice President Kamala Harris, tended to stick to biography, big themes, subjective arguments and uncheckable promises and predictions. When they did make assertions of fact, they tended to be accurate.
Here is a fact check of five claims Harris made in her speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, plus one claim by a Democratic senator.
Harris on the Supreme Court immunity decision
In her speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination on Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris mentioned the Supreme Court’s July decision on presidential immunity while warning about the “consequences” of giving former President Donald Trump another term.
“Consider the power he will have – especially after the United States Supreme Court just ruled that he would be immune from criminal prosecution,” Harris said. “Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails.”
Facts First: This needs context. The Supreme Court ruling last month did not grant Trump or former presidents in general total immunity from criminal prosecution, though it did grant them immunity for many of their activities in office.
The court ruled that a former president has “absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority” and is “entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts” – but also ruled that “there is no immunity for unofficial acts.”
It’s fair for Harris to frame the ruling as an expansion of presidential power. But the ruling did not kill the ongoing criminal prosecutions against Trump, let alone prohibit any future criminal prosecutions against him.
A federal prosecution over Trump’s attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 election is back in the hands of a district court judge, who must decide which of the alleged Trump acts at issue are official and which are unofficial. And a state-level election subversion prosecution against Trump is also alive in Georgia, though it is on hold amid a battle over whether the district attorney leading the case should be disqualified.
In May, before the Supreme Court ruling, Trump was found guilty of felony falsification of business records in a state-level prosecution in New York. The presiding judge is now considering how the ruling applies to that case, in which Trump is awaiting sentencing.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Harris on Trump restricting abortion
Harris said that if Trump were to become president again, he and his allies would limit access to birth control, ban medication abortion; enact a nationwide abortion ban; force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions “with or without Congress”; and create a national anti-abortion coordinator. “Simply put,” she said, “they are out of their minds.”
Facts First: Harris is making a prediction that we cannot definitively fact check, but Trump himself has not, during this campaign, endorsed these policies she said he would implement as president. Many of the policies are proposed in Project 2025, a conservative think tank’s set of policy preferences for a next Republican administration.
Over the past couple decades, Trump’s position has shifted several times on abortion restrictions.
On Truth Social Thursday, Trump wrote “I do not limit access to birth control or I.V.F. – THAT IS A LIE, these are all false stories that she’s making up, that I’ve never even heard of. It’s just words coming out of her mouth.”
Trump regularly boasts about how he appointed the justices to the US Supreme Court that overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that guaranteed pregnant people the right to an abortion in the United States.
Even in this latest campaign, Trump has repeatedly ducked direct questions about his support for a federal ban, and polls show that the majority of Americans are not in favor of a federal abortion ban. Polls also show Republicans and Democrats largely believe that access to birth control should be widely available. Possibly reflecting those sentiments, in April, Trump said directly that he would not sign a national abortion ban if reelected to the White House. Trump also said the decision to ban abortion should be left up to the states. In July, the Republican National Committee softened language on abortion that better reflected those views.
Trump’s current position on abortion reversed what he said in 2016 when he was first running for the presidency and was the opposite of statements he made throughout his time in office.
Some scholars are concerned that conservative advisers to Trump have encouraged him to ban abortions by enforcing the 1873 Comstock Act. By enforcing this Victorian-era anti-vice law that is still on the books, but is not currently enforced, he could create a national ban and bypass the need for legislation.
The Comstock law specifically bans the mailing of “obscene” materials used to produce an abortion. Some scholars believe Trump could use the Justice Department to enforce a ban that would not just restrict people from sending the medication currently used in the majority of abortions through the mail, but would ban any kind of materials used to produce any kind of abortion. The Comstock law has also been used to ban birth control.
Trump has not officially endorsed the enforcement of the Comstock Act, but it is a strategy some of his advisers have outlined, including former advisers who created Project 2025; the Heritage Foundation’s plan for the next Republican administration. Trump has not endorsed Project 2025.
In an interview with CBS on Monday, when asked if he would enforce the Comstock Act, Trump said that “specifics” remained to be determined, but that he “generally” wouldn’t enforce the act’s prohibition against pills used for an abortion. Trump has not elaborated on what “generally” means, but he did add that “the federal government should have nothing to do with this issue.”
From CNN’s Jen Christensen
Harris on Trump raising prices for families by $4,000 a year
Harris claimed in her Thursday speech at the Democratic National Convention that Trump’s proposed policies would raise prices for American families. “He intends to enact what, in effect, is a national sales tax, call it a ‘Trump Tax,’ that would raise prices on middle-class families by almost $4,000 a year,” she said.
Facts First: The claim is reasonable enough, but it’s worth explaining that Harris is referring to Trump’s proposal to implement new tariffs if he returns to the White House.
Trump has called for adding a tariff of 10% to 20% on all imports from all countries, as well as another tariff upward of 60% on all Chinese imports.
Together, a 20% across-the-board tariff with a 60% tariff on Chinese-made goods would amount to about a $3,900 annual tax increase for a middle-income family, according to the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a liberal think tank.
If the 20% tariff was just 10%, as Trump sometimes suggests, the total impact for middle-class families could be $2,500 a year, according to CAP.
Separate studies estimate that the impact of Trump’s proposed tariffs would also raise prices for families, but by a lower amount. The Peterson Institute for International Economics estimated the new duties would cost the average middle-class household about $1,700 annually. And the Tax Policy Center said the impact could be $1,350 a year for middle-income households.
From CNN’s Katie Lobosco
Harris on Trump giving tax breaks to the wealthy
Harris on Thursday said Trump fights for the wealthy, not the middle class.
“Instead, he fights for himself and his billionaire friends, and he will give them another round of tax breaks that will add up to $5 trillion to the national debt,” Harris said during her remarks at the Democratic National Convention.
Facts First: Harris is referring to Trump’s vow to extend the provisions of his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that expire next year. Her claim is mostly true, though extending the provisions would also help Americans who are not wealthy.
The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, one of Trump’s key achievements in office, reduced taxes for most people, though the rich benefited far more than others. If the expiring provisions are made permanent, the highest-income households would receive more than 45% of the benefits, according to a July analysis by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
If the law’s provisions are made permanent, households making at least $450,000 – roughly the top 5% – would be the biggest winners, the analysis found. They would see their after-tax income increase by 3.2%. For those in the top 1%, who make at least $1 million, that boost equates to a tax cut of about $70,000, on average, in 2027.
Middle-income households earning between roughly $65,000 and $116,000, on the other hand, would receive a tax cut of about $1,000, or 1.3% of their income, the analysis found.
Overall, extending the 2017 tax law provisions would reduce taxes for about three-quarters of households but hike them for about 10%, according to the analysis.
As for the impact on the national debt, extending the individual income and estate tax cuts, extending or maintaining some of the law’s corporate tax changes, and taking interest into account would increase the deficit by more than $4.6 trillion over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
From CNN’s Tami Luhby
Sen. Casey overstates the role corporations have played in driving inflation
Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey highlighted Harris’ recently announced plan to put in place anti-price gouging laws in an effort to lower the cost of food, saying Thursday at the Democratic National Convention, “Prices are up because these corporations are scheming to drive them up.”
Facts First: Casey’s remark lacks key context and overstates the role corporations have played in driving inflation, according to two papers published by regional Federal Reserve banks.
The papers published by the two banks suggest corporations contributed to the inflation Americans have experienced in recent years; however, their pricing actions weren’t the primary driver of inflation when it peaked at a four-decade high in 2022.
Research published by the Kansas City Fed last year found that corporate profits, which grew significantly in the first half of 2021 as firms raised prices at a faster pace than their costs were increasing, could have accounted for more than half the inflation Americans experienced that year. But by 2022, the rate at which corporations raised prices compared with their costs declined.
The researchers concluded that corporations likely raised prices in 2020 and the early part of 2021 in anticipation of rising future costs. But price hikes corporations put forth then were not the main source of inflation in 2022.
Research published by the San Francisco Fed earlier this year reached a similar conclusion: that alleged corporate price gouging was not a primary catalyst for the inflation surge that occurred in 2021 and 2022.
Ultimately, the inflation Americans have had to contend with over the past few years is the product of a confluence of events, including the war in Ukraine, government spending and pandemic-related disruptions across the economy. The unprecedented stress on supply chains in the thick of the pandemic, for example, contributed significantly to inflation’s rise in early 2021.
However, research from progressive think tanks, such as Groundwork Collaborative, suggests there’s a more direct link between corporation raising prices and higher inflation.
From CNN’s Elisabeth Buchwald