Tolbert: The Facts On The Asa Hutchinson ‘Birthday Party’ Ad

With the primary now in our rear view mirror, prepare for a deluge of political ads from both sides slinging everything they can at one another.

Many of these ads will be designed to paint opponents as unlikeable as humanly possible.  The Pryor campaign and groups supporting him are certainly hammering this with ads portraying Tom Cotton as “a heartless ideologue” as Politico puts it in an article this week.

But it is not just the U.S. Senate race. The Democratic Governor’s Association came out last week with an ad portraying Asa Hutchinson as “out of touch” with Arkansas.  The ad hammers on two main points that are worth a closer examination.

First, the ad claims that Asa “voted against tax relief for Arkansas families.”  The support for this claim in the ad is very thin.  It points to House Roll Call Vote 94 in 2001 when Asa was an Arkansas Congressman.  This little-known procedural vote was on an amendment to HR 10 – Railroad Retirement and Survivors’ Improvement Act of 2001.  According to the Railroad Retirement Board website, this law “liberalizes early retirement benefits for 30-year (railroad) employees, eliminates a cap on monthly retirement and disability benefits, lowers the minimum service requirement from 10 years to 5 years of service if performed after 1995, and provides increased benefits for some widow(er)s.”  The bill passed the House with broad bipartisan support – 407 to 24 on the first House vote.

The ad refers to a vote on an amendment to this bill from Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA).  According to the House records, this amendment was a substitute amendment that “sought to provide for establishing a refundable retirement savings credit for low- and moderate-income workers; and provide credits to small businesses that establish qualified pension plans for their employees.”  The vote on this amendment failed largely on party lines – 207 to 223 with all the Republicans and a few Democrats voting against the amendment.

In other words, the entire claim is based on a 13-year old procedural vote that no one in Arkansas was following and applies to every Republican in Congress in 2001.

The second claim criticizes Asa for spending at the Transportation Security Administration in 2003 while Asa was Undersecretary for Border & Transportation Security at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The ad claims Asa allowed “huge taxpayer-funded bonuses to government bureaucrats” and spent “half a million in tax dollars to be spent just to throw a birthday party.”  The ad points to a couple of articles from 2004 and 2005, which is based on this 2004 report from the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General.

This report examines an awards event held on November 19, 2003 at the one-year anniversary of the TSA – not really a “birthday party,” but an awards banquet.  The event — including transportation of employees to the event — cost $461,745 and paid bonuses to 88 senior managers of around $16,000 each.  Although the report finds no wrongdoing, it does make several recommendations all of which were agreed to and implemented by Asa.  From the report…

TSA’s awards ceremony and executive performance awards complied with applicable laws and regulations, which give agencies considerable latitude. In our judgment, however, the overall costs of the awards ceremony were unnecessarily expensive. We are recommending that TSA solicit competitive bids for all services and products associated with its annual awards ceremony; ensure that each executive performance award is supported by a justification specific to the employee and with attendant additional detail to support awards in exceptional amounts; and provide more equitable treatment for lower graded employees when making performance award decisions.

The report finds no direct connection to Asa authorizing this spending in advance, which his campaign claims he did not do. “In fact, Asa Hutchinson did not authorize the spending and when the Inspector General reported the questionable spending, Hutchinson took action to stop the waste,” the Hutchinson campaign said.

In short, the ad stretches the facts to create an unfavorable picture of Asa based on a little-known vote and an Inspector General report on spending in TSA while he was at Homeland Security.  Ads like this make Ross’ re-writing the history of his House committee vote to advance an Obamacare bill all the more laughable as this vote was a much bigger deal than anything mentioned in the DGA ad.

Get ready though.  More of these type ads are on the way.