Substance Abuse

An accurate comparison with the Clinton bills listed in the e-mail would have included only the bills Obama has sponsored that have been signed into law. This comparison favors Clinton heavily, since 19 of her bills in seven years have become law, while Obama has had just two in his three years:

S. 2125, A bill to promote relief, security, and democracy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
S. 3757, A bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 950 Missouri Avenue in East St. Louis, Illinois, as the "Katherine Dunham Post Office Building."

The Meaning of Fluff
The question of whether a bill is "substantive" is often subjective. But the Clinton bills that the e-mail seems to characterize as frivolous have to do with such goals as recognizing and establishing national observances, honoring individuals' memories, marking important events and congratulating sports teams. Five of the seven Obama-sponsored bills passed by the Senate have similar goals. So do more than 40 percent of all the bills that have been passed by the Senate since the beginning of 2008.

Surely we don't elect senators just to name post offices. But given the contention that meatier bills can prompt, it's much easier to push a seemingly frivolous bill through Congress. Every one of the Clinton and Obama bills that passed the Senate did so by unanimous consent. Bills that generate more opposition, meanwhile, can be struck down or left to languish. According to GovTrack.us, a legislative research site, 308 of 356 bills Clinton has sponsored haven't made it out of committee. In the current (110th) Congress, that includes several bills on foreign policy, nuclear safety, poverty, housing and education, not to mention 19 bills regarding public health and coverage, 13 benefiting the armed forces, and 12 addressing children's care and safety. Likewise, 120 of Obama's 129 sponsored bills haven't made it past the committee level – including, in the 110th Congress, nine bills on energy and environmental policy, nine on public health and eight benefiting the military and veterans, as well as multiple bills on education, foreign policy, product safety and voter access. These bills, being more substantive than, for instance, Clinton's regarding the men's lacrosse team or Obama's on National Summer Learning Day, are also more likely to die in committee.

Blog Showdown
Several blogs have picked up and repeated the idea that Obama has sponsored more, or more important, legislation than Clinton has. One writer on the political blog Daily Kos looked at the senator's record in detail but did not evaluate Clinton's legislation. Another went through legislation from each candidate, analyzing the impressiveness of each bill from her perspective. On the other side, noted blogger Ezra Klein wrote, in his blog for the liberal magazine The American Prospect, that the second Kos article was "not anything even approaching a fair comparison of [the candidates'] legislative records" and that Clinton had in fact proposed important bills.

Since the value of a piece of legislation is so often a matter of opinion, that's a blogspat we won't get into. We can say for sure, though, that Clinton has been the sole original sponsor of more bills than Obama at a slightly higher annual rate; that she's been more successful than Obama at passing bills through the Senate and into law; and that, while she has sponsored a number of seemingly frivolous bills that were signed into law, these are comparable to many of Obama's bills and common in the Senate generally.

One final thought: Recently we published a special report warning readers about the high level of inaccuracy in chain e-mails. This one is no exception. In fact, with its anonymous author and grammatical errors, not to mention a redundancy or two, it's a classic of the genre. If you find one of these e-mails in your in-box, our suggested course of action remains the same: Just hit delete.

Republished with permission from factcheck.org .

Sources
Hillary Clinton for President. "Email Misrepresents Hillary's Legislative Record," 10 Mar. 2008.

GovTrack.com. "Barack Obama," Accessed 26 Mar. 2008.

GovTrack.com. "Hillary Clinton," Accessed 26 Mar. 2008.

Library of Congress. THOMAS, Accessed 26 Mar. 2008.

Illinois General Assembly. "Barack Obama," Accessed 25 Mar. 2008.

Daily Kos. "I found the BEEF - Obama's Senate Record," 21 Feb. 2008.

Daily Kos. "I Refuse to Buy into the Obama Hype," 20 Feb. 2008.

Klein, Ezra. "Clinton and Obama's Legislative Records," 22 Feb. 2008.

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