Will Fake News Purveyor Catherine Cortez Masto Vote To Confirm Biden’s Radical FCC Nominee?

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., has campaigned on her vote to pass President Joe Biden’s dubiously named “Inflation Reduction Act” this summer, falsely claiming the bill would bring down the deficit and serve as a model of fiscal responsibility.

Between August and September, the Western Democrat, who is considered one of the most vulnerable incumbents this November, tweeted at least 10 times that the colossal legislation will cut the deficit — but that’s just not true. Don’t count on Cortez Masto’s posts being flagged by Big Tech for disinformation, however. Instead, count on Cortez Masto casting the deciding vote on Biden’s radical pro-censorship nominee for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Gigi Sohn, whose record of demanding overt censorship of dissenting voices precedes her.

As one example of Cortez Masto’s misinformation-peddling, the Democrat wrote in an Aug. 8 tweet: “The Inflation Reduction Act reduces the deficit by $300 billion. This is a critical first step for our families dealing with rising prices – and I’ll keep working in the Senate to lower costs for Nevadans.”

But the “Inflation Reduction Act” does nothing to fight inflation, and certainly doesn’t lower the deficit by “$300 billion.”

On the contrary, an analysis from the conservative fiscal group Americans for Tax Reform estimates, based on numbers from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), that President Joe Biden’s latest spending package would contribute $25 billion to the deficit over the next five years. To be fair, Cortez Masto’s initial post came two days after the CBO’s initial scoring of the bill published on Aug. 5, in which the government agency estimated an $18 billion deficit reduction, according to Americans for Tax Reform. One month later, however, a revised analysis upped that number to a $25 billion deficit increase — in either case, a far cry from the $300 billion reduction Cortez Masto claimed from her campaign Twitter account.

Chris Jacobs, the founder and CEO of the Juniper Research Group and frequent Federalist contributor, outlined on Tuesday how the bill will only exacerbate inflation and add to the deficit. Estimates by Democrats claiming deficit reduction, Jacobs explained, rely on problematic assumptions made to sell the bill to voters as a well-conceived measure to bring the nation’s finances in order. Those assumptions include budget gimmicks, the expiration of Obamacare subsidies, and a spike in tax collections from the “Internal Revenue Service’s new army of auditors.”

“To put it more bluntly,” Jacobs wrote, “The law can only reduce the deficit if the IRS can investigate, audit, and harass enough Americans to generate additional buckets of cash for Washington to spend.”

But again, don’t count on Silicon Valley Giants flagging the senator’s posts for fake news, which brings us back to the FCC and Sohn.

Sohn, an American attorney and former agency staffer under the Obama administration was nominated for a seat on the Federal Communications Commission in October. And given her pro-censorship background, Sohn is the perfect nominee for an administration that almost created a “Ministry of Truth.” Sohn has questioned whether conservative media should maintain their broadcasting licenses and has called Fox News “state-sponsored propaganda.” The nominee to the influential communications commission also complained that lawmakers paid too much attention to the expansion of broadband to rural communities.

“Policymakers,” Sohn said in written testimony, “have focused disproportionately on broadband deployment in rural areas of the United States.”

Never mind that rural Americans are the most underserved when it comes to high-speed internet connectivity. Good luck to rural Nevadans getting high-speed internet with Sohn at the helm of the FCC.

Cortez Masto has not yet committed to a decision on Sohn’s nomination, at least not publicly. The senator’s office did not respond to The Federalist’s inquiry.

Former Nevada Attorney General and Republican Senate nominee Adam Laxalt called on Cortez Masto to reject Sohn’s confirmation last week, highlighting her opposition to the Fraternal Order of Police. The union, representing more than 330,000 law enforcement officials across the country, archived a long list of her attacks on officers, with demands to defund police as a “violent institution.”

“Sohn is an anti-police radical who has publicly supported defunding the police and repeatedly promoted social media posts attacking law enforcement,” Laxalt said in a press release. “As the deciding vote in the U.S. Senate, the choice before Cortez Masto is clear: Will she stand with the cop-hating far-left or will she stand with our brave police officers and oppose Sohn’s nomination?”

According to the latest aggregate of polls by RealClearPolitics, the Nevada Senate race remains a tight contest two months before November, with Laxalt up by a mere 1 percent.

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at [email protected].

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