Here are Pelosi’s comments the Washington Post looked at:
“In order to pay for it, [House Republicans] are going to make an assault on women’s health, make another assault on women’s health, continue our assault on women’s health and pay for this with prevention initiatives that are in effect right now for childhood immunization; for screening for breast cancer, for cervical cancer; and for initiatives to reduce birth defects — a large part of what the Center for Disease Control does in terms of prevention.” — House Minority Leader Nancy Perlosi (D-Calif.), April 26, 2012
I’ll skip to the conclusion:
This is a good example of politicians using obscure details of the budgetary process to score political points.
From Pelosi’s statement, one could imagine a wholesale “assault” to strip funding for women’s health programs. But in fact, there are virtually no specific programs aimed at women currently in the fund. In the future, the administration hopes to add such programs, but that is not the reality today, as evidenced by the fact the administration never raised this concern last year when the GOP-led House also voted to kill the preventive health care fund.
Pelosi could have raised concerns about perceived cuts in preventive health. She could have also noted that women benefit greatly from such efforts. But she — and fellow Democrats — went too far to label this “an assault on women’s health.” Maybe evidence of that will emerge through the regular appropriations process — at which point we could revisit this ruling — but for the moment this smacks of political opportunism.
We wavered between one and two Pinocchios but ultimately this fits with two on our scale: “Some factual error may be involved but not necessarily. A politician can create a false, misleading impression by playing with words and using legalistic language that means little to ordinary people.”