Seriously, this guy is flat out pathological. Who can believe anything he says?

In addressing a dinner of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Los Angeles, President Obama made a rather striking claim — that Senate Republicans have filibustered “500 pieces of legislation that would help the middle class.”

Regular readers knows that The Fact Checker has objected to the way that Senate Democrats tally these figures, but the president’s claim makes little sense no matter how you do the numbers.

The Facts

First, some definitions: A filibuster generally refers to extended debate that delays a vote on a pending matter, while cloture is a device to end debate. Filibusters are used by opponents of a nominee or legislation, while cloture is filed by supporters.

Since 2007, there have been 527 cloture motions that have been filed, according to Senate statistics. This is apparently where Obama got his figure. But this tells only part of the story, as many of those cloture motions were simply dropped, never actually voted on, or “vitiated” in the senatorial nomenclature.

Obama is assuming every cloture motion can be counted as a filibuster. Political scientist Sarah Binder of the Brookings Institution, in 2002 co-wrote a paper that concluded there was 94 percent correlation between cloture motions and documented filibusters between 1917 and 1996. But the Congressional Research Service, using newer data, warned in a 2013 report that “it would be erroneous, however, to treat this table as a list of filibusters on nominations.”

Indeed, when you go through the numbers, there have just been 133 successful filibusters — meaning a final vote could not take place — since 2007.

But, even if you accept the way Senate Democrats like to frame the issue, the president is still wrong. He referred to “legislation” — and most of these cloture motions concerned judicial and executive branch nominations. In the 113th Congress, for instance, 83 of the 136 cloture motions so far have concerned nominations, not legislation.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact...of-legislation/

He made the claim on his latest golf outing to CA so you can be sure his slavish little followers in LaLa land lapped it up. However, he lied.