Mitch gets fact-checked

The folks at the nonpartisan fact-checking website PolitiFact looked into one of Mitch McConnell's recent statements. Here's what they found:

On June 9, 2010, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., used a floor speech to link BP and a climate-change bill sponsored by Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn.

"The problem for Democrats is that debating the Democrat cap-and-trade bill might not fit neatly into the White House messaging plan, since it’s been widely reported that a major part of the Kerry-Lieberman bill was essentially written by BP. This is clearly an inconvenient fact: an administration that seems to spend most of its time coming up with new ways to show how angry it is with BP is pushing a proposal that BP helped write."

...In fact, looking at three BP-pushed initiatives that have come to light shows that none were included in the current draft of the bill, which suggests that the senators and their aides were hardly captive to BP. It may be revealing that one day after the statement we're checking, McConnell had toned down his description of BP's role. In a floor speech on June 10, 2010, McConnell said, “Some favor the Kerry-Lieberman cap-and-trade bill, a significant portion of which, by the way, has been pushed by the oil company BP.”

If he'd simply said "pushed" the day before, he would have been pretty close to being accurate. But McConnell went much further when he said that BP had "essentially written" a "major part" of the bill. We rule that claim by McConnell False.