The race for U.S. Senate here in Florida is sure to get a lot of attention in the coming weeks, and the primary election was just a preview of what we can expect as the ads start flooding the airwaves.

One recent commercial for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) included a claim about legislation to fix things at the Veterans Administration.  The commercial said this:

"Marco Rubio wrote and passed bipartisan legislation allowing the V.A. to fire negligent workers."

Our partners at PolitiFact took a look at this claim to see how accurate it was. PolitiFact reporter Joshua Gillin says that Rubio's claim rates MOSTLY TRUE on the Truth-O-Meter.  Gillin says that Rubio, for the most part, did what the commercial claimed.

"Back in 2014 at the height of the Veterans Administration scandal, Sen. Rubio drafted legislation to address it," said Gillin. "The legislation that was proposed would allow the Secretary to fire senior workers at the V.A. if those workers were found to not be doing what they were supposed to be doing."

Gillin notes that there's one piece that merits a reduction in rating of the claim. 

"This bill was introduced into the Senate that year, but it didn't go anywhere," said Gillin.  "It was left in committee, but then, the language from that abandoned bill was actually put into another bill that the Senate did take up and vote on. Even though it wasn't Rubio's actual bill, the language was the same, so he gets the credit for authoring the legislation. That bill then passed the Senate and the House and it became law."

Gillin says that, in the end, the law that was passed had Rubio's original language in it, but it was not the original legislation that Rubio had authored.  Because the commercial did not make the distinction in the language of the claim, the claim as aired gets a MOSTLY TRUE rating on the Truth-O-Meter.

 

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