“This was about saving the banks. And jobs. And those banks paid it back! Bernie voted against the bailout to the automobile industry, too.”

— Former vice president Joe Biden

“No. I did not. Bush later used the bailout money. And the banks [got] hundreds of zero-interest loans.”

— Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)

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Biden and Sanders traded charges about votes concerning the auto industry bailout. This is a good example of how voters should be wary about claims concerning past votes in the Senate.

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Sanders focuses on a vote in December 2008 that would have provided $15 billion to the auto industry. Both he and Biden voted for it, but it failed to advance in the Senate.

Meanwhile, Biden voted for the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, which was originally designed to assist the financial industry as the economy collapsed. There was a vote Oct. 1 to provide $350 billion, and then another vote Jan. 15 to release a second installment of the TARP funds, also worth $350 billion. Biden voted in favor both times, while Sanders voted to block the funding.

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Here’s where it gets tricky. After the failure of December vote to help the auto industry, President George W. Bush announced he would use the TARP funds to rescue the auto industry. He advanced $13.4 billion — and said $4 billion more would be given to automakers after Congress approved releasing the second tranche of funds. (Ultimately, the U.S. government gave the automotive industry nearly $80 billion, and all but $9.3 billion was paid back.)

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When Sanders voted against TARP the first time, he probably had no idea that Bush would tap it to help the auto industry. But it was clear the second TARP vote would aid the auto industry, as Michigan lawmakers specifically urged a “yes” vote for that reason.

Biden is right that Sanders voted against the mechanism that ended up helping the auto industry, but it would be wrong to suggest he was against helping the auto industry. He certainly was on the record as having supported an auto bailout when it was not tied to Wall Street. Sanders, meanwhile, has gone too far to suggest he cast a vote for the auto industry that actually would have made a difference; that particular legislation went nowhere.

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“I am saying that you have been on the floor of the Senate time and time again talking about the need to cut Social Security, Medicare and veterans programs. How to deal with the deficit. Everything was on the table.”

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— Sanders

“I did not. I never voted to cut Social Security.”

— Biden

Sanders’s point rests on how one defines a “cut.” In the mid-1980s, bipartisan alarm grew over soaring federal budget deficits under President Ronald Reagan. Biden, along with two Republican senators and another Democrat (Max Baucus of Montana), proposed a simple solution — a one-year freeze on all spending, including defense spending and social programs such as Social Security. The plan was rejected 33 to 65, although more Democrats than Republicans voted for it.

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A one-year freeze would mean that funding would not increase, including Social Security benefits. Technically that’s not a reduction. But because of inflation, those funds would be worth less — in effect, a cut.

Sanders said Biden spoke about this “time and again” on the Senate floor. In 1995, during the debate over the balanced budget amendment, Biden recalled his freeze proposal from a decade earlier. Biden’s support of the balanced budget amendment was criticizing by liberal groups who feared it would lead to program reductions.

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Biden’s current campaign platform calls for raising Social Security payroll taxes on wealthier Americans and boosting benefits for people who have been receiving Social Security payments for at least 20 years.

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“That bill was opposed by LULAC, the largest Latino organization in America. They called the guest worker program akin to slavery. The bill was killed because it was a vote on the amendment. I think it was 49-48. You know who voted with me? Barack Obama.”

— Sanders

Sanders is oversimplifying. When the Senate took up an immigration overhaul in 2007, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Sanders both voted in favor of the “Dorgan amendment.”

Named after then-Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), the amendment would have placed a five-year cap on a temporary worker program included in the overall bill. Supporters of the immigration bill called the Dorgan amendment a dealbreaker.

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What Sanders leaves out is that Obama later took votes in favor of advancing the overall legislation. Sanders consistently opposed the 2007 plan, which ultimately failed.

“I learned I can’t take the word of a president when, in fact, they assured me they would not use force. Remember the context. The context was the United Nations Security Council is going to vote to insist we allow inspectors in to determine whether or not they were producing nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction. They were not. What’s the first thing that happened when we got elected? President Obama turned to me and said, get those troops out of there. I was responsible for getting 150,000 troops out of Iraq.”

— Biden

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Biden voted for the Iraq War when he was a senator, but this version of history is disputed by former president George W. Bush.

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Biden, during the Senate debate on a resolution authorizing force against Iraq on Oct. 10, 2002, argued that the resolution was designed to ensure diplomacy. But he also fought against alternatives offered by more liberal Democrats that would have required Bush to first win U.N. authority for an invasion or else seek a new war resolution from Congress.

“The reason for my saying not two steps now is it strengthens his hand, in my view, to say to all the members of the Security Council: ‘I just want you to know, if you do not give me something strong, I am already authorized, if you fail to do that, to use force against this fellow,’ ” Biden argued on the Senate floor.

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The United Nations ordered weapons inspectors back into Iraq, but the Bush administration got impatient with the results, calling for the inspections to end almost as soon as they started. Irritating allies, the administration argued that the inspections could not be allowed to drag on because the U.S. military buildup in the Persian Gulf region had proceeded too far to turn back from war.

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Nevertheless, Biden continued to express support for his vote. “I supported the resolution to go to war. I am not opposed to war to remove weapons of mass destruction from Iraq,” he said in a February 2003 speech. “I am not opposed to war to remove Saddam [Hussein] from those weapons if it comes to that.” But he added that Bush was not being straight with the American people about the possible financial and military burden.

In a Washington Post opinion article just before the conflict began, Biden unsuccessfully argued that an invasion should be delayed until the administration obtained a U.N. resolution authorizing an attack. That was the position taken by Senate liberals that Biden had previously dismissed during the debate about the war resolution.

Bush, in his book “Decision Points,” wrote: “Some members of Congress would later claim they were not voting to authorize war but only to continue diplomacy. They must not have read the resolution. Its language was unmistakable: ‘The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.’ ”

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Biden often says Americans can trust his judgment on questions of war because he was later in charge of a U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq during Obama’s first term as president.

In 2009, Obama asked Biden to manage the withdrawal of nearly 150,000 U.S. forces. Biden chaired a committee that made sensitive decisions about the pace and scope of the troop withdrawal, while also keeping an eye on economic and political issues in Iraq.

But Biden often leaves out what happened after that. Obama sent U.S. troops back into Iraq during his second term. Biden was still the vice president. The Biden camp argues these are two different conflicts and the troop levels were much higher pre-2011 and much lower post-2014. However, as top Obama administration officials have said in public, the two conflicts are inextricably linked. The Islamic State gained a foothold in Iraq in large part because U.S. forces had withdrawn.

“I have gotten 100 percent rating from NARAL as well. … I know my record of late from NARAL has been 100 percent. I don’t know whether it was 25 years ago.”

— Biden

Ilyse Hogue, president of the abortion rights group NARAL, tweeted during the debate that Biden “has been evolving over time but his lifetime rating from @naral is not 100%. His last year in Congress he had a 100%. Annual ratings are entirely dependent on what votes come up in any given session.” She added that Sanders is “absolutely correct that his own voting record is 100% lifetime.”

“You have nine super PACs.”

— Biden to Sanders

After a slow fundraising start, Biden is now flush with campaign cash and has locked down support from some of the best-funded Democratic super PACs.

Sanders doesn’t have a super PAC per se, but he enjoys the support of a “sprawling network of socialists, climate-change activists, millennial organizers and other liberal advocates, who raise money from millions of members,” as The Washington Post has reported. Nine groups in this coalition are known as “People Power for Bernie.”

Most of these pro-Sanders groups are not organized as super PACs — which can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money — but as politically active 501(c)(4)s.

It is unknown how much most of these groups have raised to support Sanders in the 2020 cycle or where they are getting their money because they are not required to disclose their donor lists. Advocates for more transparency in political donations — predominantly on the left — refer to this type of funding as “dark money.”

“The coronavirus pandemic reveals the fundamental failure of our country’s health-care system. How is it that we can spend twice as much as any other country and not be able to ensure that all people can get the care they need for free?”

— Sanders

Sanders often says this line in debates, but he never gets it quite right. He apparently meant to say the United States spends twice as much as other developed countries — defined as members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Instead, he said twice as much as any other country. (Later in the debate, he referred to “twice as much per capita” but that’s still not right.)

The United States pays far more per capita on health care than any other major country in the world ($9,892 in 2016) — twice as much as Canada ($4,753). The OECD median was $4,033. But Switzerland is a major developed country, and U.S. costs are 25 percent higher than Switzerland’s ($7,919). These figures come from a study by a team led by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

More recent OECD estimates show the United States spent $10,586 per person, compared with Switzerland ($7,317 per person), Norway ($6,187 per person) and Germany ($5,986 per person). All of those are more than half of U.S. spending, although the OECD average was just under $4,000. So Sanders would have been correct if he spoke about the average or median of other developed countries.

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