Sue Lowden, a candidate for the Republican nomination to run against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), recently boasted that she single-handedly stopped a pro-union bill when she was in the state Senate. The problem, as the Reno Gazette-Journal discovered, is that this never actually happened.
“I was a state senator in this very difficult time of right to work,” Lowden said. “You know, was it going one way or another? And it went right through the Assembly. It passed that the state would not be a right-to-work state. And I stopped it in the Senate.”
However, the Gazette-Journal found, there was no such bill that came anywhere close to passage. The closest example was in 1995, there was a bill that would have guaranteed a right to join a union. It failed in the Senate by 15-3, and did not make it to the Assembly at all.
Lowden has admitted her error, the paper reports:
“I absolutely want to clarify that,” she said. “We’ve gone over the records meticulously, which maybe I should’ve done before I said anything. It was my vivid recollections of so many close votes. That’s how I remembered it, but the record doesn’t show it.”
She chalked the mistake up to the 15-year time lapse and the fact that she was the swing vote on many important issues in the 1993 session. Her election to the Legislature in 1992 swung control of the Senate to Republicans.
“We had a lot of 11-10 votes,” she said.
