Fact Check: CPAC

Here are a few notable claims from the conference we examined -- specifically checking their veracity and the surrounding context.

While discussing the opioid epidemic and illicit drugs, Fox News contributor Sara Carter told CPAC's audience that in the height of the crisis, places in Ohio ran out of room for bodies in the morgues and had to put some in freezer trailers outside.

"I've never seen anything quite like this then when I went to the epicenter in Ohio and other states who are facing this crisis," said Carter, "where the morgues were so overflowing with bodies that they had to rent freezer trailers to put the children in the freezer trailers outside of the mortuary."

Facts First: This is true.

Initially, Carter's claim was met with skepticism online, with some accusing her of overblowing the opioid crisis.

As CNN reported, the state of Ohio purchased several mobile morgues (trucks that have refrigerated trailers) in the mid-2000s. Originally, the trailers were meant to be used for emergency/mass casualty incidents like mass shootings and so forth. Several times in 2015 and 2016 some morgues in Ohio had to use the trailers due to overcrowded morgues, with officials citing overdose deaths as the primary cause of the overflow.

In 2017, Ohio Coroner in Montgomery County Dr. Kent Harshbarger told CNN "overdoses are coming in all the time and we're constantly full on a day-to-day basis."

While praising President Donald Trump during his remarks at CPAC, Vice President Mike Pence listed off some of the accomplishments he believes the administration has made in its first two years. Among them, of course, was the 2017 tax reform.

"With the support of this generation of conservatives, President Trump signed the largest tax cut and tax reform in American history," the Vice President said. "That's promises made and promises kept."

Facts First: The tax cuts Trump signed into law in December 2017 was certainly large, but the largest? No.

When it comes to measuring the size of these tax reforms, many studies look at how the federal tax revenue lost from the cut compares as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) over time.

An analysis from CNN on this very claim found that Trump's tax reform comes in at around -1.1% of GDP. By this measurement, the 2017 tax reform is below at least six previous tax cuts passed under presidents including Obama, George W. Bush, John F. Kennedy, and Reagan.

When looking at the current inflation-adjusted dollar amount the tax reform would cost, it still comes in under the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010, and the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 according to data from the Treasury Department.

No matter how many times the administration makes this claim, it's still incorrect.

During the second day of CPAC, several speakers made jokes (some more seriously than others) about the Green New Deal, specifically suggesting that Democrats are looking to get rid of cows.

Referencing the Green New Deal resolution, former Deputy Assistant to President Trump Sebastian Gorka claimed that Democrats "'want to take your pickup truck, they want to rebuild your home, they want to take away your hamburgers. This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved." Sen. Ted Cruz, too, made reference to the removal of cows.

"I hope to see PETA supporting the Republican party," he said, "now that the Democrats want to kill all the cows." Rep. Mark Meadows joined in on the joke, suggesting that Chick-Fil-A's stock will increase with Democrats "trying to get rid of all the cows," citing the Green New Deal.

Facts First: Getting rid of cows was mentioned in a now-removed FAQ on the Green New Deal but is not in the actual resolution.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's team released an FAQ following the Green New Deal resolution. Dealing with the question of why the resolution focused on "100% clean and renewable" energy as opposed to "100% renewable" the FAQ explained that "we aren't sure that we'll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast."

Those 18 words set off a wave of attacks from conservatives and Republicans, quickly becoming a focal point of their criticism of the Green New Deal. (The upcoming cover of the conservative magazine National Review features Ocasio-Cortez surrounded by cattle.)

The FAQ was later renounced by Ocasio-Cortez and her team, with her Chief of Staff Saikat Chakrabarti tweeting that an "early draft of a FAQ that was clearly unfinished and that doesn't represent the GND resolution got published to the website by mistake."

Regarding agriculture, the resolution does not mention cows but focuses on "working collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible."

This story is breaking and being updated.

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