Americans for Prosperity’s Tim Phillips appears on C-SPAN, gets the story wrong as usual

August 12, 2014

On C-SPAN’s Newsmakers this past Sunday, Tim Phillips, president of the Koch brothers’ political arm, Americans for Prosperity, gave the kind of interview you’d expect – one that plays fast and loose with the facts, pays tribute to his backers, and shows just how deluded Phillips and the Koch brothers truly are.

During the interview, Phillips characterized AFP’s work as simply opposing bad policies, but failed to mention that his backers have been pushing their extreme, self-serving agenda for over 30 years. Phillips also suggested that “most Americans… don’t have any sense of who David and Charles Koch are,” but he’s wrong – the Kochs are becoming a liability for the candidates they back.

That’s because voters are recognizing that AFP is essentially the third-largest political party in the country. The group plans to spend over $125 million in dark money this cycle to buy the Senate so Tim Phillips and the Kochs can see their extreme policies move from ideas to reality.

What are these extreme policies, you ask? Well for starters, they want to kill any raise in the minimum wage. They want to end Social Security as we know it. They want severe cuts to education funding to offset tax cuts for the wealthy. It’s an extreme, self-serving agenda that is out of touch with working Americans.

But wait, there’s more: thanks largely to Tim, the Kochs, and the extreme politicians they back, the current Congress is on track to be the least productive in modern history. Despite this, Tim thinks that “Americans are not as concerned about obstruction.” He said “it’s a good thing” that House Republicans have voted more than 50 times to repeal, replace, or cripple the Affordable Care Act instead of focusing on solving pressing problems like raising the minimum wage, extending unemployment insurance, and creating opportunity for families to get ahead.

This interview showed just how out of touch Tim Phillips and the Kochs are with the majority of Americans. In fact, the only point he made that was even close to being accurate came when he was asked for his thoughts on how the 2014 elections will play out. He answered that Republicans are struggling to take the lead because “the Republican brand is weak.” We couldn’t agree more.

That point aside, this was just another example of AFP using talking points to disguise the Koch brothers’ extreme agenda. Come November, the American people won’t be fooled.

Paid for by American Bridge 21st Century Foundation