Via Kevin Drum, I see that Megan McCardle has written a confusing and defensive post accusing the Democrats of "basically gutt[ing]" the Congressional Budget Office. I have no idea what she means:
My procedural complaints are somewhat more obscure. The biggest one is that I am beginning to believe that in order to get this bill passed, the Democrats basically gutted the CBOl. Not because they were working with the CBO to get estimates--that's the CBO's job, to provide Congress with a cost. But rather, because this bill was something novel in the history of legislation. Previous Congresses wrote bills, and then trimmed them to get a better CBO score: witness the Bush tax cut sunsets. But the Congressional Democrats started out with a CBO score they wanted, and worked backward to the bill. They've been pretty explicit about the fact that no one wants this actual bill; rather, the plan is to pass basically anything, and then go and totally rewrite it when the budget spotlight is off. I'm not aware of any other piece of legislation that was passed this way.
Essentially, the Democrats have finished the process of gaming the CBO scores. They're now meaningless. You don't pass a piece of legislation that bears any resemblance to what you intend to end up with; you pass a piece of legislation that gets a good CBO score, and then go and alter it piece by piece.
Wha? Like Drum, I'm mystified at what she's getting at here. The CBO remains the same non-partisan institution it always has been. President Obama wanted to write a bill that was deficit neutral -- the one the Senate intends to pass Thursday actually lowers the deficit -- and in order to do that, they rewrote the bill several times until the CBO, in its role as independent arbiter, said that that it was deficit neutral. No one has said anything about going back to "totally rewrite" the bill when the budget spotlight is off.
McCardle and the Weekly Standard also complain about a provision that would make it harder to repeal the independent board that would cut Medicare and Medicaid costs in an effort to avoid congress' porky proclivities. (Yes, these are the budget hawks complaining about this.) They do so by taking a quote of out context, either perniciously or because they didn't bother to read the entire page.
Check out page 1020 of the bill they refer to: It says that the recommendations of the independent board cannot be repealed, nor the board itself, but if you read on, that rule can can be waived by a three-fifths majority in the Senate. The idea is, again, that medical spending rules are best made by doctors, not by senators. This isn't the most democratic provision in the world, but it's not tyranny, and it's silly to watch people who support Senate filibusters of everything and anything complain about super majority requirements designed to cut the deficit.
-- Tim Fernholz
