Conservatives ... You Can't Handle The CBO!

After all year repeatedly citing Congressional Budget Office estimates and analysis to argue that health care reform would increase the deficit, conservatives this week faced a CBO report that said health care reform would cut the deficit.

So conservatives breathed a sigh of relief and rallied around the Senate Finance Committee bill, right?

Right.

Fascinating to me are the lengths conservatives have gone to dismiss the report as irrelevant.

Their main argument? There is no Senate Finance Bill. (Surprisingly Zen, I know!)

What are they talking about? Because the Senate Finance Committee traditionally votes on bills with plain English language, so people can actually follow the debate, and then has the bill translated to technical legislative language before it reaches the full Senate floor, conservatives are straining to claim the plain English version is completely meaningless.

(Remember way back when, conservatives would complain that bills were thousands of pages too long and no one could understand what was in them? Good times.)

Legal Insurrection breathily claims: "THERE IS NO BAUCUS BILL. The CBO scored the concepts described by the Baucus Committee. There is no legislative text. None. Baucus and his Democratic colleagues refused to reduce their concepts to actual legislation prior to a vote."

Somewhat less breathy Tevi Troy at the National Review similarly says: "This is again a preliminary score, as they have specs, but not legislative language, from the committee. This is somewhat akin to test-driving the blueprint of a car rather than the actual car itself."

The Heritage Foundation is calling it the "Vapor Bill."

Of course, this is all nonsense.

CBO is giving a preliminary score based on the plain English language so the process doesn't get more bogged down than it already has. It will then give a full score once the bill is translated into technical language.

The expectation is the numbers would be similar. If they weren't, it will be known and legislators would surely make changes.

Even if Democrats wanted to skirt the CBO (a position you could justify as CBO has already made their general views known, and legislators could decide to take them or leave them as not everyone considers their methodology flawless) there is no political way they could.

All Democratic leaders have pledged to pass a bill that is at least deficit neutral as deemed by CBO. It will be impossible to get the votes of any right-leaning Democrats, let alone GOP Sen. Olympia Snowe, without a favorable CBO number for the final version of legislation.

Yet for some reason, The Weekly Standard's Mary Katherine Ham boldly predicts CBO will never get a chance to score the final bill. Never!

Unfortunately, Democrats will never wait for a CBO score of the actual legislative language before enacting this behemoth—even waiting for a preliminary score before a committee vote was a lot to ask— so this early and rosier-than-others picture of the bill will mean points for Democrats.

Such poor analysis of the political landscape will not serve conservatives well. It is blindingly obvious, for better or for worse, that Democrats are working very closely with CBO to make sure whatever they put on the floor passes CBO's muster. Betting on CBO getting the shaft is a sure loser.

But most conservatives are looking to obstruct, not solve the health care crisis. And they grasping for whatever arguments serves them in the moment.

As The New Republic's Jonathan Chait observed after CBO scored the original version of the Senate Finance Bill: "...Max Baucus produced a plan that reduces the budget deficit by significant and growing amounts over time ... You wouldn’t expect every single Republican to come on board. But the fact that zero Republicans endorsed his bill even after their putative objections were completely satisfied is significant and disturbing."

Conservatives made the choice of presuming you couldn't craft health care legislation that cuts the deficit. Bad move. Whatever problems liberals have with the Senate Finance bill, that fact is it proves you can.

(And you could cut the deficit even more if you include a robust public option, which looks more likely to added to the legislation before it hits the Senate floor.)

Conservatives have painted themselves in a corner. And their response has been to throw paint all over the room.

P.S. I'm also still waiting for just one conservative to accept the CBO estimate of household costs from the House climate bill.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future