OBAMA TRIES CHICAGO STYLE ARM TWISTING ON THE CBO
Posted by straight shooter on July 31, 2009 under Economy, General, Health Care, Political TerrorismThe Obama administration is finally hitting its biggest roadblock in the debate over health care: the facts. Despite his best attempts to gloss over the real cost, the President continues to lock horns with the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), whose unflattering analyses are cutting significantly into the administration’s efforts to sell this as reform. Much to this administration’s displeasure, the CBO continues to provide an honest assessment of the bill’s price tag, which has rocketed well above $1 trillion.
Unlike other entities, the CBO is supposed to be above partisanship–but in the eyes of the Obama administration, that’s a problem. For an administration so accustomed to having its way with Congress, the press, and the American people, the CBO’s independence has been a powerful annoyance. Frustrated by his inability to control how CBO scores his proposal, President Obama took the unprecedented step of calling CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf into his office for a heart to heart. The White House was particularly angry over Elmendorf’s estimate that the House version of “reform” would “result in a net increase in the federal budget deficit of $239 billion over the 2010-2019.” Obviously the President didn’t take kindly to the CBO for interrupting his public spin with the bottom line.
But calling in Elmendorf to “discuss” these costs is highly unusual – even by liberal standards. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, this is the first time an administration has tried to directly intervene in how the CBO appraises legislation. More than a few people speculated that the administration was trying to strong-arm the Office into releasing more budget-friendly numbers in their scores. There would be no other motivation for the meeting, particularly since (as both Ed Morrissey and John Fund point out), the White House has its own budget office.
If President Obama were earnestly looking for ways to cut costs, he could have picked up the phone and called the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget. Instead, he reached across the entire Executive Branch to strong-arm a congressional appointee, a move that shows this President isn’t willing to fight fair in the most expensive policy initiative of his term.
As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell described it, “that’s like asking the umpires to come up to the owner’s box…. I mean, if the CBO is to have credibility, they’re the umpire.” To his credit, Elmendorf said that the meeting with President Obama would not impact how the CBO scores health care reform. And to prove it, the CBO released an assessment on Friday afternoon that disputed the Democrats’ claim that a few changes to the plan would result in big savings. On the contrary, the proposed cuts would only skim a measly 0.2% off the bill’s total price.
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merkin It would be wonderful if we could seat down tethgeor and compromise away our differences. But there has to be two parties to a compromise and for the last four years there has been only one. The Republicans are the ones who continue to move the goal posts, who refuse to compromise. It is the Republicans who moved so far to the right that they refuse to accept positions and policies that they actually formulated as solutions a few short years ago. The Obama administration is the most moderate administration we have had since the Ford administration. The Republicans have done everything that they can to sabotage Obama including doing everything in their power to extend the recession to try to prevent Obama’s re-election. This is the reason that we have two laws that are expiring that will cause massive damage to the economy, because the Republicans used the debt limit to try to impose austerity on the US knowing that it would damage the recovery. They are using the debt, most of which was run up on their watch, to try to prevent an Obama reelection.It is even more breathtaking than that. Thirty years of Republican deregulation and the Bush administration’s absolute total failures to regulate, to enforced the laws on the books caused the largest financial crisis and recession since the depression, that cost millions of people their jobs, millions of people their homes and which cost the nation 7 trillion dollars in real wealth and drove the government more than 4 trillion dollars further into debt. And the reason that the Republicans want to get the White House back is so that they can do it all over again by reapplying the same policies that caused the Great Recession guaranteeing another recession in 5, 7 or 10 years.These policies that the Republicans refuse to compromise on are more important to them than the impact that they have on the economy. For them the means justifies the ends. But you were going to prove me wrong about your pet peeve, government waste. You were going to prove that the Republicans are actually serious about this issue, that it is not just something that they talk about every four years at election time. And I assume that you were going to explain why they have been talking about government waste for more than thirty years but don’t seem to every get around to doing something about it when they are in power. And I assume that you were going to tell me why if this is such an important issue for you why do you not complain about the Republicans who seem to be taking advantage of you, asking for your vote and then not doing anything about government waste.