CBO to House GOP: Go Climb A Tree

by evanmcmurry

The Congressional Budget Office has officially given up. Faced the 37th vote to repeal Obamacare the Affordable Care Act by the House Republicans, the CBO has stopped scoring the possible costs of repeal, all but telling the loons in the lower chamber to find something better to do with their time:

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, meanwhile, told Congress on Wednesday that it doesn’t have time to provide them with anymore estimates for the cost of repealing the legislation.

 “You requested that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) provide a cost estimate for that legislation,” Director Doug Elmendorf wrote in a letter to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis. “Unfortunately, we will not be able to do so. Preparing a new estimate of the budgetary impact of repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would take considerable time–probably several weeks.”

He noted that the CBO provided the estimate for Congress the last time it voted to repeal the bill — their report concluded repealing the law would raise the deficit by $109 billion over 10 years.

You’ll recall, of course, that these very selfsame House Repubs are gearing up to hold the debt ceiling hostage—again—to get Obama to agree to balance the budget within 10 years (a plan that would obliterate vast swaths of government, and not just the parts that help the poorz, but the parts that work on roads and bridges and stuff).

So the House is demanding the balancing of the budget while simultaneously trying to blow it up over the exact same time period. No wonder the CBO is slowly backing away.