How Republicans Can Fight the Good Fight

(Bloomberg View) -- In an interview with the Washington Examiner's Philip Klein, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mick Mulvaney, took some shots at the Congressional Budget Office and its ability to inject some neutral expertise into the legislative process, asking whether "the day of the CBO has come and gone" and accusing it of being biased against Republicans.

The latter charge is silly; the current CBO director is a Republican, hired by Republicans. Besides, the CBO has had a terrific reputation for decades. That doesn't mean its assumptions can't be questioned, of course, but Mulvaney happens to be director of an organization perfectly capable of producing its own analysis of, say, the Republican health-care bill. If he thinks the CBO is wrong, he's in the best position to make the case with facts and numbers, so his choice of doing it with rhetoric suggests there's not much there. 

What matters, however, isn't administration attacks on CBO. There's actually a long history of those, although that faded when Bill Clinton decided to accept CBO numbers instead of contest them with OMB estimates, as previous presidents had done. After all, the entire reason the Congressional Budget Office exists is to give legislators information independent of the president.

The short version of the story is that in the years after World War II the growth of the "presidential branch" gave the White House a large information advantage over Congress, which depended on the institutional memory of individual House and Senate committees. Congress fought back in the 1960s and 1970s by hiring more professional staff and creating congressional agencies, including the CBO in 1974. Since 1995, when Newt Gingrich was speaker of the House, Congress's commitment to neutral expertise has eroded -- and with it the ability of Congress to legislate -- but the CBO itself has remained a first-rate operation.

So what really matters is not whether the White House attacks the CBO -- that's more or less to be expected of institutional rivals -- but whether Republicans in Congress fight back. It's an open question whether very many House and Senate Republicans even want to be serious legislators. If they do, and I certainly hope they do, then they'll rally around their own agency. Without it, they'll be weakening themselves and their institutions. And that, I'm afraid, weakens U.S. democracy.

1. Jack Santucci at the Monkey Cage on Maine's ranked-choice voting. 

2. James Warren talks with Seth Masket about political scientists in the public conversation. 

3. Nate Cohn on why state polls were off in 2016. 

4. James Downie on Donald Trump's inability to master basic facts about his own policy agenda. Normally I might give tweets the benefit of the doubt; it's hard to get things right sometimes in 140 characters. But Trump has pretty much forfeited any doubt on this subject, as anyone who has looked at a fact-check of one of his full-length interviews knows. 

5. And my Bloomberg View colleague Megan McArdle on what we miss by working from home. 

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Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg View columnist. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

To contact the author of this story: Jonathan Bernstein at jbernstein62@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Brooke Sample at bsample1@bloomberg.net.

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