Roughing the Health-Care Ref

摘要

We have entered the age of civility in American politics. Just last week, for instance, House Speaker John Boeh-ner stopped calling the Democrats' health-care bill "job killing" and began calling it "job crushing." Say it with me: awww. But there's one institution that has been civil all along: the Congressional Budget Office (sorry, but sometimes civility is boring). The nonpartisan agency, which calculates the official cost of legislation for Congress, speaks in the polite language of actuarial tables, refuses to reliably please either party, and is the closest thing American politics has to an umpire. And the Republicans are getting sick and tired of it.