On Friday, congressional Republicans appointed Keith Hall to become the next director of the Congressional Budget Office. The announcement ended a careful two-month process that involved figuring out how to fill the position with a competent and credible individual, but without giving Democrats ammunition to decry any appointee as a partisan hack.
Hardly anyone dislikes outgoing CBO director Doug Elmendorf, which is no small achievement in this town. He’s a well-respected economist and someone who strived to play it down the middle. However, the perception among Republicans was that when push came to shove in the melee over the Affordable Care Act, he caved and gave the Democrats what they wanted, a score that allowed Nancy Pelosi to state with a straight face that Obamacare represented the biggest deficit reduction legislation in the history of Congress, a grotesque absurdity if there ever was one. That’s what precluded Elmendorf’s reappointment more than anything else.
