Yes. Republicans Lie All the Time. About Everything

Ezra Klein:

Ezra Klein - Repealing health-care reform would cost hundreds of billions of dollars -- and Eric Cantor knows it:
House Republicans are in a pickle.... [T]he health-care bill reduces the federal deficit by more than $100 billion over the next 10 years. Luckily, they've figured out an answer to their problem: They've decided to simply exempt the repeal bill from the rules. That means they're beginning the 112th Congress by lifting their own rules in order to take a vote that will increase the deficit. Change we can believe in, and all that.

Republicans are aware that this looks, well, horrible. So they're trying to explain why their decision to lift the rule requiring fiscal responsibility is actually fiscally responsible. Majority Leader Eric Cantor got asked about this, and he returned the reporter's serve with a volley of nonsense:

About the budget implications, I think most people understand that the CBO did the job it was asked to do by the then-Democrat majority, and it was really comparing apples to oranges.... It talked about 10 years' worth of tax hikes and six years' worth of benefits. Everyone knows beyond the 10-year window, this bill has the potential to bankrupt this federal government as well as the states.

That's all well and good -- but it's not true....

As for the period "beyond the 10-year window," the Congressional Budget Office -- which is now comparing "apples to apples," as the law is delivering full benefits for all 10 of the next 10 years -- says the law saves vastly more money in its second decade:

The legislation will reduce federal deficits during the decade beyond the 10-year budget window relative to those projected under current law—with a total effect in a broad range around one-half percent of GDP.

That's in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars.

What's important about Cantor's argument is not that he's wrong. It's why he's saying something he knows to be wrong. There are plenty of reasons to oppose the health-care reform bill. You might not want to spend that money insuring people, or you might not think the legislation goes far enough in reforming the system. But as a matter of arithmetic, using the math that Congress always uses, the bill saves money.... But Cantor and the GOP know full well that the bill is unpopular largely because people think it increases the deficit. Polls have shown that only 15 percent of Americans know that CBO said it will reduce the deficit. If, in the repeal fight, it becomes widely understood that the bill reduces the deficit, it will become more popular. So it's crucial, as the repeal effort goes forward, for Republicans to become much more brazen in falsely asserting that the bill doesn't really reduce the deficit, and that even if the CBO does say it reduces the deficit, that they're saying that because they've been tricked somehow. But CBO wasn't tricked. If it were, Cantor, who has a staff dedicated to figuring these things out, would have a better argument than the one he's offering.

There's no excuse for anybody to ever carry water for this Republican Party. Anybody. Ever.