All Mitch McConnell is asking is for the CBO to cook the books.

Senate Republicans don't like the score that they got out of the Congressional Budget Office for Trumpcare. Kicking 23 million people off of health insurance in the next decade just doesn't look good politically, so rather than reworking the actual legislation to try to make it not awful, they're pressuring the CBO to change their methodology and the numbers.

They say the CBO used data from March 2016 in coming up with the analysis that 22 million people would lose health insurance. By using a more recent benchmark from this year, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) argues that number might come down by as much as 6 million. […] CBO acknowledges that it is using the March 2016 data. But it says it is following standard procedure in doing so. […] Deborah Kilroe, the associate director for communications at CBO, said the agency typically uses the same baseline as the congressional budget resolution when scoring a bill that is protected by the reconciliation instructions. Kilroe noted that when Congress passed its budget resolution shortly after New Year’s Day, CBO had not yet issued the January 2017 benchmark that Johnson is now using in his updated analysis.

That's an "extremely unusual, unprecedented probably" ask, former CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin told Talking Points Memo. "The whole point of scoring is to make apples to apples comparisons," he said. "If you tweak the methodology in the middle of the process of passing a bill, it defeats the purpose of having a scorekeeper." By the way, Holtz-Eakin is not a liberal or even a Democrat. He's currently president of the conservative think tank American Action Forum. What Republicans want them to do is pretty ridiculous on its face—like Sen. John Barrasso's (R-WY) demand that the CBO come up with a score that shows the effect of "freedom," that shows "that the preponderance of the people who would not be insured were not actually losing insurance. […] Because it’s a free country, they would choose, because we eliminate the individual mandate, to not buy insurance."

Stan Collender, a former senior staffer on the Senate Finance and Budget committees blasted the maneuver. "You can assume that any changes in the methodology they’re demanding are to make their bill look better. Not to be factually correct, but politically salient." Of course that's why they're doing it. They're Republicans.

All we need is three Republican senators to block Trumpcare. If you have a GOP senator, we need you to call their office at (202) 224-3121. Demand that they put their constituents above their party. After the call, tell us how the call went.