What, me worry?

Nothing to see here, Speaker Paul Ryan insists. It's not a big deal at all that the House passed a bill to repeal Obamacare and gut Medicaid and kick at least 24 million people off of health insurance without finding out what it might do to the budget or the economy. It's just a sixth of the economy and the House has never passed such a massive bill under budget reconciliation without getting a CBO score, but the fact that he did that and that because of it the House might have to vote again? Who cares?

Ryan has delayed formally sending the American Health Care Act to the Senate after his chamber’s May 4 vote, Bloomberg reported last week, in order to receive a confirmation from the CBO that the bill cuts the deficit enough to qualify for reconciliation in the Senate — that is, the Senate’s ability to pass the bill on a simple majority vote, foregoing the threat of a Democratic filibuster.

“We just want to have an abundance of caution to make sure,” Ryan said at his weekly press briefing Tuesday, explaining why he had rushed a House vote and then delayed sending the bill to the Senate. “CBO scores have been unpredictable in cases in the past. We don’t think that’s going to be the case, but again, we just want to make sure that we dot our ‘I’s and cross our ‘T’s exactly the right way, so that when we send a bill over to the Senate, it is not, as we say, fatal.”

A competent leader would have done all that dotting and crossing BEFORE sending a bill to the floor, not to mention having a big party in the White House Rose Garden with the president to celebrate overcoming weeks of embarrassing failures. But competency is a very high bar to be setting for Mr. Ryan.