From Sunday’s “Roundtable.”

On the CBO scoring of Obama’s health-care plan:

I think what happened this week is we had our emperor’s-new-clothes moment. And that is that Obama had argued ever since the beginning, when he made his address to the joint session of Congress, that the rationale for health-care reform–it was a necessity because our spending on health care is excessive, $2.5 trillion a year, it’s going to destroy our economy. And he’s right about that.
And then he says, “Therefore, I’m introducing reform,” which as we now learn–the CBO has told us openly–is going to increase our costs rather than decrease our costs. It totally undercuts and contradicts the central rationale of his plan.
And of course, it was always out there. It was obvious: if you’re going to increase health care provisions with a huge universal new entitlement of universal care, of course it’s going to increase costs.
You could hide that in the rhetoric, but he can’t hide it any more after what we heard from the Congressional Budget Office. And he is stuck.
Revenue neutrality is a red herring. Even if you achieve that, it leaves us on the course that we were on originally–that Obama had said originally is ruining our economy.
And to achieve revenue neutrality, the House is insisting on huge taxes on investors and small business. Which means that you cannot go to the well [again] on that, and you have used up a source of revenue that would otherwise help cure our deficit.
So…I think it’s [the CBO estimates] exploded the entire fiscal rationale of the plan.

On the Sotomayor hearings:

It is a waste of time, and it isn’t even an entertaining show. Ever since Robert Bork spoke the truth in answering his questions about his philosophy and was denied a seat on the court, everybody understood that it’s kabuki.
And I thought that she–that this nominee–really pushed the envelope of disingenuousness. I mean, it was a hell of a performance. As Mara said, [she] repudiated the standard of empathy, repudiated her statements about a wise Latina, implying that whereas she had said a Latina makes a superior judgment to a white guy, she actually meant equal–and she said it apparently six times and she had it published once.
And then when she said that she would be guided by the law–she’s a person who says that the law is indistinct, it’s a matter of experience and interpretation. Who makes the law? She does on the court.
Her performance was absolutely incredible in the sense that it was not believable, but it will get her on the court.