Hmmm: White House blog post kinda sorta defends Boehner's plan

But the more interesting question is why would Jack Lew write this, and essentially defend Boehner and his bill? I think the most plausible reason is that Democrats have just realized that the Reid bill, which the White House is backing, has made the same mistake, so that Reid’s cuts would also be scored as lower than its authors claim by CBO (probably at exactly the same level as the original Boehner bill). With House Republicans accepting CBO’s correction and re-writing their bill with deeper cuts to suit the later CBO baseline, Reid’s bill suddenly becomes a much weaker player in all this unless he also makes deeper cuts, which the Democrats are obviously not inclined to do.

In that sense, this baseline confusion could well strengthen Boehner’s hand. He has another chance here to design the bill in a way that addresses some of the concerns that House conservatives have raised today—that is, in a way that relies less on back-loaded caps, and that more generally just has effectively deeper caps but on its face is the same bill at the same levels that congressional leaders informally agreed to over the weekend. The same structure and the same level of cuts, but using the later baseline, gives him a chance to produce a stronger bill but one that should have no less of a chance of shaping the Senate debate and the ultimate outcome if it passes the House.