Joe Scarborough Turns to Bart Simpson to Shred Mike Johnson’s CBO Jab

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough turned to Bart Simpson to hit back at House Speaker Mike Johnson’s jab at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) by warning that attacking the agency was the “last refuge of the big spending Republicans.”

Johnson appeared on Fox News on Thursday to defend President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” after exiting DOGE head Elon Musk criticized the legislation in an interview with CBS News days earlier. Johnson explained how he’d sent Musk a “long text” after hearing the comments.

Rounding on the CBO, he told Fox News: “What I wanted to make sure that he understands is that the projection that he’s referring to in others is from the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office. They are historically totally unreliable. It’s run by Democrats. 84% of the number crunchers over there are donors to Democrats. They don’t have our best interests in mind.”

During Friday’s Morning Joe, Scarborough ran the clip back before mocking Johnson and citing a moral lesson from a famous episode of The Simpsons in which Bart believes he can pass an exam by saying a prayer.

Okay, let me just say this. Mike Johnson has been there while the deficit has exploded at record rates. These Republicans, Jonathan Lemire and I will bring Mike in. I’ll bring Jim in as well, because Jim was around when he saw us fight day in and day out, and it was ugly. But he saw us fight day in and day out and we balanced the budget four years in a row.

And let me tell you, as Lisa Simpson once said of Bart, praying before an exam prayer is the last refuge of the truly desperate. I disagree with that, of course, but attacking the CBO is always the last refuge of the big spending Republican. They all do it because they don’t like facing the truth. And the truth is that under Republicans from 2017 to 2021, the budgets were bigger than they had ever been, the deficits bigger than they had ever been, the debt bigger than they’d ever been. And here we’re not talking about rounding errors, we are talking about $20 trillion that these Republicans are going to vote on to add to the federal debt $20 trillion. We can’t afford it.

There’s nothing ideological about this. There’s nothing ideological. About those numbers. There’s nothing ideological about not balancing the budget. I know I was there, we did it four years in a row. The only time that’s happened in the past century, and they’re adding $20 trillion to the debt with this bill. Jon Lemire and he’s blaming the Congressional Budget Office. I mean, that’s not even shooting the messenger. That’s even worse than that. He can’t believe that he knows that this bill cripples America’s economy over the next decade.

Watch above via MSNBC.