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Republicans “refuse to acknowledge that a factual thing is a factual thing.”

The GOP pushed for the removal a non-partisan report by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service (Congress’s own think tank) that showed that the very partisan Republican economic plan of tax cuts for the wealthy helping the economy is dead wrong.

The federal agency that wrote the report is “the gold standard,”  their integrity  is “unimpeachable” per Rachel Maddow.

They show that there is no evidence that cutting taxes on the rich will make the economy grow, which is exactly the basis of Mitt Romney’s and the GOP’s economic philosophy. That is what Romney has been trying to sell America. That is the premise he’s been pushing for months and months.

So what did Senate Republican aides do when they got wind of the findings that conflict with their own talking points? Why, they started complaining about them so strongly that the agency withdrew the report.

The GOP does this repeatedly: Don’t like what you hear? Get rid of the report. But we have it. The Maddow Blog has it. The Internets have it, right here. And as Rachel Maddow reminds us, “there’s nothing that Senate Republicans can do to stop that.”

Maddow Blog’s Steve Benen:

More information is coming to light.

Thomas Hungerford, the CRS researcher who produced the report, told HuffPost that he stands by it. “Basically, the decision to take it down, I think The New York Times article basically got it right, that it was pressure from the Senate minority to take it down,” Hungerford said. “CRS reports go through many layers of review before they’re issued and as far as the tone and the conclusions go, people who specifically look at the writing and the tone said it was okay. So it’s not going to be that and as I can tell you outright, I stand by the report and the analysis in the report.”

Hungerford said that he had never experienced suppression like this before….

For its part, McConnell’s office insists “people outside of Congress” also raised concerns about the CRS report, but Tim Noah explained that these outsiders are apparently limited to conservative think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation.

Here is the New York Times article.

The Republican party suppresses the vote and suppresses the truth. Why any voter would think either of those actions is worthy of their support is beyond me.

Steve Benen goes on to say, “I talked yesterday with the office of House Ways and Means Committee Ranking Member Sander Levin (D-Mich.), who’s begun an informal investigation to determine the extent to which the CRS faced coercion from Mitch McConnell’s office.”

Jared Bernstein, a former economist for Vice President Biden:

“This sounds to me like a complete political hit job and another example of people who don’t like the results and try to use backdoor ways to suppress them… I’ve never seen anything like this, and frankly, it makes me worried.”

Me too.