WASHINGTON — The roster of House Democrats planning to boycott President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration grew to about 50 on Tuesday in a protest of the New York businessman’s policies and his repeated criticism of legendary civil rights activist John Lewis.

The Georgia congressman made headlines over the weekend for challenging Trump’s legitimacy to be the next president and erroneously claiming that Trump’s inauguration would be the first he will have missed since coming to Congress three decades ago.

In fact, Lewis had skipped President George W. Bush’s inauguration in 2001.

Trump struck on Tuesday morning, as is typical, on Twitter: “WRONG (or lie)!” Trump tweeted, citing a 2001 Washington Post report that noted Lewis had skipped George W. Bush’s inauguration.

Lewis’ office on Tuesday confirmed that the congressman had missed Bush’s swearing-in.

“His absence at that time was also a form of dissent,” said spokeswoman Brenda Jones. “He did not believe the outcome of that election, including the controversies around the results in Florida and the unprecedented intervention of the U.S. Supreme Court, reflected a free, fair and open democratic process.”

Obamacare fallout

WASHINGTON — Insurance premiums would soar for millions of Americans and 18 million more would be uninsured in just one year if Republicans scuttle much of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul without a replacement, Congress’ budget analysts said Tuesday.

Spotlighting potential perils for Republicans, the report immediately became a flashing hazard light for this year’s effort by Donald Trump and GOP lawmakers to annul Obama’s law and — in a more complicated challenge — institute their own alternative.

It also swiftly became political fodder in what is expected to be one of this year’s biggest battles in Congress.

Republicans have produced several outlines for how they’d redraft Obama’s 2010 statute, but they’ve failed to unite behind one plan. President-elect Trump and GOP congressional leaders have at times offered clashing descriptions of their shared top goal, so eventual success is hardly guaranteed.

Tuesday’s evaluation came from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, joined by Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation.

Together, they analyzed a Republican-written bill, vetoed by Obama last January, that would have erased major portions of his overhaul. Those included tax penalties for people who fail to buy insurance and for larger companies that don’t cover workers, federal subsidies to help consumers buy policies on the law’s online marketplaces and an expansion of Medicaid coverage for low-income people.

Court vacancy

Trump has met with one of the judges on his short list for potential Supreme Court nominees, less than two weeks before he is expected to announce his choice for the nation’s highest court.

Judge William Pryor, an Alabama-based judge on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, met with Trump in New York on Saturday, said two people familiar with the meeting. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the meeting had not been publicly announced.

Trump said last week that he would select a candidate to fill the seat of the late Justice Antonin Scalia within his first two weeks in office. He has promised to seek someone in the conservative’s mold and said he is working from a list of 21 people, mainly conservative state and federal judges in their 50s.

For nearly a year, the court has had only eight justices, which means they can deadlock at 4-4 on decisions.

Ex-CIA chief miffed

Trump has long flirted with an adversarial relationship with our country’s intelligence community. And now he apparently has gone too far for at least one of its leaders.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published Monday night, CIA Director John O. Brennan had finally had it. Brennan said Trump crossed “the line” by invoking Nazi Germany while talking about the intelligence community having, in Trump’s words, “allowed” a dossier full of unconfirmed and salacious allegations about him to leak into the public domain.

Here’s Trump’s tweet:

“Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to “leak” into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?”

Brennan didn’t hold back, saying Trump has a right to challenge the intelligence community — but not in this manner.

“It’s when there are allegations made about leaking or about dishonesty or a lack of integrity, that’s where I think the line is crossed,” Brennan said.

He added: “Tell the families of those 117 CIA officers who are forever memorialized on our wall of honor that their loved ones who gave their lives were akin to Nazis.”

Tell the CIA officers who are serving in harm’s way right now and their families who are worried about them that they are akin to Nazi Germany. I found that to be very repugnant, and I will forever stand up for the integrity and patriotism of my officers who have done much over the years to sacrifice for their fellow citizens.”

That’s pretty strong.

Brennan will not continue on as CIA director in the soon-to-be-installed Trump administration - that’s Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan. -- so his decision to lash out at Trump isn’t all that significant going forward. But it’s worth acknowledging just how stern a rebuke the CIA director delivered to Trump just days before he takes the oath of office.

And were this not Trump - and had there not been a kind of slow boil of the president-elect’s controversial statements about the intelligence community - this is the kind of thing that would register as major news. In a way, we’ve become desensitized to it.

A few examples of how we got to this point:

It took Trump until last week to acknowledge that Russia was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta - a long-held conclusion of the intelligence community. Trump had previously suggested that it might have been the Democrats themselves, China, “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds” or “some guy in his home in New Jersey.”