Obama, Gruber: Two peas in a pod

By LEROY GOLDMAN
Guest Columnist Blueridgenow.com

Published: Saturday, November 22, 2014 at 4:30 a.m.

I was in the hearing room that day in July 1973 when Fred Thompson, the minority counsel to Sen. Howard Baker, R-Tenn., on the Senate Watergate Committee, asked White House assistant Alexander Butterfield if he was aware of a taping system in the White House. Butterfield testified that he was aware of such a system.

Although it took another year for the end to come, those tapes changed everything.

In an analogous but different way, MIT economics professor Jonathan Gruber turns out to be President Barack Obama’s Alexander Butterfield. Don’t misunderstand — I am not suggesting that President Obama is guilty of obstruction of justice or contempt of Congress as Richard Nixon was. But I am suggesting that Gruber’s taped revelations will turn out to be terribly and irreversibly damaging to President Obama and Obamacare.

Gruber’s tapes document how the Obama administration deliberately misled Congress and the American people in order to get Obamacare enacted and implemented. They make it impossible to deny what really happened. Gruber’s revelations strip away the plausible deniability that presidents normally use to shield themselves from the political fallout of wrongdoing or blunder.

Here’s how Gruber’s condescending arrogance coupled with his loose lips have boomeranged on the president and Obamacare:

Obama and Gruber go way back. At a Brooking Institution conference in 2006, then-Sen. Obama said of Gruber and a few other academicians that he had “stolen ideas liberally” from people like Jon Gruber and others “who can inform policy debates with a prophetic voice.”

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And now we know that Obama meant what he said. Writing for The Hill, Justin Sink reported earlier this month that from 2009 until this year, Gruber visited the White House nearly two dozen times. He met with President Obama, former OMB Director Peter Orzag, former National Economic Council Director Larry Summers, and Nancy-Ann DeParle, who had the lead for the White House on Obamacare.

According to Steve Rattner, who worked as a lead adviser for President Obama in 2009, Jonathan Gruber was “the man” behind Obamacare.

And Gruber profited enormously from his unique role in advising the president on Obamacare. In March and June of 2009, the Department of Health and Human Services negotiated contracts with Gruber that totaled almost $400,000. In addition, Gruber and his firm have been hired by at least eight states to assist them with their health care exchanges. These contracts have provided Gruber with millions of dollars.

But here’s the heart of the matter: Gruber’s tapes document that the Obama administration knew the individual mandate, the centerpiece of the legislation, was a tax, but the administration also believed that the bill would not pass if either the American people or the Democrats on the Hill understood that.

So the bill was written in a way to disguise that. It was written so that the Congressional Budget Office would not score the mandate as a tax. Gruber drove that point home by saying that “the lack of transparency is a huge political advantage” and “the stupidity of the American voter ... was really, really critical for the thing to pass.”

It gets worse. In 2009, President Obama was interviewed by George Stephanopoulos of ABC News. Stephanopoulos asked the president five times if the mandate was a tax. The president responded by insisting the individual mandate was “absolutely not a tax increase.”

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And in 2009 in a speech to the American Medical Association, President Obama said, “No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”

Going forward, the president and top administration officials repeated this promise 37 times. They knew it wasn’t a promise. They knew it was a lie.

Ironically, in 2012, when the individual mandate’s constitutionality was being challenged before the Supreme Court, the administration was forced to reverse course and argue what Gruber tells us it knew from the outset — that the individual mandate was a tax.

So it comes down to this: Gruber and President Obama believed that the Democrats in Congress and the American people were stupid enough to be hoodwinked. Now President Obama believes the American people are stupid enough to buy his notion that Gruber was just a bit player in all of this.

In oral arguments before the Supreme Court next March in King v. Burwell, the Obama administration will expect that a majority of the Supreme Court will be stupid enough to fall for its assault on the plain English meaning of the section of Obamacare that limits subsidies to states that have established exchanges.

In 2012, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s four liberals and saved Obamacare. But much has changed since then. Public support for the legislation has dipped to 37 percent, an all-time low. Earlier this month, the electorate punished Democrats and repudiated President Obama’s policies. And now the firestorm created by the Gruber tapes has ripped the scab off the administration’s duplicitous “selling” of the law.

Next June, I believe the Supreme Court will rule in King v. Burwell that the administration’s reach went beyond its grasp. And that will enable the American people to force the president and Congress to rewrite this contrived and tortured piece of legislation.

LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident.

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