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| Jonathan Gruber |
NEW REPUBLIC
By Brian Beutler
In an otherwise excellent exegesis of the ongoing controversy surrounding Jonathan Gruber, Vox’s Ezra Klein treats an infamous video in which the Obamacare adviser mocks the “stupidity of the American voter” as distinct from an earlier Gruber-related controversy, in which the MIT economist appeared to validate a legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act. The latter, in Klein's telling, is a genuine threat to the law, as it can be construed to vindicate the law's challengers, who claim that the Obama administration is illegally subsidizing insurance in states that didn't set up their own exchanges. The former, by contrast, merely affirms the right's suspicion that Obamacare is a symptom of liberal condescension to the ignorant masses.
But the controversies are actually conjoined, and the link between them explains why the right isn’t merely going to run Gruber’s name through the mud, but probably haul him in front of a congressional committee or two and recapitulate his sins every day until the Supreme Court determines the fate of the Affordable Care Act for a second time. The two Grubergates are being deployed together in service of a common goal.
That goal is for the Supreme Court’s five conservatives to hobble the law without fear that their decision will be interpreted—correctly—as a spite-driven judicial logrolling of a statute conservatives hate.