Gruber lawyers up: If you want to see the work I did, 'take it up with my counsel'

Give Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz an A for tenacity, but there was no way he was going to get anything other than this out of Gruber. I lost count on how many times Gruber said "take it up with my counsel" in the course of a 3:30 clip, but it's ultimately nothing more than a stall. There's no grounds for Gruber's counsel to withhold it from the committee when he did the work as part of a contract with HHS. If the federal government paid for the work, Congress has the right to see it.

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But hey, they'll have to talk with Gruber's lawyer! He's not giving up anything: Now I will say this for Gruber. If the HHS paid for the work, it's really the HHS that Congress needs to subpoena the information from, not Gruber as the contractor. On the other hand, this is the Obama Administration we're talking about, so just because they're legally bound to give it up doesn't mean they will. The law is pretty much whatever Obama decides it is on a given day. What are Gruber's documents going to show? Probably a lot about the real assumptions Democrats made about the likely effects of ObamaCare, on everything from coverage ratios to premiums to impact on networks to actual impact on deficits (as opposed to the B.S. they fed the CBO, which according to Gruber himself was designed to deceive). There's little doubt in my mind that the Gruber documents - and Congress is going to get them eventually - will contain a treasure trove of information that further demonstrates how dishonest the administration was in selling this whole thing. The question in my mind is whether the information proves to esoteric for the public to really get incensed about it. The media won't take the information and translate it into plain English for the sake of their viewers. Of course. The media won't cover it at all if they can help it. It's going to be up to the Republicans to make the public see why this information matters, and that's crucial, because the real story here is not that Gruber called us all stupid. It's that ObamaCare doesn't do what the White House claims it did, and never was going to, and they knew that all along. Make the public understand that, and you can repeal it. I'm not sure talking to Gruber's lawyer is the place to start, though. If I'm Congress, I'm beating up the HHS to hand this information over. Today.

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