Everyone knows by now that ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber likes to talk, so maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that he’s agreed to testify before Congress concerning the many deceptions Democrats used to pass ObamaCare back in 2009 and 2010.
Answering the questions of Congress is not a favorite activity of the Obama Administration, but as the president himself went to pains to tell us, Gruber is not part of his staff. He’s just a guy who was paid more than $400,000 in consulting fees to help construct this monstrosity of a law. If he actually had an office in the White House, Valerie Jarrett would surely be in his face first thing Monday morning letting him know he is not to provide any useful information whatsoever. But as it stands, he can say whatever he likes, and apparently he likes to say a lot.
One of the reasons I really don’t believe in conspiracies – especially these days – is that there is always someone around with a big mouth, and there is usually someone else on hand with a video-enabled smartphone and easy access to YouTube. That’s why we know as much as we do about how the ObamaCare scam was perpetrated. Gruber is that overconfident liberal who often thinks he can just tell it like it is and no one beyond those in the room at that moment will ever hear it. When that proves to be a delusion, the would-be conspirators who did keep quiet about their lies and deceptions – not to mention their thinly veiled contempt for the intelligence of the American people – have to scramble to do damage control.
Having said all that, I do think Republicans run the risk in these hearings of focusing on the wrong thing if they are not careful. Pollsters and consultants will want the hearings to generate cringe-inducing headlines about how Democrats thought Americans were stupid, because that will further drive down the president’s approval rating and the public’s feelings about the law in general. And there is nothing wrong with that, but you can’t stop there.
If the objective is to get rid of this horrendous law – and that must be the objective – then the American people need to be shown why the law is not “working” as the White House and its media allies keep insisting it is. They can help their cause here by exploring a couple of key points Gruber made in his public comments:
How the Democrats overemphasized supposed “cost reductions” because they thought that would appeal to the public, when this was really about herding everyone into government-approved insurance policies. Costs are not going down as we were promised. They’re going up. The White House is arguing that, well, they’re going up less than they would have. The truth is no one knows what would have happened if ObamaCare had not been implemented, but what we do know is that Obama promised premiums would go down by an average of $2,500 a year per family, and in fact they’re continuing to rise. Republicans need to explore in these hearings the reality that Democrats knew all along this would happen.
How the Democrats deceived the Congressional Budget Office to make it look like ObamaCare would reduce the deficit – by shifting costs to the “out years” while counting new tax revenues from day one – while oh, by the way, also managing to pretend ObamaCare was not chock full of new taxes.
Exploring more fully the fact that everyone in the White House – up to and including Obama himself – knew that like-your-plan-keep-your-plan promise was a lie, but repeated it anyway to keep the public’s opposition to the bill limited in intensity.
These three issues are crucial because it’s not enough just to make the public angry about the process used to pass the bill. The public already dislikes the bill and is already convinced the process of passing it was dishonest. What the public needs to understand now is that ObamaCare is substantively hurting them, and the deceptions Gruber has revealed – which can be explored more fully in his testimony – absolutely help to show that.
The more the public sees this, the more we will see pressure for full repeal, maybe even enough to bring along the 13 Senate Democrats who could give a repeal vote a veto-proof supermajority. I understand that’s a very ambitious goal. I’m the kind of guy who likes to think big, and I’d like to see congressional leaders who think that way too.
