We shouldn’t be remotely surprised to learn of Jonathan Gruber’s latest comments. Why? Well, because as anybody who has been paying attention knows, the entire Obamacare project has been an exercise in rank dishonesty from the get go. Gruber is routinely as slippery as hell, sure. But so is everybody else. Ezra Klein told us before the bill was even passed that advocates of reform had to mislead the public to get anything done, while his fellow travelers on the Left made no secret of their real goals. During the debate, the president and the broader Democratic party made repeated assurances that they knew full well were utterly false. The champions of the law within the journalistic class, meanwhile, refrained from admitting what the measure did until it had been launched, at which point they said, “of course you can’t keep your insurance; of course you are being charged more to subsidize others; of course there are winners and losers; how else did you think this was going to work”?
Obamacare’s partisans understood from the outset that their proposal was unpopular, and that in consequence they would not get it past the people unless those people were hoodwinked. But they didn’t care. They wanted their change far more than they wanted to respect the truth or the legislative process or the Constitution or the limits of executive power or the rule of law — or anything much at all. For its apologists, the results have been all that have mattered. And so, utterly convinced that any behavior in pursuit of their end was virtuous, they lied their nasty little heads off. They’re still lying.