Congressional Republicans may be considering having hearings about Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber’s comments applauding the “lack of transparency” surrounding the passage of the health-care law, The Washington Post reports.
“We may want to have hearings on this,” Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee told The Washington Post Wednesday. “We shouldn’t be surprised they were misleading us.”
“I just had a colleague text me saying, ‘We’ve got to look into this!'” Jordan said.
Gruber is the now-notorious Obamacare architect who has attributed Obamacare’s passage to “the stupidity of the American voters,” a “lack of transparency” about what was in the law, and “the basic exploitation” of voters, which he deemed a “very clever” way to get the law passed. (RELATED: In Third Video, Obamacare Architect Talks About ‘Basic Exploitation’ of America Voters [VIDEO])
Whether the latest videos become the center of new congressional hearings on the how the health-care law was passed, more of Gruber’s years-old comments on the legality of Obamacare subsidies in the states have already been cited in Supreme Court briefs submitted this fall, after recordings were re-discovered over the summer.
Several videos feature Gruber explaining that the health law’s premium subsidies are restricted to state-run Obamacare exchanges — the subject of several lawsuits, one of which, King v. Burwell, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear next session.
“If you’re a state and you don’t set up an Exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits,” Gruber was taped saying in 2012, the exact argument argued by the plaintiffs in King. Since that recording and one other were discovered, the plaintiffs cited Gruber’s comments in their petition asking the Supreme Court to take the case — which was granted last week.
Gruber, of course, brushed aside his own comments as a “speak-o.” But although his expertise and an amicus brief he signed onto had been cited many times in the Obama administration’s filings in the King case, any mention of Gruber was scrubbed from the administration’s filings in October, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is coordinating the case for the plaintiffs.