By forcing federal funding as a quid pro quo, Democrats stupidly opened a giant hole for the coming Supreme Court challenge. Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber explicitly says the Administration backed the quid pro quo as a way to punish balky states. He also says Obamacare passed due to a deliberate “lack of transparency” and “stupidity of the American voter.” Well fuck you very much sir, your dishonesty, sleaze and massive stupidity combined with arrogance may end up derailing Obamacare.
“The federalism conflicts contained in the individual mandate provision” are precisely what the Supreme Court challenge is based on, and it is a solid, well-thought-out challenge based on constitutional law.
Jonathan Turley:
[Gruber] repeatedly endorsed the theory at the heart of the recent decisions in Halbig and King by challengers to the ACA: to wit, that the federal funding provision was a quid pro quo device to reward states with their own exchanges and to punish those that force the creation of federal exchanges. That issue will now be decided by the United States Supreme Court.
Reason:
Gruber said explicitly that the tax credits to offset coverage costs were conditioned on state participation in the law’s exchanges—a contention that the administration denies, and is at the heart of a legal challenge on its way to the Supreme Court.
And here is the oh-so-smug Gruber boasting about how the Obama Administration was deceptive and sleazy about Obamacare.
“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO [Congressional Budget Office] scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in – you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed”¦ Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass….Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.”