Jonathan Gruber is a Liar. Was He a Liar Under Oath?
Jonathan Gruber is a liar. The question now is whether Jonathan Gruber was a liar while under oath.
In a sworn hearing before the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday, Gruber, widely cited in the press over the last few years as an architect of Obamacare, insisted that he did not write any of the health care law himself. "I didn't draft the legislation," he said, later reiterating the claim: "I did not write any part of the Affordable Care Act."
Asked by Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wy.) why he claimed in 2012 to have written part of the law, he said that it was "an effort to seem more important than I was," and that he "was speaking glibly."
He seems to have spoken "glibly" on multiple occasions.
As The Hill notes, in a late 2010 lecture to students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Gruber is a faculty member, he talked about the health law and described his role in its creation, saying, "Full disclaimer: I'm going to describe it objectively, but I helped write it."
In another 2010 video, captured by C-SPAN and posted at Townhall, Gruber also noted his bias in favor of the law while claiming to have helped write it. "Once again, unabashed, I helped write the federal [health care] bill as well," he said. That remark was made the same month that Obamacare was signed into law.
Two years later, Gruber hadn't changed his story. In a now-infamous 2012 lecture on the law's health exchanges at Noblis, Gruber not only said that states that don't set up exchanges don't have access to tax subsidies, he also referred to the "the one bit of the bill I actually wrote."
The issue isn't whether those statements were glib. It's whether they were true. (Notably, when asked by Rep. Scott Desjarlais (R-Tenn.) whether other embarassing videotaped statements were lies or not, Gruber would only say that his remarks were "glib and thoughtless and really inexcusable.")
There is no way to reconcile his multiple past statements with the statements he made this week while under oath. Either Gruber spent two years lying about his role in writing the law, or he was lying this week in his sworn congressional testimony.
