There’s been quite a commotion over the video of “Obamacare architect” Jonathan Gruber admitting what everybody who’s been paying any real attention already knew: the intentional duplicity with which the law was passed. The only surprise is how open Gruber was about it.
The video shows Gruber describing fairly accurately how liberals lied in order to make Obamacare seem much more attractive that it actually is. But Gruber did make one glaring error.:
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
In addition to Gruber’s offensive condescension about those “stupid” proles, he’s just plain wrong about what actually happened in the political sense. Americans are smarter than he thinks: they never were fooled by that bag of tricks. The people have been against this from the start, and nothing has changed in that regard since.
Obamacare was not passed by referendum, it was passed by our elected representatives in the House and the Senate. The people tried desperately to make their anti-Obamacare wishes known, but the Democratic members of Congress who were in the majority at the time refused to listen. Their leaders whipped them into line, and although a few were allowed to vote against, Pelosi and Reid made sure there wouldn’t be enough of them voting “nay” to actually derail the bill. Why did they allow some to vote against Obamacare? Because they knew just how very unpopular it was, and that those who voted for it in districts where it was unpopular were very much at risk of not being returned to Congress in the next election.
And that’s exactly how it went. 2010 was a protest election that returned the House to Republican hands. What were the people protesting? Obamacare.
So who’s stupid, Gruber?
[Neo-neocon is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at neo-neocon.]
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