Humpty Dumpty Meets Heraclitus

There is an interesting column by Larry Elder out regarding the two recent conflicting federal court rulings on ObamaCare tax credits. I do not know how important to any Supreme Court decision the following information will be, but Elder shows Jonathan Gruber, the architect of the Affordable Care Act, contradicting himself on the matter, and trying to sweep it under the rug.

Twice in 2012, Gruber made it clear that the language of the bill excluded from the tax breaks anyone purchasing from a federal exchange:

By not setting up an exchange, the politicians of a state are costing state residents hundreds and millions and billions of dollars. ... That is really the ultimate threat, is, will people understand that, gee, if your governor doesn't set up an exchange, you're losing hundreds of millions of dollars of tax credits to be delivered to your citizens.

And, a week later:

The federal government has been sort of slow in putting out its [health insurance exchange] backstop, I think, partly because they want to sort of squeeze the states to do it. I think what's important to remember politically about this is if you're a state and you don't set up an exchange, that means your citizens don't get their tax credits. But your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill. So you're essentially saying to your citizens you're going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country.

More recently, this is what Gruber -- Add a second "b" and you have a perfect name for a villain in an Ayn Rand novel -- had to say:

We can go to the people who wrote it and say did you ever intend this as a poison pill or is it a typo every single one says it's a typo? [sic] And every single one of them will say this is just a typo. So there is no mystery here.

Regarding the contradiction, obvious once he learned that someone noted his earlier remarks, Gruber called those "speak-os".

Elder is confident of a Supreme Court ruling against ObamaCare, since, as Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute  puts it, "This is not a constitutional challenge to the law. It's not asking any court to strike down the law. It's actually asking them to uphold the law."

That might be nice, except that for who we have in charge of enforcing the law and the extremely limited likelihood of Congress exercising the appropriate remedy.

-- CAV