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 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.