When it comes to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, the Left’s aim has proven about as accurate as a unit of Imperial Stormtroopers shooting at Luke Skywalker. But liberals keep firing.
The latest miss comes from the liberal activist site ThinkProgress, which tries to catch Scott Walker in a reverse-Gruber moment (as in Jonathan Gruber, the MIT professor and Obamacare architect who has been caught making a string of embarrassing statements undermining Obamacare supporters). The site ran a post by Ian Millhiser headlined, “VIDEO: Republican Governor Caught On Tape Demolishing The Legal Case Against Obamacare.”
As you may know, the Supreme Court in March is set to hear a case, King v. Burwell, in which challengers argue that the Internal Revenue Service illegally ruled that federal subsidies to purchase insurance could flow to residents of states that defaulted to the federal insurance exchange, even though text of Obamacare reads that subsidies should be limited to an “exchange established by the state.”
Millhiser thinks he has nailed Walker, because at one point in his 2013 interview with the Wall Street Journal, the governor said, “But, in the end, there’s no real substantive difference between a federal exchange, or a state exchange, or the in between, the hybrid, the partnership.”
Over at Slate, my former colleague Betsy Woodruff suggests that in the Walker comments, the Left may be able to make hay out of this just as Obamacare opponents have had fun at the expense of Gruber — and quotes several Obamacare backers celebrating their resurfacing.
Yet the context that Millhiser quotes shows that Walker was talking about the phony federalism aspect of the exchanges. That is, when drafting Obamacare, Democrats tried to create the illusion that they were giving states flexibility to shape the exchanges in their own way. But in reality, there were so many restrictions on how the exchanges could be set up and on the design of the insurance policies offered on the exchanges, that ultimately, they were controlled by the Obama administration either way.
It’s clear that this was what Walker was saying in the full transcript:
It’s worth adding further that Walker was making this statement in 2013, and if he had been in regular contact with Obama administration officials, what they would have told them was that the IRS ruled that subsidies would go to those who obtained insurance both through the federal and state exchanges, so there was no difference. Whatever his position on the legal battle over subsidies, that was the operative rule when Walker was making his comments.
This is completely different from Gruber, who, along with other embarrassing comments, actually made one of the central arguments of challengers of the IRS rule. Those challenging the rule have said that Congress intended to limit subsidies to state-based exchanges as an inducement to get states to set them up. “Preposterous!” liberals collectively screamed, “everybody knows that Democrats always intended for the subsidies to flow regardless of whether states set up their own exchanges.”
But then video surfaced of Gruber — the law’s architect — stating, “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.”
That is what an actual Gruber moment looks like.
