I Figured out Why Republicans Hate Gruber so Much

      Man, that was putrid. Some really tacky theater but from Issa we expect nothing less.

      Tuesday's House Oversight Committee hearing with Obamacare consultant Jonathan Gruber was one of Darrell Issa's last hearings as committee chair, so naturally he made it count, with an extra helping of his usual grandstanding. Issa opened by haranguing Gruber about whether he is stupid:

"I've been accused that I'm going to berate you or something and I hope it won't feel that way when I get done. But the night before last I was at the Kennedy Center honors where they honored Tom Hanks, who famously portrayed Forrest Gump. The ultimate successful stupid man," Issa said before getting to his first question for Gruber. "Are you stupid?"

Issa's question was a reference to the comments that brought Gruber to notice, in which hereferred to "the stupidity of the American voter." But mostly, Issa was mugging for Fox News, which was predictably in orgasms over the hearing. For his part,

Gruber repeatedly apologized, saying his remarks were "glib," "insensitive" and "downright insulting."

      http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/09/1350515/-Darrell-Issa-drags-Forrest-Gump-into-Obamacare-hearing#

       I think what it is about Gruber's quotes that gets the GOP and other Very Serious People so upset is they don't like him making fun of stupid people-notice that Issa holds up Forrest Gump as a national icon: the Republicans hate the idea of stupid people being spoken of dismissively. 

       He's not so much denying people are stupid as defending their right to be stupid. Again, I won't disagree-how else did people vote for the GOP again because there's been little wage growth during the economic recovery-which is what the VSP tell us this election was about? I've said before I don't have a problem with Gruber calling people stupid-so many people are and it'd be ok but who is the victim of it? Those who aren't so stupid. Stupid people are ruining are country. So I can't indulge it so tolerantly. 

       http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2014/11/jonathon-gruber-tells-truth-about.html

       So Gruber-as he isn't stupid-understood what his job was today in coming before someone as stupid as Issa: humble himself, rub his own face in the dust, insist that he was unspeakably arrogant and that he deserves his comeuppance. 

       After all, even the ranking Democrat on Issa's committee, Elijah Cummings, made a big point of being outraged about his comments. This is America: stupid people don't just have equal rights, they have special rights. 

       However, because Gruber isn't stupid and understood this he came through this without any real glove being laid on him as Politico documents. 

       "Jonathan Gruber spent his day getting battered and humiliated by Darrell Issa Tuesday — but Issa never did manage to land the knockout punch."

        "Gruber, an economist and health care adviser, apologized for his infamous “stupid voters” riff about Obamacare, got scolded by one committee member after another, said he wasn’t really the “architect” of Obamacare and even came away facing a subpoena threat."

       "Still, Tuesday’s House hearing never forced Gruber to admit what Republicans wanted to prove: that he was speaking from inside knowledge of the writing of the Affordable Care Act, and therefore had confirmed that Obamacare was a fraud all along."

        "And as much as the Republicans grilled him, Gruber never budged from his story, whether they wanted to believe it or not: He ran numbers for Obamacare, didn’t really know the political strategies he talked about so freely, and did not, in fact, confirm the premise of a lawsuit over subsidies that could give the Supreme Court a new opportunity to unravel the health care law next year."

       Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/jonathan-gruber-darrell-issa-obamacare-113443.html#ixzz3LS8rvj2r

       So Issa got what he wanted as his term in this chair is mercifully over-Fox News will love showing him throw rotten tomatoes at Gruber for making fun of the stupid, but meanwhile he got nothing of any real longstanding importance-which is pretty much a good way of summing up Issa's entire term chairing his department. 

        P.S. On the tangible plane as opposed to the Forrest Gumplike theater, Mitch McConnell and friends may have said too much in cheerleading for the SJC to kill off Obamacare. 

         "Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming spells it out as clearly as you could want:

Republicans say that, if the court rules for King, the rest of the law might be inoperable. If King loses, then the reconciliation process could very well target the subsidies.

“That alone is enough to bring down the health care law,” said Sen. John Barrasso. “We’re going to continue to try to one, repeal; two, strip out the worst parts of the law; and three, look to the courts.”

      "This comes after Mitch McConnell flatly suggested that SCOTUS’s coming decision on Obamacare might “take it down,” giving “us” a “mulligan” and a “do-over.” With this latest from Barrasso — the chair” of the Senate Republican Policy Committee — we now have two members of the GOP leadership looking to SCOTUS to accomplish what Republicans are failing to accomplish through legislative and political means. The question is whether this sort of talk, about a lawsuit that is supposedly all aboutstatutory restraint and enforcing the law as written, will make Chief Justice John Roberts a bit uncomfortable about the role the SCOTUS is poised to play here."

       http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/12/09/morning-plum-republicans-look-to-supreme-court-to-destroy-obamacare/

      The key about Roberts is that one the one hand he's 'naive' about politics. So he can innocently declare that there is some language in the Voting Rights Act that needs to be changed under the assumption that this will be easy to do-totally innocent as well as the fact that the Congress is hyperpartisan and would never do this in a million years as the GOP has no interest in fixing the Voting Rights Act. 

     On the other hand, he really is naive-in that he believes his own spiel. If you show to him clearly that his political calculations are all wrong it does bother him. So on Obamacare he had initially planned to do away with the individual mandate, reasoning that it's just part of the law. However, his fellow Republicans got him to change his mind after he heard them gloating about killing ACA whole cloth. He cares a great deal about the Court's legacy and doesn't just want to be seen as the third House of the GOP. So there is a big part of the hope for ACA in this round.