The Obamacare architect whose crowing about “the stupidity of the American voter” made him an embarrassment to the Obama White House last year played a much bigger role in the law’s creation that the White House or top Democrats have pretended he did.

A Wall Street Journal report Monday (paywall protected) cites about 20,000 pages of emails released by the House Oversight Committee that show MIT economist Jonathan Gruber was intimately involved in Obamacare – including the section of the law at the center of a Supreme Court case that’s expected to be decided within days.

Gruber became a lightning rod for critics of Obamacare and the Department of Health and Human Services last year, when a series of videos surfaced showing him bragging about the deceptions used to pass the law and explaining the political strategy behind the law’s provision that federal subsidies for health insurance premiums were to be available only to those who signed up for insurance through exchanges “established by the states.”

That phrase, which Obamacare’s lying defenders to this day pretend was a product of sloppy legislation was actually an integral part of the law’s creation, Gruber said repeatedly on the videos.

Once those videos came to light, Gruber became a non-person to the White House and to the Democrat leaders like Nancy Pelosi who foisted the law on the American public. They claimed Gruber was no more than just another adviser whose work was negligible to the law’s overall construction.

The non-Obama media was reporting they were lying then. The emails published The emails reported by the Wall Street Journal show those reports were correct.

According to Breitbart:

One email indicates Mr. Gruber was invited to meet with Mr. Obama. In a July 2009 email, he wrote that Mr. Orszag had “invited me to meet with the head honcho to talk about cost control.”

“Thank you for being an integral part of getting us to this historic moment,” according to Sept. 9, 2009 email to Mr. Gruber fromJeanne Lambrew, a top Obama administration health adviser who worked at HHS and the White House. In a November 2009 email, she called Mr. Gruber “our hero.”

In an August 2009 email, Lawrence Summers—then a top economic adviser in the administration—emailed Mr. Gruber and asked “if you were POTUS, what would u do now?” Mr. Gruber responded that Mr. Obama should hold out for enough money to do universal coverage.

When the president is asking what you would do if you were in his shoes, you’re more than “some adviser.”

“His proximity to HHS and the White House was a whole lot tighter than they admitted,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R- Utah, chairman of the House oversight committee, told the Journal, according to Fox News.

“There’s no doubt he was a much more integral part of this than they’ve said. He put up this facade he was an arm’s length away. It was a farce.”

It might well be the farce the Supreme Court uses to decide the future of President Obama’s signature law.

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Joe Saunders

Joe Saunders, a 25-year newspaper veteran, is a staff writer and editor for BizPac Review who lives in Tallahassee and covers capital and Florida politics. Email Joe at [email protected].

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