Quote:... the Competitive Enterprise Institute dug up a video from 2012 in which Mr. Gruber told a nonprofit outfit that "if you're a state and you don't set up an exchange, that means your citizens don't get their tax credits." He added that "I hope that that's a blatant enough political reality that states will get their act together and realize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these exchanges." He made similar remarks to another group.

Jonathan Cohn, ObamaCare's cheerleader at the New Republic, quoted Mr. Gruber on Friday as saying his remark "was just a mistake" and he didn't recall why he made it. We can think of a reason: It was the truth. Liberals feared some states wouldn't set up exchanges, so they deliberately wrote incentives into the law so the states would do so. This was the conventional liberal wisdom until this year when it suddenly became legally and politically inconvenient for the Administration to admit it.