Pelosi says she's never heard of Gruber, but she cited him by name in 2009

Pelosi says she&#039;s never heard of Gruber, but she cited him by name in 2009

(Image credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

last updated 8 January 2015

Jonathan Gruber, MIT professor and consultant on ObamaCare, has recently stirred up controversy over comments he made about the "stupidity" of Americans helping the health law to pass — and Nancy Pelosi wants nothing to do with him. The House minority leader took to CSPAN this week to say that she doesn't know who Gruber is and he did not help write the bill.

Unfortunately for Pelosi, the record says otherwise on both counts. Gruber did help write ObamaCare, and Pelosi herself repeatedly cited his work in 2009.

Gruber's original comments stated that "the stupidity of the American voter... was really, really critical for the thing to pass," and video has since surfaced of him saying that ObamaCare is "very clever" in its "basic exploitation" of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.