The battle over ObamaCare got so dirty Tuesday that Democrats leaked embarrassing e-mails showing how Republican House Speaker John Boehner hid his efforts to protect long-standing health-care subsidies for members of Congress and their staffers.
Boehner publicly demanded an end to those benefits on Monday, as the GOP continued its trench warfare against ObamaCare. “Why don’t we make sure that every American is treated just like we are?” he asked.
But e-mails from February to July showed how Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid lobbied President Obama to save the subsidies — setting up a meeting so secret that Boehner’s office tried to disguise it as a discussion on immigration.
“We can’t let it get out there that this is for [Boehner] and [Reid] to ask the President to carve us out of the requirement of Obamacare,” Boehner’s chief of staff, Mike Sommers, wrote to Reid’s top aide, David Krone, on July 17.
“This is a little bit more difficult because it isn’t a routing meeting because [House Minority Leader Nancy] Pelosi and [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell won’t be there,” Sommers said in the e-mail, leaked to Politico.
“I am even ok if it is the President hauling us down to talk about the next steps on immigration,” the e-mail continued.
Sommers wrote that any cover story would do as long as it concealed the true purpose of the meeting with Obama.
“I really don’t care what it is about[,] it just can’t be about what we know it is about!” he said.
Leaking communications between top Capitol Hill staffers is a gross violation of Washington etiquette.
Boehner’s office denounced the leak as “just a desperate act by Harry Reid’s staff to protect their own subsidy.”
Under ObamaCare, lawmakers and their staff had to join the health-insurance exchanges that began operating Tuesday.
Boehner and Reid were successful in overturning a government ruling that said by joining the exchanges, they would lose federal subsidies worth an estimated $5,000 to $12,000 a year per recipient.