This YouTube video has been making the rounds, and it demonstrates a couple of propositions, tentatively:
1) Congressman Trey Gowdy is a talented prosecutor, a former position he held in Spartanburg, SC.
2) Jonathan Gruber has been rendered toothless, for whatever reason. He claims to have not understood what he was saying, nor does he understand it now, other than it was offensive to some political body out there.
3) One can speculate as to why he didn't try to defend his newsworthy remarks, but to be fair: a congressional hearing is brutal and one-sided. As the highest legislative body in the land, Congress has the power. Gruber was in a no-win situation.
Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy has a good take on Gruber's "sin." Money quote:
"Gruber did err in making the common mistake of conflating political ignorance with “stupidity.” In reality, even smart people are often ignorant about politics, in large part because such ignorance is perfectly rational behavior, given the low probability that your vote will make a difference in an election. The problem of ignorance is also exacerbated by the enormous size, scope, and complexity of modern government, which makes it difficult even for more attentive voters to keep track of more than a small fraction of it. By making government even larger and more complicated than it already was, the enactment of the Affordable Care Act helped exacerbate the very ignorance that helped make its passage possible."
