In an otherwise excellent exegesis of the ongoing controversy surrounding Jonathan Gruber, Vox’s Ezra Klein treats an infamous video in which the Obamacare adviser mocks the “stupidity of the American voter” as distinct from an earlier Gruber-related controversy, in which the MIT economist appeared to validate a legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act. The latter, in Klein's telling, is a genuine threat to the law, as it can be construed to vindicate the law's challengers, who claim that the Obama administration is illegally subsidizing insurance in states that didn't set up their own exchanges. The former, by contrast, merely affirms the right's suspicion that Obamacare is a symptom of liberal condescension to the ignorant masses.

But the controversies are actually conjoined, and the link between them explains why the right isn’t merely going to run Gruber’s name through the mud, but probably haul him in front of a congressional committee or two and recapitulate his sins every day until the Supreme Court determines the fate of the Affordable Care Act for a second time. The two Grubergates are being deployed together in service of a common goal.

That goal is for the Supreme Court’s five conservatives to hobble the law without fear that their decision will be interpreted—correctly—as a spite-driven judicial logrolling of a statute conservatives hate.

The greatest impact of the latest Gruber controversy, according to Commentary magazine’s Jonathan Tobin,” may be “on the Supreme Court’s decision in King v. Burwell, the lawsuit that alleges that federal subsidies given in states that don’t have their own insurance exchanges as mandated by the law are illegal. Gruber’s comments illustrate that the insistence on each state having one isn’t, as Paul Krugman alleged earlier this week, a mere 'typo' but a glaring flaw in the law that could sink the whole scheme.”

They actually illustrate no such thing. Gruber’s assertion that opacity provided ACA proponents with huge political advantages had nothing to do with the question of whether the ACA statute provides for subsidies in every state. In that narrow sense, Klein is correct that the Gruber controversies are unrelated. But Obamacare's opponents are blending the two episodes into one because together they establish motive, means, and opportunity—and thus a plausible excuse for conservatives to gut the ACA.