The unearthing last week of video footage showing MIT professor Jonathan Gruber—one of the Affordable Care Act's key architects—claiming sua sponte that the health law's subsidies were conditioned upon states setting up their own exchanges has emboldened a once-marginal faction of Obamacare haters I like to call Halbig Truthers, in honor of the recent D.C. Circuit Court panel's ruling in Halbig v. Burwell.

These are the conservatives who claim not just that the plain text of the ACA statute limits subsidies to states that set up their own exchanges, but that the law's drafters—and the Democrats in Congress who voted for it—wanted it this way, and are now disclaiming their own subsidy scheme because too many states called their bluff.

I'm keenly interested in which liberal pundits/reporters were in on the federal exchange subsidy scam and which were just legit clueless. — Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) July 26, 2014

For years now, this has been a fringe position on the right, in part because many conservatives (like liberals and mainstream media reporters) were there to chronicle the legislative debate in great detail. They spoke to members of Congress, immersed themselves in the substance of the legislation, and pored over Congressional Budget Office reports. Some of them even read hundreds of pages abstruse bill text and did their best to reconcile it with their understanding of the policy intent. If in our sleuthing, any of us who covered the debate had divined through interviews or other methods that the law's authors intended to make the subsidies conditional—to coerce states into setting up their own exchanges—it would have been among the biggest scoops of the entire process. If, for instance, Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu had any reason to suspect that the bill she’d used so much leverage to constrain would allow Governor Bobby Jindal to deny the law’s core benefits to her constituents, she wouldn’t have voted for it.

To the extent that the question wasn’t probed widely, if at all, it's because that would've been almost like asking whether the subsidies were intended to be denominated in Rubles. Indeed, outside the Halbig-Truther fringe, the debate over setting up state-exchanges was one that divided conservatives. All of them correctly understood that opting out would cede power to the federal government. But they parted ways over whether it was strategically wiser to hold the feds at bay, or overwhelm them with responsibility for creating more exchanges than they'd anticipated. The flashpoint wasn’t over an obscure loophole in the law, but over how best to cope with the obvious universality of Obamacare. Likewise, liberals didn’t panic as more and more red states opted not to set up their own exchanges, but rather chuckled at the ironic spectacle of “states’ rights” Republicans standing aside and allowing the federal government to gobble up some more of their sovereignty.

Any port in a storm, though, which is why some right-wing activists have spent the last several months fabricating a rival narrative—a ludicrous theory of intent, in which leading Democrats meant to condition the subsidies, but decided to keep the inducement a secret from reporters, back bench members, governors, budget analysts, and health care reform advocates. This kind of deceptive argumentation is perhaps to be expected from activists. What's become incredibly frustrating to me about the Halbig brouhaha in the last few days is watching the conservative health care writers who were in the same trenches watching the same debate unfold—attempting, from a very skeptical vantage point, to explain the bill correctly—suddenly turn around and vouchsafe the Halbig Truthers.