On Monday, the Cato Institute's Michael F. Cannon spotlighted how more than 150 employers inside the District of Columbia have signed onto a protest letter that decries the local ObamaCare board's "dismantling and recasting the separate health insurance marketplaces that serve small employer groups and individuals." One of the signatories was Chef Geoff's, owned by Geoff Tracy, who happens to be married to CBS This Morning anchor Norah O'Donnell.
This puts Tracy in, perhaps, an uncomfortable position, as O'Donnell has a record of defending the President's health care law. Here a few examples from the MRC's archives from the past few months:
- Just over a month ago, on the September 10, 2012 edition of CBS This Morning, the journalist came to the aid of liberal Senator Dick Durbin, who had attacked Mitt Romney on the issue during a live segment: "That's the whole point, I thought, of ObamaCare, was in order to get more people pre-existing coverage, you had to expand the base and mandate that individuals and employers pay for health insurance."
-On the July 1, 2012, O'Donnell herself attacked the Republican presidential candidate on Face the Nation. She asked House Speaker John Boehner, "Doesn't he [Romney] have a credibility problem?" The former NBC correspondent also pressed Boehner to oppose supposed "protections for individuals" in ObamaCare: "Is there anything good in this law?...I asked you if there's anything good in it because I want to ask you about some of the specific provisions in the bill. Since you are going to be repealing it, are you willing to roll back the provisions that would provide free mammograms under Medicare?"
-At the end of June, just hours before the Supreme Court upheld ObamaCare, the CBS journalist hyped President Obama's past experience as a constitutional law lecturer:
O'DONNELL: ...It is interesting, because the President is a constitutional law professor. So I've learned how much he has paid so close attention to this - not only reading the opinions, but going back and actually listening to them on tape. And I'm told that after he listened to those arguments, he told advisers privately that he would be very surprised if the Supreme Court overturned this rule.