You want urllib if you're talking about python 3.
import urllib.request
@cherrypy.tools.json_in()
@cherrypy.expose
def index(self):
httpreq = urllib.request.Request(url="http://somesite/")
response = urllib.request.urlopen(httpreq)
jsonobject = response.read()
Let me know if you need another version of python.
Hope this helps!