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June 20, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:12
June 20, 2007, Wednesday, Hour #2
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Welcome back to the Rush Limbaugh program here on the EIB network.
Roger Hedgecock in for Rush today and tomorrow.
Coming at you from KOGO Radio on the left coast here in San Diego, California.
Mere uh steps from the uh busiest international border crossing in the world.
We're going to talk about the the border coming up and the uh amnesty bill in uh Congress.
But first, some more news from uh California.
Uh I I never I'm entertained every time uh that we have a chance to talk with uh Arnold Schwarzenegger, our governor, because he is uh truly his own uh guy, and uh, you know, it's and the way he was speaking, just I'll give you an example of what I'm trying to say here.
Uh he was speaking to the Hispanic Journalists Association gathered in Sacramento.
He was their guest speaker, keeping in mind again, these are folks who work for Univision and these uh Spanish language uh outlets, radio and television.
And uh in part uh and listen to when he realizes how politically incorrect he's getting.
Uh in part, here is what he told them.
That you've got to turn off the uh the Spanish television said.
It's so simple.
You've got to learn English.
You got to listen.
I know this sounds odd, and this is politically not the correct thing to say, but yeah, I'm getting myself into trouble.
So he tells these uh journalists who make their living uh with the the new apartheid uh uh speaking Spanish to Spanish speakers and uh uh you know not going for the assimilation.
And you know, as far as I'm concerned, Univision and the rest of these people have an absolute right to do what they're doing.
But what Arnold was trying to say, of course, is a hundred percent right.
If your uh sons and daughters want to get ahead in the United States of America, uh they would do well to learn English and speak it well.
Better than talk show hosts, by the way.
But in any event, Arnold So Arnold says is of course uh the world comes apart in California because you just can't say that kind of stuff.
So he gets uh uh pilloried uh for the next couple of days in the press out here, including by some people who make kind of a good point.
If you go to Arnold Schwarzenegger's website, for example, he's got uh Spanish uh language portion of it.
Uh when you go to the despite the fact we voted as uh English as the official state language some years ago, any of the bureaucracies of state government not only release all of their bulletins and advisories and uh and all the rest of the uh uh paper tsunami that you get out of government, uh they not only issue it in English and Spanish, or Spanish and English as the case may be, but in one case I got I got this folder.
It was a one-page notice from a department uh of the state government that was listed in fourteen languages.
And was criticized because it didn't have some languages included in it.
So we have a um we have in fact the problem is getting so serious that in a telephone poll taken by the governor's office, he asked whether people who live in California think illegal immigration is a serious problem.
Twenty-nine percent of the respondents answered yes, it is a serious problem.
Seventy-one percent of the respondents answered no es una problema seriosa.
So that's the kind of problem we're having out here in California.
Um the funniest thing, though, happened to us yesterday uh here in San here in little San Diego County.
We got uh Al Jazeera was invited to town by a local Democrat operative.
Al Jazeero was invited to town because Blackwater, and if you remember Blackwater, this corporation that trains security people, they've been in private contracts providing security for aid workers and the like in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places.
They train people, police officers, ex-military, and so forth, to go out on these contract bases and provide security.
In fact, in Fallujah, four of those guys getting killed was one of the flashpoints of that war.
So uh Blackwater, pretty famous, so of course the local activists, Blackwater bought a backcountry uh ranch land to try to put up a training facility in backcountry San Diego County.
And uh the left went nuts.
And so this leftist guy, this Democratic Party operative out in East County, San Diego, uh, called Al Jazeera, the English language Al Jazeera, to come in and cover their protest against Blackwater putting in a training facility out here.
So yeah, Alge Al Jazeera.
Uh might as well have been the BBC, I know.
Whatever, but still it was kind of funny out here.
We never expect to see Al Jazeera here.
But it is kind of an interesting point, and maybe I should take this up uh tomorrow.
An Interesting point, let's make a note of this that tomorrow we'll do a little bit more about this, about how uh our enemies in this war on terror seem to be so much better at manipulating the so-called free press in the Western world to get their point of view across, much better at it than getting across the point of a view that we have.
So we'll we'll get into a little bit more of that.
One of the things that is being done, pulling out the stops, you you know what the real polls say about Americans and their support or non-support for uh this amnesty bill, this uh Kennedy McCain immigration amnesty bill, kind of the Freddie Kruger of legislation like Nightmare on Elm Street movies, uh Freddie this uh serial killer is back.
Uh it used to be uh S 1348 a couple of weeks ago.
Now it's uh Senate bill S 1639, and we'll get into that in a minute.
But in poll after poll, the American public is saying, uh, hello, can we have border security first before you start talking about all this other stuff?
Uh because without border security, if you amnesty twelve million or twenty million people, oh, we'll get forty million the next time.
I mean, we amnesty two and a half million in eighty-six, and we got thirteen million now.
What's going to happen when you amnesty thirteen million and they don't control the border?
You know, kind of common sense.
I mean, I think everybody understands that point.
So Rasmussen uh uh starts talking about uh eighty-two percent want uh border control first and the uh twenty percent uh but only twenty percent want the Kennedy McCain uh amnesty bill uh passed.
Uh 51% want smaller steps toward reform, with step one, of course, being controlling the border.
NBC News uh Wall Street Journal poll and they're in favor of the bill.
Um thirty-five percent want to allow illegal workers permanent U.S. residency, but only if they return home and pay a fine, whopping 55% opposed, by the way, the legislation says you don't have to return home and you don't have to pay a fine to get the probationary Z visa, which is automatically granted after a paltry 24-hour uh review time.
Uh we'll get into some of this detail with Chertoff later uh in this hour.
So in any event, uh you know what the actual polling is now.
What's happening around the country is that pro-immigration groups are uh pro uh open border groups are uh manipulating the questions, and they're coming out with their own poll results.
Now I trust uh, you know, ABC uh NBC News Wall Street Journal, because they're in favor of the bill, they came out with these numbers.
Rasmussen's kind of neutral, he did not one way or another on the bill, came out with his numbers.
Now comes um Fairbank, Maslin, Mulin and Associates in San Diego.
I don't know whether they're from San Diego, but they had a I guess they're in Santa Monica, California, but they were uh uh uh commissioned uh by an immigration group, uh rights immigration rights group here in uh San Diego, the immigration rights consortium, to uh to do a poll.
And they did this complicated, I don't know, 20-some questions poll with many of the questions having 10, 12, 15 subheads and so forth.
Nowhere in this poll do they ask the flat out question uh are you in favor or opposed to controlling the border?
Because had they asked that in San Diego, it would have been, I think, in the high eighties.
We have our own crazies, but you know, most people are pretty much in that common sense frame of mind.
They didn't ask that question.
In fact, the only time they asked it, it's kind of funny, the only time they even got close to asking it, and they didn't like the result uh of of this at all, was when they uh when they asked in the in you know, subhead, this is uh C 17 C. Sorry, D. 17 D. Uh favorable or uh de favor or oppose this statement.
Establishing border enforcement procedures that facilitate cross-border flow of goods and people that is essential to a vibrant border economy.
And what happened was people stopped after they heard border enforcement, because they overwhelmingly voted for that.
70%.
What, of course, the immigration rights coalition wants to get to you is border enforcement means facilitating the cross-border flow of goods and people and guns and drugs and all the other things that we make money off of.
Well, they didn't put it that way, but that's what they mean.
So it's a uh uh interesting point because when nailed on this question, I mean i you know, if the uh if the minute men had gone out and gotten their pollster to say, well, what do you think about border attitudes?
Every journalist in San Diego would have asked, because you know, mostly liberals.
They would have asked the question, well, don't you have a conflict of interest?
I mean, a minute man, the questions, let me let me see the questions, let me see how you phrase them, let me see what your bias is, blah, blah, blah.
Well, the immigration rights coalition comes out with their press conference yesterday, and uh there was a question.
You know, well, uh, you're kind of in favor of immigration rights.
Doesn't this kind of support uh your point of view?
And here's what uh little Andrea Guerrero, spokesperson for the illegal uh immigrant uh consortium said.
Well, we might have paid for it, but we didn't answer the questions.
The voters answered the questions.
The voters answered the questions.
Yeah, but you manipulated the questions.
You manipulated this entire poll.
It's a piece of garbage.
So anyway, uh the the propaganda what I'm trying to get to here is the propaganda offensive by the open border crowd, uh which includes the unfortunately the President of the United States, the uh bulk of the Republican leadership, all of the Democratic leadership, which uh, by the way, uh Senator Reid has a single purpose in bringing this bill forward now.
His single purpose is to pass the bill.
It's Ted Kennedy's bill.
He's gonna pass this bill, because in his mind it means tens of thousands immediately, tens of thousands of new votes in crucial congressional seats uh for the Democratic Party uh in 2008.
Not a question about that.
What he also has as a secondary goal here is to split the Republican Party.
The Republican Party is split because some of the leadership of the Republican Party wants open border uh workers galore, tsunami of illegals made legal instantly, uh you know, et cetera, et cetera.
And uh Chertoff, by the way, the Secretary of the Homeland Security will be on with us after the bottom of the hour to uh to answer some questions about all that.
But uh the Republican Party is split because the base, a average ordinary citizens, and by the way, it isn't just Republicans, it's average ordinary Democrats.
It's average ordinary independents understand what this issue is about, and that's why Congress, when they get talking about this, can do no other business.
Their phone lines, their email boxes, the the uh the regular mailbox is crammed full of people saying, What are you thinking?
Which indeed is the bottom line question.
I'm Roger Hedcock.
Let's take a break on the Rush Limbaugh program on the EIB network back after this.
So to set up this conversation, uh welcome back.
Roger Hedgecock in for Rush Limbaugh today on the uh EIB network and tomorrow.
Um to set up this conversation with Secretary Mike Chertoff of the uh Homeland Security Department, uh distinguished guy, very smart guy, and uh with a very tough problem that he's wrestling with.
We'll ask him the tough questions about this Kennedy McCain uh bill that the administration is supporting in the Senate.
The American public is not supporting it.
Again, Rasmussen reports this is uh new as of uh as of uh a couple of days ago.
Sixty-nine percent of all voters would favor an approach to immigration that focuses exclusively on quote, securing the border and reducing illegal immigration, unquote.
By the way, they break that out by party.
Uh eighty-four percent of Republicans agree with that statement.
Fifty-five percent of Democrats and sixty-nine percent of the unaffiliated Bloomberg voters.
Um importantly, James Carville and Stan Greenberg of Democracy Corps, uh former advisors to Democratic President Bill Clinton, of course, need I remind you, went out and did a poll for the Democrats, went out and did a poll for the Democrat senators.
Went out and did a poll that didn't look so good.
They released it yesterday.
Uh quote, we do not find very much voter support for the comprehensive Senate bill, the pollsters wrote.
Democrats, uh Democrat voters split 47 to 47 for and against, after hearing a description of the Kennedy McCain bill.
Most independents and Republicans opposed it.
Uh the numbers uh were not uh good for the Democrats.
This is going to cause some uh trepidation here, which um maybe the Bush administration saves uh the Democrats here and maybe they don't, and that's kind of what's at stake politically, isn't it?
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, quote, voters in this poll were far more likely to support proposals that would tighten the border and stop illegal immigrants from getting government benefits than they would for efforts to legalize the estimated twelve million people living in the country illegally.
So uh this is the backdrop for the debate this week.
And the and the further backdrop is this.
The Senate and Reed had said we're gonna take up the energy bill first, and then before the Fourth of July, and don't think about going home for Fourth of July till you vote on this thing, and he's holding Fourth of July recess over their head saying, You better vote my way on this because I'm gonna hold you over.
Uh so there's a real there's a real noose tightening around these uh these senators' necks because the energy bill has got them disillusioned uh to start with.
The energy bill is they had they had to back Dingle off, Congressman Dingle, because he wanted to do everything for Detroit, as he usually does.
Uh and uh then they had to back off the the the automakers wanted to squelch the the cafe requirements of you know how many miles per gallon you know dictated by the government, and and that's in a mess.
They don't know which way they're going on that.
They want a huge new tax on big oil because everybody can agree big oil is at stake is is is bad.
And uh and they can't get enough votes for that.
So the energy bill, which of course contains no energy.
Are we drilling for anything?
Are we developing anything?
Are we doing anything other than raise taxes?
Well, of course not.
It's a Democrat bill.
Raising taxes is what they do.
Tiger is a tiger.
So here's the here here's where they are.
They're now as frustrated as can be in the United States Senate, not only because they continue to get hammered in the polls.
Do you know that Harry Reid's approval rating?
They talk about George Bush at 30 or whatever it is.
Harry Reid's approval rating according to Gallup is 19%.
Nineteen percent.
Okay.
So uh they're frustrated as can be because they can't move an energy bill of any kind, they get hammered six ways from Sunday on that, and then they talk about bringing this immigration bill back, and they get hammered big time.
Six ways from Sunday.
Trent Law just completely losing it, you know, talk radio's running America, and we've got to do something about that problem.
Well, right.
Karen in Fresno, California, next on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi, Karen.
Hi, how are you doing?
Good.
What's up?
Um Amnesty, I I think that's such an irony.
It's like saying, um, you know, if you steal a car, just tell us about it within a certain amount of time we'll like to keep it.
You know, I'm just I think that's ridiculous.
Um but, you know, for me, I really think that we really we need to uh tighten border control and not, you know, not uh slow the flow of illegal immigration.
Find a way to stop it.
I mean, we're we're a country, can put the man on the mo you know, man on the moon, we have all of this.
Just we are so smart, and yet we can't find a way to keep people too from crossing our borders.
Now I've talked to people in Fresno, uh, Karen, who are, of course, are in the agribusiness up there, and we a lot uh we we f we feed the world and fruits and vegetables and rice and a lot of other stuff in California.
We're a huge agricultural state, and they're telling me that whole thing would shut down if we didn't have illegal workers to pick the harvest.
Not true.
I don't believe that's true at all.
Um I know people I live up the hill, actually, um about twenty-two miles.
And um I know people that would um, you know, for instance, I used to sing in a band.
People I used to sing in a band with would during the day would pick the harvest, and at night they'd they play in the band.
Um I mean, there are people that will do jobs.
I think it I think that's just a ruse.
I mean, it's it's an easy one.
Um, all right, Karen, we're good.
We'll get into it with uh Chairtop in the next segment of the show.
I want people to stand by.
Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of Homeland Security will join us, and then after the uh top of the next hour, uh Senator Sessions from Alabama will join us.
He's been one of the most articulate crit critics and has put out critiques of this uh this bill now uh designated.
They had to change the number.
They got so tired of hearing adverse stuff about this and their constituents complaining, they changed the number of the bill from S 1348, which was till what, yesterday.
Now it's S 1639, 1639.
So they're desperate to try to hide from you what they're doing.
We, of course, will nail the United States Senate on this.
They're on the wrong track.
This is the wrong remedy.
We're going to talk about the right remedies too in the next hour.
Stay with us.
Welcome back to the Russian Limbaugh program here on the EIB network.
Roger Hedgecock at COGO Radio in San Diego, KOGO Radio.
Coming at you today and tomorrow.
Now, Michael Chertoff uh graduated uh Magnum Kumlaudi from Harvard Law.
He uh clerked for uh Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, he's been a federal prosecutor.
He's been in uh private uh practice of law, he's uh was special counsel to the U.S. Senate Whitewater Committee, he's been a an assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division.
He's been a uh federal appeals court judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
He is now the Secretary of Homeland Security and joins us on the EIB network.
Uh, Mr. Secretary, welcome to the program.
Good to be on the show.
You were uh here in COGO in San Diego.
You've been in San Diego many times uh checking the border here and elsewhere across the border, and I'm gonna bring up an issue we brought up with you before.
Uh it has it has been two years since uh Congress uh exempted from all kinds of restrictions, a project to complete our fence down here.
There's a gap in it called Smuggler's Gulch, which is named for a specific reason.
And uh it's been two years since money has been appropriate.
It's been two years since there was a clearance of every and any uh possible problems, uh lawsuits, et cetera, have all cleared out.
And yet that fence and that segment is not built.
Isn't this a problem of the credibility of this administration when it says it wants border security?
We can't even get this fence built.
Actually, Roger, it's an engineering problem.
Um the particular challenge in smugglers gulch, if I recall correctly, is that it it's a very steep decline, and then there's also a drainage issue which has to be accommodated.
So one of the things we've had a challenge with is getting engineers who can find a way to to uh either fill that grade so we can build a road across it and then accommodate the drainage in another fashion that doesn't create a new vulnerability or find some way to uh design the slope so that we can drive down there safely in a way that doesn't allow people to pass through it.
Now, I have to confess I'm not an engineer, so I I do kind of rely on the guys who build roads for a living to tell us how to do this.
But uh I will agree with you.
This is not an issue of legal authority, it's not an issue of money at this point.
It's just uh putting in place an engineering solution that does not create a new vulnerability.
So, in terms of looking at how long it would take to secure our border when we look at this Senate bill, now numbered uh S 1639, uh again, to me it's an indication that whatever the problems are, it takes a whole long time to get border security, but it's gonna be an almost uh immediate time to get uh probationary Z visas.
Well, I think actually what happens is it's not an all-or-nothing proposition.
Um we actually have made significant increases on border security, and over the next 18 months we're gonna make more increases.
The job will not be done in 18 months, and in fact, part of doing the job is putting into place other mechanisms like a mandatory employment verification system, uh like the high-tech pieces that we're putting along other parts of the border, and creating a temporary worker program that allows us to address some of this economic uh magnet that has been pulling people across the border.
So in many parts of this bill actually contribute to the ability to control the border.
In fact, the reason we want to do a comprehensive bill is because it brings all of the tools we can bring to bear on the problem to get it fixed as quickly as possible.
The CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, concludes that even with the 4.4 billion for border security, even with all you're talking about in terms of border security in this bill, it would only reduce illegal immigration by thirteen percent.
Your reaction?
I I think with the Congressional Budget Office, which is frankly a bunch of uh budget analysts, not a bunch of border patrol guys did was they assumed that, and then having assumed that they then did what they normally do, which is they project the budget impact of what they've accepted as their factual assumptions.
I don't agree, in fact I have no idea what their basis is for concluding that this would only result in a modest decrease.
I can tell you we've already seen a 25 to 30 percent decrease in the flow uh across the border, between the ports of entry.
I recognize obviously that we, you know, a part of the problem are people who come in through our ports of entry legitimately and then never leave.
So a building between the ports of entry is only a partial solution.
But that's why I say um common sense as well as the experience of the border patrol and the and the immigration folks tells us that only if you attack all of these elements, the employer verification, the interior enforcement, the border enforcement, and something to deal with the economic magnet.
Only all of that together gives you the leverage you need to solve the problem.
You know, I understand that approach and it has a it has a logical consistency to it.
Here's the problem and where it breaks down for me.
This administration has has had six and a half years to control the border, and it is uh demonstrably out of control.
You've had the FBI director, the CIA director testifying that terrorists are probably here in the thousands and the hundreds.
We've picked up people uh the three of the Fort Dick Six uh were smuggled across the Mexican border.
You you you've got a situation in which there's no credibility.
Trent Lott was talking about this the other day of this administration in controlling the border.
And I'm sorry, when I read this bill, and it provides for this probationary Z visa nearly immediately with a 24-hour uh security check when last year's bill was was 90 days, and you've got gangsters being told, well, you can get a Z Visa too and M S 13 fellow, as long as you renounce being a gang and say you'll never do it again in writing, and then you'll be okay.
Uh this stuff is not serious to me, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Chertoff, I think.
Well, let me separate some of those things.
Some of those are are are myths and some of them are are things we have to address seriously.
First of all, th there is no provision and and there is not going to be a bill that simply says that a gang member gets a Z uh a Z card or a probation card simply by saying I'm not going to do it in the future.
And there is no 24 hour restriction on our ability to remove people if they fail a background check.
We will, of course, do a first cut uh very quickly to see whether someone's fingerprints turn up on wants and warrants or something of that sort.
But the bill that that um we're promoting here and what we're pushing here, including some amendments that are now stacked up ready to go, uh ensures that we have the time necessary, obviously we want to be quick about it, uh to do the background checks.
And if at any point in time, whether it be twenty-four hours, twenty-four days or twenty-four weeks, if we find a problem emerges with somebody, either because of something in their past or something that they do in the future, they're out of here.
There's no right for them to stay and get a probationary uh continue their probationary status.
Uh likewise the the idea that you can just apologize for, you know, and promise not to be a gang member, that doesn't get you uh admitted to probationary status.
On the larger issue of credibility, look, every administration uh has a part in this process, going all the way back to Ronald Reagan and before.
What I can tell you is if you look back over the last few years, uh we had a a dysfunctional immigration and naturalization service that was a stepchild of the Department of Justice.
We brought that out of the department, we we separated the service element from the enforcement element, which was a way of making sure that we didn't confuse the two missions, we had clear missions.
That was done in 2003 and 2004.
When I came in in 2005, we did a uh a thorough evaluation of the border.
For the first time, we unified the border patrol with a single strategic plan instead of every sector commander doing his own thing and making his own decisions.
And then we we began a very ambitious program to develop not only tactical infrastructure but high technology and other systems that would enable us to deal with this problem.
And let me just give you one example of of a promise that we made that we delivered on.
In August 2005, I I promised that we would end catch and release at the border uh within one year, meaning by the end of September 2006.
We actually beat that and we ended it at the very end of July 2006.
And since then, we have maintained a rule of catch, detain, and remove at the border instead of catch and release.
So we have actually uh established credibility.
Admittedly, we haven't solved the problem yet, but we have made some significant steps.
Secretary Chertoff, uh, Department of Homeland Security uh with us, and I appreciate your time, Mr. Secretary.
But let me let me just go back over a couple of those points because again, I read the bill, I see what the what the amendments are and I understand what you're saying, but uh the fact is that today uh the mechanisms of of government cannot even give us uh passports in a timely enough uh fashion and there has to be an extension of time reviewing those.
Uh you're going to have uh potentially twelve million plus people applying for this probationary Z visa, which is renewable indefinitely, by the way.
And uh you you're gonna have twenty-four hours under this bill to uh review that application.
So you're down to nine minutes, you know, on on that uh bureaucracy that's trying to go through all those checks that are going on now, and there's no unified there's no uniform computerized system of doing checks on warrants.
You've got every state having a different one.
You have no unified place of knowing where uh if people came in from whatever country.
I I know you have access to and and lots of resources, but wouldn't you agree that you're not ready yet for twelve million applications and twenty-four hours to to to process it?
Well, first of all, as I say, I mean the first w the first cut, which is simply checking the fingerprints relies on two databases.
IAF is an IDENT.
One is our immigration database, one is the FBI database, which is the law enforcement database, and we are we are uh partially interoperable, but but even where we're not interoperable, it's it's easy to check both databases.
We do this, by the way, eighty million times a year at our airports.
When people come in, they give us their fingerprints at the airport and we run it against our databases.
So obviously we need to to scale this up as a as part of the process of enrolling people, and I'm not going to tell you that the day after the bill passes, we're ready to start that enrollment process.
I think there's a recognition it's going to take some months to scale it up.
But the money, at least as proposed in the amendment, has 4.4 billion dollars, which is a huge chunk of money to support doing this.
The actual technology exists and is currently used.
Uh of course, like no system is a perfect system.
Uh and if someone doesn't have a record and there's no, you know, uh nothing in the system to show they've done something wrong, it we're not necessarily going to find that out in 24 hours.
But what I can tell you is it is infinitely better than what we have now, because right now we have twelve million people and nobody knows who they are or what they've done or has run their names against uh databases, except when we happen to arrest them as as part of our enforcement effort like we have in New Haven or Portland or all over the country.
But that's just a a drop in the bucket because even if we arrest a thousand people a week, uh that only gives you fifty-two thousand people a year, and you have to div and if you look at the twelve million, you see that's uh that's a very long number of years before you get all those people arrested.
We have to find a quicker way to pull these people in and start to get the hay off the haystack.
All right, uh, Michael Chertoff, I appreciate your time, and I know you've got to run uh we're we're we're late on a break as well, but appreciate uh your coming on and the information uh we're going to continue to debate this, and of course the Senate will as well.
Thanks for being here.
Good to be on the Chertoff.
Let's take a break.
I'm Roger Hitchcock filling in for Rush Limbaugh.
So much to talk about.
Stay with the Roger Hedgecock in for uh Rush Limbaugh on the EIB network.
Thank you, Rush.
I'll be here today and tomorrow I'll rush takes a well-deserved uh break.
Now look, I don't think in this audience I have to, although I'm brimming with impose upon you the rebuttal or the rest of the story or the other facts with regard to Secretary Chertoff's uh statements on this program.
Uh this is a very smart man.
Very tough job, uh attempting to uh juggle a lot of stuff.
But this bill is not exactly what he says it is, nor is the effort of the Bush administration to enforce existing law exactly what he says it is either.
But let's get to your comments.
K in Seattle, Washington.
Kay, welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program.
Yes, Secretary Chertoff, it's an honor to speak with you, sir.
He's not on, but go ahead and make your statement.
He represents the U.S. government.
We destroyed and rebuilt the Axis powers in World War II.
We put a man on the moon.
We single-handedly feed the world.
And he wants us to believe that an engineering problem has prevented a fence from being built.
When having worked in an entrenched bureaucracy for 31 years, I can tell you that when the top people in a bureaucracy want something to happen, it happens.
And when they don't want it to happen, they will move heaven and earth to see that it doesn't.
So if they want us to believe that they're going to what they're going to do is legalize 12 million illegal immigrants, criminals.
They can't even control the mayor of Los Angeles who won't, or whoever, or not the mayor, but the police chief or whoever down there won't let his officers ask if people are illegal or not.
Right.
Now, Kate, but have you ever been to the San Diego Tijuana border?
No, I haven't.
You you've never been to Smugglers Gulch?
I have not seen it.
Okay.
You know how right you are without ever having been there.
But it's the experience of working in public schools for 31 years.
Well, there you go.
See, now you have a leg up on me.
I I think this is this is an important insight because you know how these bureaucracies work.
He puts on this fig leaf cover story that's an engineering problem.
I've walked uh the the smugglers gulch.
It is in in fact uh uh a gulch.
It's got two steep sides.
It's got a little creek that comes and runs down through it to it to the Tijuana River, and uh and putting some uh pipes in there for the flood is probably a good idea.
Filling it in is what they want to do with a fence across the top and a roadway.
Again, uh if this is an engineering problem, then probably a third or at least a quarter of the of uh similar topographic problems exist along the sixteen hundred mile border between San Diego and Brownsville, Texas.
Uh are we going to have two years of engineering on each gully?
Because if we are, they'll never be border security.
It's uh I I found that answer to be astonishing that two years after they had the money, two years after Congress acted to sweep away all the environmental objections of California Coastal Commission and the environmental lawsuits and all the rest of it, all of that was put aside.
Uh uh an emergency piece of legislation from Congress directed that this fence be built, because it is the only gap in our I think it's like 15 miles of fence that we do have separating Tijuana from San Diego.
Uh the gap is there.
And it's not called smugglers' gulch just, you know, out of coincidence, okay?
So the fact that they've had two years to do the engineering of where the road goes and how they're going to handle flood waters, and uh you know how many years did it take to build uh the Hoover Dam, uh you know, the Grand Cooley uh uh you could go through this whole list of a time when if Americans wanted to do something, it simply got done.
It is clear to me that this administration does not want to secure this border.
Because this example I used is an example that could be multiplied dozens of times over.
And when we come back after the top of the hour, Jeff Sessions, the United States Senator from Alabama, will join us with his rather detailed critique of this and hundreds of other items in this amnesty bill, which is once again gonna be uh slipped through.
Oh, and and wait to hear what clay pigeon means uh with regard to making law.
Clay pigeon has a specific meaning with regard to this law, and we'll come back and talk about that tactic.
All these things that the senators think we don't know about.
We do, and we're mad.
I'm Roger Hitchcock on the Rush Show, back after this.
Critics call the uh Kennedy McCain immigration bill amnesty.
They call it no gangster left behind, no pedophile left behind.
They call it an open door to tripling or quadrupling the number of people illegally in this country through chain migration.
What about all of those criticisms?
Senator Jeff uh Sessions of Alabama will join us as one of those senators who's taken a very close look at this bill.
What is the truth of it?
We'll come back with Jeff Sessions with that truth.
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