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Jan. 28, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:42
January 28, 2011, Friday, Hour #2
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Yes, America's Anchorman is away today, and this is your undocumented anchor man sitting in.
No supporting paperwork whatsoever.
Rush will be on your television set later today, though.
7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific on the Golf Channel.
Three back-to-back rush episodes of his golfing adventures.
7 p.m. Eastern tonight, 4 p.m. Pacific.
And he will be back at the Golden EIB microphone live Monday to take you through another week of excellence in broadcasting.
Well, it is the end of the week, and you know what that means.
Here we go.
Yes, not actually live from New York.
We are live from New Hampshire from EIB's newest broadcast facility, Ice Station EIB, in Barley, New Hampshire, 11 degrees Fahrenheit today.
I'm not sure what that is in Celsius, but I think to show that we're getting our act together and rejoining the modern world, we should convert to the centigrade system.
And then I'll be able to give you the temperature in real degrees.
So 11 degrees Fahrenheit, Barme, New Hampshire, Ice Station EIB.
I did mention, actually, I mentioned in the last hour that I was going to be in New York, because usually if I'm doing the show from New York, I mention that I'm in non-compliance with the NEW YORK State Bureau OF Compliance.
Because I walked into my office one day early last year and saw my ashen-faced assistant reading this missive from the NEW YORK State Bureau OF Compliance informing us that we were in non-compliance with the Bureau OF Compliance and the fine for that was $14,000.
And I think with the interest, it's up to $127,000 or whatever it is by now.
We'll be funding the entire high-speed rail link in New York State from Plattsburgh to Manhattan will be entirely funded by my fine for being in non-compliance with the New York State Bureau of Compliance.
But despite that, when I mentioned I was going to be in New York, I had some emails saying, where are you going to be in?
Where are you going to be in New York?
I'm actually going to be in Albany, where I believe the Bureau of Compliance is based.
Is that right, Tiffany?
That's like right.
So we're going to be round the corner from the Bureau of Compliance SWAT team.
I think I'm at the whatever it is, the Holiday Inn in Albany or whatever, talking to the Conservative Party of New York, the guys who elected William F. Buckley's brother a few years back as senator for New York.
But I'm in non-compliance with the Bureau of Compliance.
So I'm taking a great risk actually crossing the border into New York State because the Bureau of Compliance SWAT team could easily take me down as I'm giving my speech at the Holiday Inn.
So if you're there and you hear banging on the door, duck under the attractive table centerpieces, so when the Bureau of Compliance SWAT team open up on me, you won't get hit and be one of the unfortunate casualties of their determination to keep me in compliance with the Bureau of Compliance.
You know, the states are falling apart in America.
And what we do about this is going to be very interesting in the years ahead.
We can carry on talking about rubbish like high-speed rail, but the reality is that all levels of government in many parts of this country spend too much.
And the question is what to do about them.
And now they're talking about making, enabling states to become bankrupt.
And this is obviously a racket.
They're going to let states become bankrupt.
And then what will happen is that if you happen to live in a more or less fiscally responsible state like New Hampshire, you will wind up on picking up the tab for California and New York State and Illinois and all the rest of it.
And there was a letter, Brian Smith, who's a reader in the Wall Street Journal.
He had a, I don't know whether this is a letter in the print edition or just a website comment, but he had a great idea here.
He said that if states go bankrupt, they should lose their statehood.
And if effectively they're living on the federal tab, they should revert to territory status.
And I think that's actually a great idea.
That if you have been so incompetent as a state, we're not talking about a school district or a city here.
We're talking about an entire state.
If an entire state goes bankrupt, in what sense are you a functioning jurisdiction?
You should lose your statehood and be, they should chisel a star out of the flag and you should be a territory again, like Oklahoma Territory was a century ago when they did Oklahoma and the farmer and the cowman should be friends and all the rest of it.
You should lose statehood and revert to territory status because you have failed at grown-up government.
And that should be reflected in your jurisdictional status.
So if they want to change the law to enable states to go bankrupt, then they should also put the price on that.
That if the state is going to become a dependent, if the state is effectively going to become a welfare charge upon the other states, then you should lose statehood, at least temporarily, and become a territory.
There's actually a North American, I hate to go all Britannic on you, but there's actually a North American precedent for that.
Newfoundland, you know, that big barren rock just up off the east coast, way up north, Newfoundland.
Newfoundland was an independent dominion within the British Commonwealth from, I think, from 1910 or 1911 to the early 1930s.
It had what they call in the British Empire responsible government.
So it was an independent country, in effect, like Canada or Australia or South Africa or New Zealand.
And then in the early 30s, in the Depression, when FDR was doing such a great job with the North American economy, the fringe parts of it took a bit of a hit and Newfoundland could no longer maintain itself as an independent country and reverted to becoming a colony, reverted to becoming a dependent of London.
And I don't believe, as far as I know, I don't think there are any other examples.
One, I can think of one other example in British imperial history where a self-governing, independent member of the British Commonwealth becomes a dependent territory of London again.
That's what happened to Newfoundland in the early 1930s.
It failed, as I said, the expression they use in the British system is responsible government, which is a good word for it because it means you're responsible enough to govern yourself.
Well, California and New York and Illinois tried governing themselves and they failed.
They flopped.
They flopped big time.
And there is absolutely no reason why those of us in more prudent states should have to pick up the tab for them without some cost.
So if states want to go bankrupt, that's fine, but there should be a price for that, that they become territories again and they lose their congressional representation and their ability to influence who we elect to govern the nation.
And their failure at responsible government should be reflected in their change in their status.
And Brian Smith makes this point in the Wall Street Journal very pithily, I think.
Illinois, by the way, of course, is the Obama state.
And this is perhaps where he gets his kind of lackadaisical, blithe, ensouciant approach to fiscal matters and why he can stand up at the State of the Union and start bleating on about light rail as the solution to America's problems.
I don't think it's ever going to be possible to have high-speed rail in this country.
I mean, just to take him seriously for a moment.
You remember he said, oh, high-speed rail, you'll be able to zip around on trains really fast and there'll be no pat-downs.
Well, actually, let's just take that for a minute.
It's not funny, and that's why people didn't laugh, when the President of the United States is making jokes about no pat downs, because he's the guy who institutes the pat-downs, right?
He's the guy who says that minor federal bureaucrats can now stick their hands in your underwear.
He's the guy who instituted that.
He doesn't have to go through it.
Nobody's going to get their hands on President Obama's genitalia, just on yours.
Okay?
So that's the difference.
Right there, that's the difference between the king and his subjects.
So lots of people can make jokes about enhanced pat-downs, but the guy who's ordering the people to put his hands around your genitals is not the guy in a position to make that jokes.
That's like President Mubarak standing up right now in his presidential palace in Cairo and doing water cannon jokes.
Lots of people can do water cannon jokes, not the guy who's ordering the water cannon into action.
So that's why he flopped out with his pat down joke.
But here's the other thing.
You know, what's the first thing that's going to happen the day after the high-speed rail network opens?
And you'll be able to zip by high-speed bullet train or whatever pansy name they give it because they don't want the mean-spirited Japanese name.
When you can zip by high-speed rail link from New York to Los Angeles, what do you think?
If that starts on Monday, on Tuesday, there's going to be some al-Qaeda threat to Pennsylvania station or whatever.
And on Wednesday, they're going to institute enhanced pat-downs at the high-speed rail station.
So the rail journey will only take 20 minutes, but you'll have to get to the station three hours beforehand to shuffle through all the enhanced pat downs.
So even the no-pat-down thing isn't even going to happen.
But the other thing that isn't even going to happen is the high-speed rail link.
The only train in this part of the world is the one that goes from Washington, D.C. via New York and New Haven, Connecticut, up to Montreal.
And a couple of years ago, I was thinking, I like trains.
I was thinking of taking the train from up to Montreal.
I looked at the timetable.
The average time between White River Junction, Vermont, Montpelier, Vermont, and St. Albans, Vermont, and Montreal, it averaged 16 miles an hour.
Amtrak, Amtrak, averaged 16 miles an hour.
You'd be quicker bicycling.
If you were on a bicycle running alongside the Amtrak Montrealer, you'd be faster.
You'd beat them.
If you were one of these liberals, if you were John Kerry in the beautifully sculpted yellow spandex hugging your buttocks beautifully, so every TSA agent can see you hiding nothing in there except what God gave you, and you on your little racing bike, you would be beating the Amtrak Montrealer.
And it eventually, they decided to end the train at St. Albans, Vermont, and stick everybody on the Greyhound up to Montreal.
The idea that this country, in its present state, could develop any kind of meaningful high-speed rail network that wasn't a unionized boondoggle that attracted no customers at any kind of affordable price and instead was just imposed another unsustainable bureaucratic feather-bedded union racket on top of the poor taxpayers of this country is completely absurd.
And when a grown man stands in the United States Congress and delivers that as the solution to the woes facing America, he's just out of it.
He's just on planet Zongo.
He's got no, he no longer, he has completely slipped his moorings.
And he is now free-floating in the clouds, entirely detached from any reality.
And that was the President of the United States on Tuesday night.
1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein in for Rush.
More straight ahead.
Mark Stein in for Rush.
Michelle Obama says she doesn't tell people what to eat.
This has never been about the government telling people what to do, she says about her anti-obesity plans.
You can't tell me.
You can't tell me.
This isn't why the government is giving $8 million to Colorado universities in Colorado to develop terrorism detecting plants that can sniff explosives on your person and change color.
They'll also be able to tell whether you've got a Twinkie in there.
I'm not sure I'm with Mrs. Obama on this, but she says it's never been about government telling people what to eat.
That's the state where, by the way, that's the state we're reduced to after the first quarter millennium of America's Republic.
We've worked our way around to a situation where we're supposed to be reassured when the government tells us it's not going to dictate to us what we're going to eat.
Let's go to John in Crofton, Maryland.
John, you're live on Open Line Friday.
Great to have you with us.
How are you doing, Mark?
I'm doing good, and thanks for waiting.
I think we've got a crisis developing.
This is what Obama's been waiting for to show us that he can earn his bones and finally take care of a crisis in an effective way.
It's a weekend.
You got a number of nations that are going through turmoil right now.
Not only Egypt, but Tunisia already fell.
And I understand Yemen and Jordan have a problem.
I think Iran might be behind it.
And even if they're not, you got the Suez Canal.
Being a British guy, you know damn well that there have been crises that affect the Suez takeover of the Suez Canal.
We do have to protect that right now.
I think the Pentagon and the State Department, the White House, should be considering sending a task force there to protect the shipment through the Suez Canal, especially with the price of oil the way it is.
And I think OPEC would appreciate this, and we could charge them back for this service to keep the free flow of supplies, especially oil right now.
The market went down 139 points while I was on the phone waiting to get on.
It's more important than that WTF speech that he gave on high-speed train traffic.
So I think we have to get serious now and not fiddle while Rome burns.
Well, that's very interesting about the Suez Canal.
You're in favor of sending U.S. troops to secure the Suez Canal.
Is that right?
That would be more important than the Suez and the Panama Canals, the two premier canals.
And if they choke off oil supplies through there, what's it going to do to the price of gas, which is already over $3 a gallon for regular?
No, no, that's true.
But don't forget that when it comes to that, Obama is all in favor of that.
He thinks if we get the price of gas to go up, we don't.
Yep, yep.
That's the point.
We need to push him into taking action to keep that canal open.
But really.
Realistically, John, Obama is not going to get mixed up in this.
Obama, for example, is not Obama's core belief from his first two years of foreign policy is that he does not believe in the projection of American power in the world today.
And the idea that Obama would stake the Obama era in American politics, which he wants to be a transformative domestic era, on securing the Suez Canal, I find that hard to imagine.
I mean, you don't really think Obama's going to do anything on this.
That's why I think we have to ask him to do it.
He has to be forced into doing it because that's the smartest thing to do for the whole world.
Now, you're going to have a financial crisis worse than what we're seeing just today.
This is going to affect world markets.
Yes, but you know, everything that has happened in the last I mean, just to take your point, for example, that it might be the Iranians behind this, right?
Which is an interesting point.
But if we assume, say, that Iran will go nuclear any day now, what would be the main effect of that?
The main effect of Iran going nuclear is that it would control the price of the world's oil de facto, and it would control who Middle Eastern oil gets sold to.
So, for example, if they decide they want to prioritize their Chinese customers rather than their Western customers, they're free to do that.
Obama has sat by and done nothing for two years as Iran has gone nuclear on his watch.
Why would he suddenly swing into action now?
He's trying to act like he's moving to the middle because he's trying to act Reagan-esque.
Wouldn't Reagan do this?
Didn't China?
You know what he might do if he's going to go down this path at all, John?
I think he wouldn't do what Reagan would do.
I mean, I think that whole Time magazine cover that Rush was talking about the other day is just glib opportunism on the part of Obama and his Obama's sockses in the media.
But you might get him on board for like a kind of some sort of UN mission, UN peacekeeping type thing.
Well, that's all you'd get him to do because he believes in multilateralism.
He believes in a bunch of guys standing around in blue UN helmets.
I can see him doing that.
But the idea of him sending a U.S. task force to secure the Suez Canal, which you're right.
You're right.
And in a sense, I think he could get something on that because the Chinese certainly have as much to lose from any choking of traffic in the Suez Canal as anybody else.
But here's the thing: here's the thing, John.
He has demonstrated no interest in the rest of the world since he took office.
His only interest in the rest of the world is that he doesn't want the Iranians nucling Cleveland until he's had an opportunity to devastate the American economy and the American political landscape himself.
He just wants foreign policy to butt out and keep the hell out.
And that's why everything he's done here is reactive.
He has no strategic view whatsoever of America's role in the world, except that he does not believe in the projection of American power in the American national interest.
That's why if you listen to his speeches, they all give the impression that he's sort of taking an intellectually equidistant position between U.S. national interests and the sort of global interests of the planet.
Very unusual aspect to the speeches of an American president.
Lots more still to come.
Open Line Friday on the EIB network.
Mark Stein sitting in for Rush.
Rush back live on Monday.
Yes, Open Line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh Show, Monday to Thursday.
A highly trained broadcast specialist controls the content of the show.
But Rush is out today, so we don't have a highly trained broadcast specialist on hand.
Anything goes, whatever you want to talk about.
We've been talking about Egypt.
We've been talking about the president's response to the situation that the United States faces.
Let's go to David in Kingsland, Georgia.
David, what's on your mind?
Please don't make this political.
When the Chinese, the head of China came over and we had to hang our head, I think it's time that Americans stand up for themselves.
And we need to have Americans donate money and pay back the debt that we owe them.
Well, you know, I would be interested in doing that.
But the question is, how do you do it?
Let's say about half the debt of the United States government, the federal debt, not the state and municipal debt, but just say like half the federal debt is foreign and about half of that, you know, 40, something in the region of two-fifths to half of that is with the Chinese.
So you're talking about finding a sum of in the region of at a low ball estimate, something like three and a half to four trillion dollars.
And you can't find that overnight.
I mean, the great question is not whether we can afford to pay off the debt, but whether we can even afford the interest payments on the debt.
I'm sure, you know, David, you have a MasterCard or a Visa card or whatever, and you know it's not a good month when the statement comes at the end of the month and you can only pay off the interest rather than just paying the principal.
It doesn't matter whether that applies whether you've got like a MasterCard or a Visa card with a $100,000 limit or whether you've got one with a $2,000 limit.
If you can only pay off the interest at the end of each month, you're not doing so great.
And that's the situation the United States is in, that within the next two to three, I would say by 2015, the interest on the debt will be covering, the interest payments on the debt will be covering the entire cost of the Chinese military.
Right now, it covers about 80% of the cost of the Chinese armed forces.
I mean, that's crazy.
80% of the Chinese military is paid for by U.S. taxpayers.
How are we going to, that's just the interest.
How are we going to pay off the actual principal of the debt, David?
You have companies and people that have a trillion dollars, a billion dollars, and I know they're going to help.
I'm disabled.
I'm in a wheelchair.
Right.
And I will give you $500.
I'll have to make installments, but I am sure there's many, many Americans, and we should be able to pull up that kind of money.
Well, you say that, David, you know, and I believe you, that you'd give $500 and we'd buy bonds that would be specifically marked for paying off the Chinese.
But what are the odds that, say, you get two, three, five years down the line and the Social Security Fund is running low and they decide to take the bonds that were earmarked for paying off the Chinese and put them into propping up Social Security.
That's the problem.
That's the problem, David, that the American people, it's not just pathetic government figures, but the American people each November, for some time now, have voted themselves a lifestyle and a level of government that they're not prepared to pay for in taxes.
And so how are you going to persuade those people who say, oh, great, government health care.
Oh, great.
Let's have government funding for high-speed rail.
Oh, great.
Let's replace all the light bulbs in America with the Curly Fry light bulb because it's environmental.
How are you going to persuade all those people that if you live by debt, you die by debt, which is the situation the United States are in?
I mean, that's not a problem for government.
That's a problem for the American people, David.
Well, I understand, but I know for a fact that we can get the money that we owe China.
I cannot believe that people would hang their heads because we have that kind of money.
I know we can get that kind of money.
I know it.
Well, I hope you're right.
I hope you're right, David, because it's a very simple thing.
When money drains, power drains.
So the guys who hold your bonds hold your soul, as Jonathan Swift said a couple of centuries back, that When your money is draining to Beijing remorselessly, eventually other things do too, like light power.
I mean, basically, the dollar's role as the global currency is entirely dependent on whether it's in the interest of Beijing to keep it that way.
Thank you for your call, David.
But you know, he's right here, by the way.
He's right.
If he's serious, he's right.
That at a certain point, America has to stop being a country mortgaged to Beijing.
I'm, as I said, I was interviewed by a foreign TV station the other day, and I said I'm about the least anti-American non-American on the planet.
But that said, there are structural defects in the United States that are looming, not just in mid-century, but looming right now, right now.
I was gassing up in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, a couple of days ago on a very cold morning.
And I was putting the gas into the Tangamai truck, and the gas pump was running slow, as it does these days.
I don't know why.
There's all kinds of apocryphal urban myths about this, or in this case, a rural myth, urban myths that it's to do since they put the 10% ethanol in, the tanks run slow, particularly on cold mornings.
I don't know what it is, but I know that if you're ever going through some like decrepit New Hampshire town that's got some broken down general store where its pump, its sole pump has been unmodernized, so it's the original pump they put in in 1954, and you stop to fill up your tank there, you'll be in and out of that place in a minute and a half.
That thing from 1954 will fill up your tank in nothing flat.
Whereas the new environmentally friendly pump, you're standing there freezing in the cold, pumping gas forever.
So I'm standing there in the freezing cold, and this thing's running slow.
So it's like taking four minutes to put a dollar's worth of gas in the tank.
So at some point, I say, nothing works in this third world dump of a country anymore.
And a guy comes around the corner who's been gassing up on the other side.
He's like plaid clad and he's, you know, he's dressed for hunting season.
And he doesn't like to hear some sinister foreigner badmouthing his country.
So he says to me, hey, why don't all you foreigners, if you don't like it, why don't you clear off the hell out of here?
And I said to him, because I was in a bad mood, we were both in a bad mood, could easily have ended in bloodshed.
You know how these things go.
And I said to him, which I wouldn't normally do, I'd have sort of backed away cautiously.
But I was in a bad mood and I snapped at him and I said, hey, if us foreigners ever pull out of the United States, you guys are screwed.
You're completely screwed.
You've got to use that line 50 years ago.
You're going to use that line 30 years ago.
But right now, the only people cropping this country up are foreigners.
Who's buying your debt?
The United States government dumps in Treasury bonds every year the equivalent of the Canadian economy or the Indian economy twice over.
In other words, as fast as India grows its economy, America grows its debt twice as fast.
The entire Canadian economy, the United States government now issues in the form of Treasury debt each year.
In other words, in other words, this country expects the world to buy the equivalent of a G7 nation in U.S. federal debt every single year until the end of time.
So the line, the line, oh, why don't you foreigners, if you don't like it here, clear off back where you came from, that's a very, that would have been a cute line as recently as 1980.
But now it's just a joke.
It's just a joke.
Because until you get serious about this debt, you are like Blanche Dubois in a streetcar named Desire.
You have come to depend on the kindness of strangers, sir.
America is dependent on the kindness of strangers, sinking a G7 economy's worth of money into U.S. federal treasury debt every year.
On America's, on big government streetcar named Desire, you have come to depend on the kindness of strangers.
And Americans should be ashamed of that.
And that's why it's interesting to hear callers from Americans who are ashamed and actually personally prepared to pay off American debt themselves.
But you know how that works.
You know, let's say you've got a teenage son and he wrecks the car and he goes out drinking and he blows all his money and next thing you know, he's got a credit card but he's run up $20,000 worth of debt on it.
And you say, oh, not to worry, son.
It's embarrassing to me having a son with $20,000 of credit card debt that he's run up.
I'll pay that off for you, son.
Do you think that's going to teach your profligate son that this time he should drive more responsibly and drink less and learn how to budget and steward his money?
No, he's just going to carry on as normal.
So if individual citizens volunteer to pay off Chinese debt so they can walk tall in the world today, do you think that man who gave that pathetic figure, who gave the State of the Union address on Tuesday, do you think he's going to take that as a sign that he needs to rein in?
No.
Every speech Barack Obama gives, he stands up there and he says, Washington is broke.
Washington is fixed.
Washington doesn't work anymore.
So what's his solution?
More Washington.
More Washington in everything.
More Washington in your car.
More Washington in your property market.
More Washington in your health care.
More Washington in your mass transit light rail links.
More Washington, more Washington, more Washington.
Until you change that, paying off the individuals, individuals volunteering to pay off the debt wouldn't work.
Warren Buffett, Bill Gates writing a check to pay off the entire debt wouldn't work because in the end, it's not an accounting error.
It's actually a moral question.
It's about the debauchery of Republican government.
It's about the negation of 1776.
What you've done is not run, not spent more money.
That's not the issue.
And it's not even the Chinese owning the debt.
That's not the issue.
It's the spending that causes the debt.
So there's no point paying off the debt until you crush and kill.
I hate to use mean-spirited, violent language, but unless you take a Japanese bullet train and send it spiraling into the heart of government spending, then who owns the debt?
And volunteering to pay it off is not going to make any difference.
Mark Stein in for Rush, lots more still to come.
Obenline Friday on the Rush Limbo Show.
Let's go to Paul in Fort Walton Beach in Florida.
Paul, you're live on the EIB network.
Great to have you with us.
Yeah, great to speak to you, Mark.
You're the number one guest host on the number one show.
Yeah, that's not damning with feign praise.
Great honor for a foreigner to sit at the Golden EIB microphone.
What's on your mind today, Paul?
Yeah, during your last sit-in on the show, you mentioned that farmers were going to have to spend a lot more of their time filling out government paperwork instead of farming as a result of the so-called FDA Food Safety Modernization Act.
Right.
And it's even worse than you feared.
In the Washington Post recently, they reported that the FDA is going to hire 2,000 inspectors specifically to enforce the provisions of the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act.
So after the farmer gets done planning and sewing and repairing the equipment and working all day, he comes home and he's going to have an FDA inspector to make sure that all of his paperwork is correct before he gets up the next morning and starts all over again.
No, there's no point to that.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
No, there's no point to that.
I mean, who could think that what America needs right now is 2,000 more federal inspectors for anything?
There are more federal regulators regulating agriculture than there are farmers to begin with.
Okay, that's the bad news.
The good news is the bill as passed, well, it's now a law, public law 111-353, is unconstitutional in three very important points, if I can go over them very quickly.
Okay.
Okay, first of all, the Constitution, Article 1, Section 7, says all bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.
That's the origination clause.
Well, the bill didn't originate in the House.
It originated in the Senate.
And we've got out of the mouth of Senator Harry Reid himself the fact that that's the case, because when the bill passed the Senate on the night, I may add, of Sunday, remember during the lame duck session, they did all those backroom deals.
Well, on Sunday night, December the 19th of last year, Harry Reid substituted with two amendments.
He substituted the title of the Senate version of the Food Safety Modernization Act and the text into an unrelated House bill.
He basically gutted the House bill, put the entire title and text of the Senate bill into it.
Yeah, and it would be interesting to see.
He thought he'd found a technical way around, because this is like a legacy from the old George III days where the House of Lords couldn't originate money bills.
Exactly.
And it's the same and same thing here.
What's the second point here, Paul?
Well, okay, the second, now they've tried to make this so it'll withstand the constitutional challenge by using the bill number from the House bill, you see, so they can say, well, it originated in the House.
Right.
Well, that's, you know, that's almost dismissive.
I don't think anybody's going to buy that.
That's constitutional contempt.
And I would hope any judge would see it as such.
That's true.
That's exactly right.
Okay, well, another thing they did to try to make it withstand the constitutional challenge was that when they changed the title and the text, gutted the House bill and put the Senate language and title under this House bill number, they did that in the form of amendments.
Because also in Article 1, Section 7, the last clause, it says, but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other bills.
Okay, so they think that by making the title one amendment and the text another amendment and sticking it in there and sending it back over to the House, that that would fulfill the constitutional muster.
Well, it doesn't.
And here's why not, because the founding fathers, when they were writing the Constitution, had no way of knowing what sort of administrative procedures that their successors would follow.
They could have used names instead of bill numbers.
Who knew at that time?
So when the founding fathers said a bill for raising revenue shall originate, they were referring, obviously, to the language.
Yeah, and it'd be interesting.
I mean, I think you're right on this, and I think it's clear that Harry Reid found an unconstitution basically, Harry Reid thought he could be like Snoop Snoop Dogg, when Snoop Dogg had his little trial a few years back, and he could be acquitted on a technicality.
That's what they think here.
I mean, clearly, the Senate originated an unconstitutional money bill, and then they tried to fiddle the paperwork to bring themselves into post facto compliance with it.
And if the Supreme Court were to entertain that seriously, then, you know, in effect, the Constitution is dead.
It's meaningless because it demonstrates naked contempt for constitutional government.
And that's a very good point, Paul.
That was the Food Safety Modernization Act, by the way, under which farmers, as Paul was saying, not only have to get up early and milk the cows and plow the fields, but they also have all this extra paperwork imposed on them when they get there in the evening and 2,000 new federal regulators to make sure they're in compliance.
So basically, a farmer, when he gets up at the cracker dawn, would be better off just going and standing in the milking stall himself, leaning over and letting some federal regulator come in and milk his teats.
Because the idea that you can function as a farmer or in any other occupation with this level of federal regulation is preposterous.
And that's the reality of the State of the Union, by the way, that apart from the constitutional, unconstitutional, remorseless centralization of American life, it's all crippling.
There's more and more government and a smaller and smaller base of people supporting it.
Mark sign in for Rush.
More straight ahead.
The right-wing hate is getting out of control.
The state of Utah has just named an official state gun.
It's the Browning M1911 semi-automatic.
That is the new official state gun of Utah, along with the new state cooking pout and state folk dance.
I don't know about you, but I like to take the state gun and while I'm doing the state folks dance, shoot up the state cooking pot.
That's the kind of mean-spirited right-wing hater I am.
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