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June 29, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:39
June 29, 2012, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 247 podcast.
Okay, folks, I now know what happened yesterday.
I've had time to dig into this.
Time that I did not have prior to yesterday's program and did not have during the program.
And I can't tell you how sick I am.
I am literally sick over what happened yesterday.
I don't know how else to describe it.
Literally sick.
Live from the Southern Command in Sunny, South Florida.
It's open line Friday.
Open line Friday.
That's uh the day of the week where you get to choose what it is we talk about when we go to the phones.
Monday through Thursday, you have to talk about things I care about, but that's not the case on Friday.
So if there's something you think hasn't been said, a question or comment that you'd like to have the answer to.
This is your day.
Telephone number 800-282-2882, the email address L Rushbow at EIB net.com.
A giant total fraud was perpetrated on this country yesterday.
The Supreme Court as an institution is forever tarnished.
There are now no limits anywhere on the size scope, the growth of government.
We were the victims of a purposeful intentional fraud yesterday.
There is no way were anybody in Washington concerned about the Constitution.
There is no way Obamacare gets anywhere close to being law in this country.
There is no way it even approaches constitutionality.
And the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court knew that.
Felt it was his duty, however, to save the legislation.
I don't even care about motivation.
I don't care if it's because he wants the New York Times and Washington Post loving him.
I don't care if it's because he wants to be the next John Marshall.
I don't care.
All I know is that we were defrauded in front of our eyes, wide open.
We were taunted, frauded, defrauded, mocked, laughed at, I guess five to four court decisions are perfectly fine now.
Five, four, yeah, yeah.
Hey, we'll take whatever we can get.
We'll take it however we can get it.
Even if they have to invent law, even if they have to rewrite a statute that was so poorly written it wouldn't have gotten past a first grader who understood the Constitution.
It re folks, I I having having now learned what happened, and by the way, I I can't take much more.
Reading the faint praise for Justice Roberts, there are a lot of conservatives are trying to find some comfort in all this by pointing out that Justice Roberts ruled that the Commerce Clause isn't a catch-all that justifies anything Congress wants to do.
Hey, Rush, we got to look at what we won here.
Well, I understand that theory.
I mean, you do want to try to take the best of things that you can, but that is theft.
Theft of liberty and freedom right in front of our eyes.
Okay, so the commerce clause has been limited.
So now we get to pay a tax for something we don't do.
But it's it's worse than that.
It really is akin to going into a 7-Eleven.
And saying to the clerk, no, I really don't want to buy any gum.
Well, okay, tax on that's 235.
That's what's happened here.
I see all these people running around now thinking they've got free health care.
And for the next year and a half, that's what it's going to look like.
Michelle Obama is out.
Guess what?
Contraception is now free.
She got a list of all the things that are free.
AP has a list of all the things that are free for everybody.
And what happened here basically is that Justice Roberts stretched the limits to avoid being accused of activism.
I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt.
He wanted to avoid being accused of activism.
Activism in this case would have been finding the law as it is, unconstitutional.
So he succumbed to fear that doing that, upholding the Constitution would have been accused, would have resulted in him being accused of activism.
So what he did, he stretched the limits to avoid being accused of activism in the process.
He became more activist than a justice in recent memory.
He actually wrote this.
It makes going without insurance just another thing the government taxes, like buying gasoline or earning income.
That's all it is here.
He's got this law.
The Congress wants this law.
The president wants this law.
It's entirely unconstitutional.
And they all knew this, other than the four liberals.
They all knew the whole thing was unconstitutional.
And Justice Roberts decided to rewrite it.
He rewrote the legislation in a way that Congress never intended it.
It would be like a judge making up for an incompetent lawyer in court and finding somebody who's guilty totally innocent just because the judge wanted to appear magnanimous.
Or vice versa.
It makes going without insurance just another thing the government taxes.
Like buying gasoline or earning income.
Well, there's a big difference.
You don't have to buy gasoline.
And for 48% of the country, you don't have to earn an income.
But we are all going to have to pay a tax for not doing something.
And that starts a limitless universe of activity or lack of activity that can be taxed.
There is a there's a doctrine of law that says you don't reach constitutional issues if there is an alternative basis to decide the case.
Do you recall?
We talked yesterday toward the end of the program, and I was admittedly confused because I hadn't had time to read the decision nor read any analysis of it.
Things were happening lickety split here, rat tat tat.
But something yesterday that had me constantly confused was Justice Ginsburg's dissent.
She's in the majority.
What was she dissenting against?
Then after the program, I go home and I'm starting to do show prep for today's show, and I find out that a bunch of liberals are ticked off at Roberts because of what he did with the Commerce Clause.
So I saw now I'm really confused.
Day one, and they're complaining about Roberts, and Ginsburg wrote a dissent.
What was she dissenting from?
So I looked into it.
They're ticked off at Roberts.
Essentially, she criticizes Roberts for violating the principle that you don't reach constitutional issues if there's an alternative way to decide the case.
So Roberts contended that the mandate was unconstitutional, but it could be upheld as a tax.
And Ginsburg said, well, if you're going to do that, there's no need to even talk about the mandate in the ruling.
If you're going to say that the mandate could be upheld as a tax, then don't you don't have to even get to the mandate.
You don't even constitutionally, you don't have to even talk about it.
You don't have to rule it unconstitutional.
You don't have to limit.
They were, they wanted the four libs wanted this case on the mandate, not the tax income.
They wanted the commerce clause to be stretched to include unlimited government power.
And they were ticked off at Roberts for limiting that.
They said, if you're gonna find this as a tax case, leave it at that.
So when I found that out, that really aroused my curiosity, because they thought Roberts then started answering an unnecessary question.
And that, according to Ginsburg and the left makes Roberts an activist judge.
And I'm saying, you know, my head is swimming.
Because all of this is gobbledygook.
All of this is total BS, folks.
And yes, I'm going to explain this as the program unfolds.
I'm just setting the table here.
But we basically are looking at some of these words I hate using.
Roberts did not say this in his opinion, but he knows it.
Congress and the president insisted up and down this was not a tax.
And the only power that they were relying on here was the Commerce Clause power.
That's how the law was presented.
It's how it was enacted.
It's how it was intended.
Obama ran around telling everybody there were no taxes in this.
It was not a tax increase.
In fact, people's taxes are going to get cut.
The legal controversy was the Commerce Clause.
And Justice Roberts thus had to address it.
But it is an it is an utter travesty.
It is an utter travesty that a member of the court, I don't care if it's a chief or whoever decides that it's up to him to save an unconstitutional piece of legislation under the guise of not being an activist judge.
The Supreme Court wrote legislation.
They rewrote this legislation to save it.
In the real world, Realville, what used to be, what everybody thought they could count on.
What everybody thought and hoped one more time they could depend on, even though we know we really can't.
We learned it in Kelo.
We learned it in McCain Feingold.
We've learned it a lot.
We can't count on the Supreme Court to uphold the Constitution, and that's why I'm sick.
If we can't count on the Constitution being upheld in the Supreme Court, and furthermore, if the Supreme Court is going to take over the duties of the legislative branch and write legislation in order to save incompetent, unconstitutional faulty work, then we've got pure fraud.
Right before our very eyes.
I've got to take a break.
Come back.
Byron York went and looked at the first day of oral argument.
When you hear this, you're going to be angry than you even are right now.
You're going to relive the first day of oral arguments where they talked about this as a tax.
And the court allowed the government to argue both ways.
That it was a tax one day, and they allowed the government to argue the next day that it wasn't a tax.
First two days of oral arguments are where you find the answer to all the inexplicable questions here.
We'll be back.
Don't go away.
Just got something, an email, fundraising email from the National Republican Congressional Committee.
And it it kind of dovetails you probably have heard some um uh conservative commentators marveling at at Roberts.
either saved the court from this charge of activism or I'm here to tell you that the reason in these particular pieces that you have seen people praising Justice Roberts is very simple and very narrow.
It's for one reason.
He came up with something they didn't think of.
And who would have?
You've got the U.S. Congress passing a health care bill that is based on the Commerce Clause being stretched to now say that the government can mandate that we buy or not buy something.
That is how this case was presented.
It is how this case was argued.
It is how this case was presented to the American public.
It is how everybody thought this case was going to be decided.
And so all the pundits started predicting their outcomes.
Oh, yeah, it's going to go 6-3 Robertson Kennedy writing for the majority.
Well, Roberts will see what Kennedy does, and he'll go that way to make sure the court's reputation is protected.
No, it's going to go down five, four mandate going to be scrapped.
Every prediction under the sun, nobody predicted this.
Nobody predicted this.
And so all of the so-called smart people inside the Beltway are in awe and they're ooing and I, oh my God, what a smart guy.
We didn't think he got a one thing that nobody thought of.
But why didn't anybody think of it?
Because we are not lawless.
If there are no limits on the law, then we could have conjured up any possible outcome.
But most of us were constrained by what is law.
What's right, what's wrong.
Nobody conceived that the court would rewrite the bill.
And so when the court rewrote the bill, some people on our side marvel at how brilliant and smart.
Why outsmarted us?
Why, that's the one thing we didn't think of.
What a smart.
Well, why didn't you think you didn't think of it because you were thinking within the bounds of the law.
You weren't thinking that the court was going to perpetrate a fraud.
You weren't thinking.
We know Congress tried to perpetrate a fraud by stretching the commerce clause to include the ability for the government to require us to buy things.
But this was made up.
This was made up out of whole clothes.
Now, if in predicting what the court was going to do, we could have been permitted or allowed to conjure up any possibility, or the law doesn't matter.
Well, maybe somebody would have predicted this.
So I've got this fundraising letter here from the NRCC, the National Republic Congressional Committee.
Friend to come on.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote yesterday, it's not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.
He is right.
You may disagree with his decision to uphold Obamacare, but his point still stands.
It's up to us to get rid of Obamacare by defeating Obama the House Democrats.
So what are you going to do?
And they asked for three bucks.
I'm sorry.
It's not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.
We didn't make this choice.
We were the victims of a fraud.
It is entirely the job of the United States Supreme Court to determine whether or not a piece of legislation is constitutional.
They have decided 169 times that pieces of legislation were unconstitutional.
They don't do it all the time, but they do it plenty of times.
We weren't asking to be protected from the consequences of our decisions or choices.
We were being asked.
We were asking for the Constitution to be defended.
I don't believe Even to go so far as to raise money off of this by saying, well, yeah, you know, you may disagree the decision, but his point still stands, it's not our job, not the court's job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.
I don't want to relive how this whole bill came to be.
But this bill did not happen under the normal procedures within the law of how legislation is enacted, how it is debated, how it is voted on.
There was nothing that was proper about this from the get-go.
We were asking the Constitution to be upheld, the Constitution to be defended and protected.
That is their job.
You know, I can't get over this.
I really can't get the National Republican Congressional Committee, the people re-electing House members.
They see this as a fundraising opportunity, which I understand it is, but for crying out loud.
Here's this email.
Listen, friend.
Chief Justice Roberts wrote yesterday, it's not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.
He's right.
You may disagree, but his point still stands.
Not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.
Well, excuse me, Mr. National Republican Congressional Committee, but nobody voted to raise taxes.
There were no political choices expressed in this end result.
Even the Democrats who ramm this bill through in the dead of night claimed it wasn't a tax.
Every poll under the sun shows that the people do not want Obamacare.
In fact, some polls show them opposed to it by margin of three to one.
What is this?
Protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.
We need to be protected from the Supreme Court.
need to be protected from the...
There's nowhere to go now.
I'm just...
Look at this as a as a fundraising opportunity.
Look, I know it's a fundraising opportunity.
Mitt Romney got $4 million of them to ask for it.
I'm going to go ahead and hit the button.
It's not the job of the court to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.
Really?
So anything a Congress passes in any way that they pass it?
The court's gonna uphold?
No matter what it is, because it's not their job to determine whether or not it's American.
Which is to me what constitutional is.
Everybody just laissez faire here, it's hands off.
Oh, and by the way, if the way our elected officials wrote it doesn't work, guess what?
You people, whose political choices I'm talking about, guess what?
I'm gonna write something that none of you ever anticipated that nobody ever made as a choice, and I'm gonna make it the law of the land.
What defense do we have?
We're now supposed to go back, throw a bunch of Democrats out of office, hope and pray the Republicans we put into office, then have the guts to do the right thing, and if they do, and the whole thing ends up back at the Supreme Court someday, we know all bets are off.
Because nothing matters anymore.
There is no standard.
There's no backstop.
There is no alarm.
There is no 911.
There's nowhere to go.
Byron York wrote his piece at the D.C. examiner yesterday.
Nobody knew it at the time.
But the key moment in the Supreme Court Obamacare case came on March 26th, the first day of oral arguments when the people were paying few people were paying close attention.
Before getting to the heart of the case, the justices first wanted to deal with what seemed to be a side issue was the penalty imposed by the individual mandate in Obamacare a tax.
The first question the justices had for the lawyers, is this a tax?
If it was, the case would run afoul of a 19th century law known as the Anti Injunction Act, which says that a tax can't be challenged in court till somebody's actually been forced to pay it.
Well, the Obamacare taxes don't implement till 2014.
So on the first day of oral arguments, if Obamacare is a tax, the court would have to throw it out because nobody had paid the tax yet.
So the first day of oral arguments, the justices want to know.
They asked the government, is this a tax?
The government said no.
Because if it because everybody wanted the case tried, everybody wanted it adjudicated and they wanted it adjudicated now.
Since the Obamacare mandate wouldn't go into effect until 2014, that would mean there could be no court case until 2014.
So on the first day of oral arguments, the government said, no, it's not a tax.
Well, we could stop right there if we wanted to.
We could stop after the first 30 minutes of oral argument back on March 26, skip everything that happened between then and yesterday, and then go to Justice Roberts' ruling, where he found it to be a tax.
That of course is not what happened.
They kept arguing.
No one had challenged Obamacare on the basis of it being a tax.
The challengers wanted the case to go forward now.
The White House, having argued strenuously during the Obamacare debate that the penalty was not a tax, wanted to go ahead.
So the court on its own tapped a Washington lawyer to make the argument the penalty was a tax just to cover their basis.
The government wouldn't say it was a tax.
The anti-Obama lawyers would not say it was a tax, so the Supreme Court went out and they brought in.
They hired their own lawyer to argue that it was a tax.
The court on its own tapped a Washington attorney to make the argument the penalty was a tax, and therefore the case should not go ahead.
The Anti-Injunction Act imposes a pay first, litigate later rule that's central to federal tax assessment and collection, said the lawyer hired by the court, Robert Long on the first day of oral arguments.
The act applies to essentially every tax penalty in the Internal Revenue Code.
There is no reason to think that Congress made a special exception for the penalty imposed by Obamacare.
So the lawyer hired by the court affirmed it's not a tax.
Nobody in the regime thought it was a tax.
Nobody in Congress thought it was a tax, and nobody in Congress made a special exception for the penalty imposed by Obamacare as a tax.
It was all in the Commerce Clause.
So after the lawyer hired by the court made his case, it fell to the government lawyer, Solicitor General Donald Verilly to argue that no, the mandate wasn't a tax, and therefore the case was not subject to the Anti-Injunction Act.
And that's what happened on the first day.
The government hired a lawyer to make the case it was a tax.
And for really, the Obama lawyer made the case that it wasn't.
This is just so the justices could have arguments on the table that they could then decide.
At the same time, everybody knew that the next day, when Varilli planned to argue that the mandate was justified under the Commerce Clause, that he had as a backup the argument that it was also justified by Congress's power to levy taxes, in other words, it was a tax.
And Justice Alito saw the conflict right away.
He said, Mr. Varilli, today you were arguing that the penalty is not a tax.
Tomorrow you're going to be back here, and you're going to be arguing that it is a tax.
Has the court ever held that something that is a tax for the purposes of taxing power under the Constitution is not a tax under the Anti-Injunction Act.
Really said, no, it's never happened.
Now at the time, everybody found this a little boring because everybody was waiting for the reelection the next day when they got to the question of whether the commerce clause could be stretched to include the individual mandate.
But the first day is where the fraud happened.
The first day the government says it isn't a tax.
The second day, the government as a backup said, if you don't like the commerce clause, we also think it's a tax.
The government was allowed to argue this both ways.
The first way they were allowed to argue that it wasn't a tax, so that the case would go on.
The next day, they were allowed to argue as a backstop, if the commerce part of it fell apart, that it was a tax.
But a lot of these observers who were bored on the first and second days of oral arguments were then shocked yesterday when the chief justice rejected the commerce clause argument and ended up agreeing with Varili that the mandate simultaneously was and wasn't a tax, and that therefore Obamacare would stand.
Roberts joined the courts for liberals who seemed prepared to uphold Obamacare no matter what, which is true.
Roberts sleight of hand drove his conservative colleagues nuts.
The dissenter Scalia Kennedy Thomas Alito said the government and those who support its position on this point make the remarkable argument that the mandate is not a tax for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act, but is a tax for constitutional purposes.
That carries verbal wizardry too far, deep into the forbidden land of the sophists.
So from the get-go, from the get-go, this case was allowed to be violent, sloppy, bent, shaped, flaked, and formed, however, ultimately the left wanted it to be in order for it to be found constitutional or good.
And by the way, on this Commerce Clause business, folks, they didn't limit anything.
They said this bill.
They said Obamacare is not permissible under the Commerce Clause, but they didn't limit the Commerce Clause per se here.
The Anti-Injunction Act says that you cannot do a court case over a tax until it's been collected.
Levied and collected.
Well, the tax hasn't been levied and collected.
And by gosh, if the Chief Justice himself didn't find that the whole thing is kosher as a tax increase.
A tax increase on what we don't buy.
And a point that I made yesterday that I want to make again.
When you pay taxes, where do you pay the money?
Government gets the money.
These taxes are going to be paid to insurance companies.
Is that even a tax?
You have to buy health insurance.
If you don't, there's a fine.
So the money that you're spending that you otherwise wouldn't, the tax being spent with insurance companies.
The tax anti-injunction act was codified Title 26 U.S. Code.
It was enacted in 1867.
It is the law.
It's never been found to be unconstitutional.
The Obama administration was allowed to argue it both ways.
So that however it ended up being most beneficial to them was the way the court was going to decide.
So we, who cannot be protected from the political choices we make, spend all this time debating and arguing against a piece of legislation based on the Commerce Clause.
The court admits they can't find it constitutional, so guess what?
We're gonna make this thing legal by calling it a tax increase.
Government can do that.
There's a reason nobody predicted this outcome.
And the reason is nobody was thinking outside the boundaries of the law.
We'll be back after this.
Your phone calls its open line Friday, so I'll give you a shot next.
My friend Andy McCarthy has a piece on this at PJ Media.com.
His headline is Obamacare ruling pure fraud and no due process.
Here's how he opens.
Led by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court decided that Americans have no right to due process.
Indeed, the court not only upheld a fraud perpetrated on the public, it became a willing participant.
That's exactly right.
This whole law has been presented fraudulently.
The whole thing was a fraud.
Obamacare passed in Congress through trickery.
They used reconciliation, they tried all kinds of tricks.
They even thinking of deeming it to pass.
There was the Cornhusker kickback, all kinds of things ultimately didn't work because the people weren't going to put up with it.
Was upheld by the Supreme Court through trickery.
Had Obama cared, it's Andy Riding, had Obamacare been honestly presented as a tax, or had the court acted properly by striking it down as an illegitimate use of the commerce power and telling Congress that if it wanted to pass the bill as a tax, it'd have to pass the bill as a tax.
Our dire financial straits might have been forced this much-needed debate about the limits of congressional welfare power.
We've now lost that opportunity through fraud, fraud in the legislative action, fraud in the judicial review.
Due process would not allow this to be done to a criminal, but the Supreme Court's decided the American people will have to live with it.
The Supreme Court's decided the American people will have to live with it.
The Congress presents a case to the Supreme Court, well, the administration does, that is based entirely on an individual mandate that it's said to be illegal because of the Commerce Clause.
If Congress had wanted to pass a bill that got the same thing done with taxes, it would have done that.
It didn't do that on purpose.
They didn't want to go anywhere near tax increases on this.
Obama was out promising tax cuts to everybody, lower premiums, greater health care coverage and treatment.
There was no way that they wanted to talk about this as a tax, a tax increase, any of the sort.
And so the court should have adjudicated this on the basis of what was in the bill, period.
And they didn't.
Again, the chief justice wrote what I'm going to read to you here.
Under my theory, the mandate is not a legal command to buy insurance.
Rather, it makes going without insurance just another thing the government taxes.
Like buying gasoline or earning income.
Under my theory.
The mandate's not a legal command to buy insurance.
That's the stretch that he had to make in order to get where he ended up.
Under my theory.
The mandate's not a legal command to buy insurance.
Most certainly the hell was.
And that's all it was.
And that's not constitutional.
It was a command by the federal government that we buy something.
They don't have that power.
The chief said, eh, not a legal command.
It's just makes going without insurance just another than government taxes, which the government can do, like buying gasoline or earning income.
It makes you sick.
It just makes me sick.
Roberts says that he thought it was his duty to save the act.
No matter what.
It was his duty to save the act, no matter how bad it was, he had to write it to make it legal.
Sorry.
I feel like the police chief in my town just had a press conference and has announced that the police force will now be assisting criminals in breaking into my property.
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