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June 29, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:57
June 29, 2012, Friday, Hour #3
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Greetings to your music lovers, Trill Seekers, Conversationalists, all across the fruited plane.
Rush Limbaugh, Excellence in Broadcasting Network on Friday.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open live.
Great to have you here, my friends, for our big final hour, 800-282-2882.
The email address, illrushbow at EIBNet.com.
Let's listen to some tortured logic.
Let's go to the audio soundbites.
Got some liberals here discussing what all happened.
We'll start with Dahlia Lithwick.
She is the Slate Magazine senior editor and one of the left's premier court watchers.
No, no, I don't get it.
Hang on just a second.
Look, let me try this one more time.
It was just asked, you don't see any win in this thing.
The Commerce Clause was not used, declared unconstitutional.
I guess the simplest way I can express this is that this is not a faculty lounge debate to me.
This is about something really basic.
The freedom and liberty of the American people, which was not protected, upheld, or advanced yesterday.
Nothing against people in faculty lounges, and nothing against intellectuals who wish to argue the finer legal points.
And I predicted that in the court, I was right.
That's good.
That's great.
They certainly ask me, don't you see a silver lining?
I think most people in this audience, for example, I think the people who make this country work are not interested in the legal finer points.
They're interested in whether or not there is a mechanism whereby liberty and freedom will be protected, maintained, upheld.
And yesterday, a clear signal was sent that there isn't.
Now, ultimately, what that means is, and by the way, this is a life lesson because it is this way in life, by the way, it's up to us.
No, there's nothing wrong in depending on the not, there's nothing wrong in holding the Supreme Court accountable as a backstop.
They are there to assess the constitutionality of law.
That's what they themselves said, Marbury versus Madison.
That's their job.
That's what they're to do.
They didn't do it in this case.
So in not doing it, the freedom and liberty of the people who make this country work was not upheld.
That's what matters to me.
Now, over there on the side, yeah, we can.
I'm glad that that commerce clause was not expensive.
So am I.
But the fact that the commerce clause, the mandate was determined unconstitutional, didn't save us.
So it's a fine legal point.
It's a great thing.
Yep.
And I'm, but the same token, I'm not interested in IQ bonus points for smart justices who found a way to save the court, being accused of active.
I'm just a man of the people.
I'm just common, ordinary, everyday average Joe, and I have been blessed with incredible good fortune.
And unlike a bunch of elitists, I don't think that what's happened to me should only be permitted for a special few.
I think it is the birthright of every American to have the opportunity to become the best they can be, to exercise the ambition and desire and ability that they have to pursue excellence to whatever degree they wish and to have that effort rewarded accordingly, knowing that there's no such thing as fairness and equality, all that.
We stipulate that.
But for that to all happen, there have to be some guardrails and the premise of this country has to be upheld.
And for people to be the best they can be, for people to pursue their dreams, there have to be some things that are given, taken for granted of, so you don't have to waste your time focusing on them.
And now what we have to do is reassert the purpose of the country in this next election.
That's up to us to do.
It's up to us to do it for ourselves and for those of you who have children or grandchildren and pets who want the best for them, regardless.
It's up to us.
It always has been.
I've always said that this is a country that people get what they want.
And that always is the rub here.
It's the question we've been asking ourselves since Obama won in 2008.
Really, what kind of country are we?
Have we reached the tipping point where a majority is simply content to have the government give them cable TV, a cell phone, food stamps, and a little housing here and there, and that's it?
Are we still a country made up of people who believe in individualism, self-reliance, rugged self-reliance, taking care of self-interest, and in the process, elevating everybody in their orb?
And it always comes down to that.
And that remains the question now, and that's one of the reasons so many people are unsettled.
And of course, read the media today and they're talking about how, hey, it's a great day Obamacare was upheld.
That means this is free and that's free and that's just warns us what we're up against.
But I guess you could say I take this a little personally only because of how much I love and appreciate, which is actually the key word, the country.
I'm not interested in denying people opportunity, success, however they define it.
As I said, I'm not an elitist who thinks that only a few select special people really should get the spoils and then determine what the remainder, the vast majority, get.
I don't think that way.
And I think it's precisely because I don't have any pedigree in anything.
I don't have a state-of-the-art education.
I don't have a state-of-the-art anything.
I'm, in my mind, a living example of the uniqueness, the greatness, and the wonderfulness of this country.
And what I love sharing my passions, including my success.
I want everybody to be able to experience it to whatever degree they wish.
And I look at decisions like this yesterday as a huge impediment to it.
And I also see it as a lot of people not looking at life the way I do in terms of this country, not ideologically or politically, but in terms of freedom and liberty.
So that's why I'm feeling disquieted or sick, as I said, when the program began.
Because I just look at the task before everybody is now becoming even more difficult, which is life.
Understand?
I'm not, as I say, in denial.
It was just so unnecessary.
And I guess it also boils down to just something as simple as right and wrong, which we all know, we all have an inner voice.
And we all know, call it your conscience or your religion or your faith, but we all know right and wrong.
We don't always listen to the voice and we all get in trouble.
We all do stupid things and we all stretch the boundaries.
But at the end of the day, we all know what's right and wrong.
Then the realization that people in much more powerful positions than we are don't care about that.
Don't care about right and wrong, aren't interested in it.
It is all about winning the points in the faculty lounge or being impressed that somebody came up with a solution to which no one predicted.
Wow, how brilliant.
It's interesting, but it's not helpful.
Now, Dahlia Lithwick, I do want to get some of these soundbites in just to listen to the victors.
Listen to them talk about how they justify this, how they celebrate it.
So Dahlia Lithwick is the slate.com magazine editor.
I guess she's qualified as their court watch.
She was on CNN with Wolf Blitzer and their 100,000 viewers.
And Blitzer said, you've been watching this court for a long time, and I've been reading your articles for years.
What does this say to you about the Chief Justice?
I think that this was an act of true statesmanship.
People are talking about John Marshall today and likening him to the great leaders of the court.
I think he made a lot of people very mad today, but I think he fell on his sword for the integrity of the court.
I think it says he puts the court first.
Now, nothing could be more perverted or convoluted than that point of view.
Fell on his sword for the integrity of the court.
And she's a court watcher.
It's only because she got the outcome she wanted.
And so it's the outcome she wanted.
So let's make this out to be the most brilliant, far-sighted, sacrificial, whatever it takes to build this thing up.
Justices are not supposed to be statesmen.
I don't know what she had written prior to the decision, but I can tell you that there were reams of media people in the week to 10 days leading up to the decision yesterday who were excoriating the court before it had ruled anything.
And if this court found this law unconstitutional, why it was the exact opposite.
Here's Tom Brokaw, who admitted five days before the election in 2008, he had no clue who Barack Obama was.
He was on the Today Show today.
The brand new co-host, Savannah Guthrie, replacing Ann Curry, said to Brokaw, let's talk about John Roberts, Tom Brokaw.
Not many people saw this one coming.
What do you make of this almost nixon to China alignment with liberals in the court?
What do you think he was trying to do?
The conventional wisdom was that, in fact, mandates would get knocked out and that Kennedy would be the swing voter and all of this.
All the former Supreme Court clerks, by a margin of like three to one, said mandates go.
Now Chief Justice shows up.
I do think that it lowered the temperature about the debate about the politicalization of the court, and that's a good thing for the country.
It lowered the temperature.
Only among the liberals, it didn't lower the temperature at all.
The mandate was found unconstitutional, but we can't have that.
The law was found unconstitutional.
This is the thing.
John Roberts admitted the law was found unconstitutional, but I got to find a way to save it.
So I'm going to write that it's a tax increase.
And that lowered the temperature and the debate about the politicalization of the court.
It just added to the politicalization of the court.
Now let's go to Obama's, I think this guy actually is president.
Axelrod, he's out there.
Obama's celebrity of the United States.
Axelrod's actually out there appearing in venues where the president would go.
By the way, is Obama flying over the fire of Colorado today?
Or is he going out there?
Remember Hurricane Katrina Bush?
Folks, Bush was excoriated for flying over Katrina, but not landing.
And much later, it was learned that Bush didn't land because he didn't want to be a distraction and he didn't want people on the ground to have to stop what they were doing in order to provide security.
You know, when a president shows up, everything shuts down.
And Bush said, I don't want to do that.
But he got creamed for not caring.
Just flew over, gave the wings a couple of dips and headed back to Washington.
Obama's going to go out there in Colorado.
He wasn't going to go.
Somebody shamed him into going.
The fires, which they're having trouble putting out because of Obama and the defense budget, cut a bunch of tankers that fly over these fires and drop chemicals.
If he lands, it's going to take resources away from fighting the fires to handle him.
If all he does is fly over and look, do you think anybody will say, wow, how insensive?
He doesn't even care.
He just flew over like they did with Bush.
I doubt it.
They'll talk about how thoughtful he was and selfless.
He could have landed, seen it firsthand, but no, no, he put everybody else first.
That's what they'll say.
Anyway, Axelrod was on today's show today when Matt Wauer.
Matt Wauer said the good news is the Supreme Court said the mandates are constitutional.
No, Matt, they didn't say that.
Anyway, the good news is the court said the mandates are constitutional.
Bad news is that they said they're a tax.
Back in 2009, the president adamantly denied that health care reform was going to be a tax on the American people.
Does he now agree that the legislation, this law, is a tax?
Whatever you call it, Matt, whether you call it a mandate or a tax, what it is is a penalty on the very few Americans who can afford health care, don't pay for it, end up in our emergency rooms, getting free care, and then we all pay for it.
Whatever's not fair is important in an election year and coming out of a recession.
If it's called a tax, it's going to hurt.
That's Lauer trying to help out here.
Hey, you guys, you're going to know it's in a recession.
You better not call it a tax.
Anyway, this is another misnomer.
People who can afford it and don't pay for it, they end up in no people who can afford it and don't pay for it pay for it when it happens to them, like I do.
Anyway, the people that are going to get everybody's going to have to buy it or pay a fine, not just the rich.
Take a break.
We'll be back.
Don't go away, folks.
Axelrod will not call this a tax increase.
He will not refer to the mandate as a tax.
There are, according to Tax Foundation, a minimum 21 tax increases in Obamacare, a minimum of 21.
One of them is an additional 0.9% payroll tax increase on wages and self-employment income.
A new 3.8% increase, a tax on dividends, capital gains, and other investment income for taxpayers earning more than $200,000 a year.
Most of these taxes do not just fall on the rich.
A lot of them smack small business right in the breadbasket.
Let's see, Mike in Baltimore.
Great to have you, sir, on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hey, Rush.
Megadittos.
Thank you.
It's a pleasure to speak with you today.
My brothers are going to be so jealous.
I'm going to have a different take on this.
I'm going to have a favorable view of Chief Justice Roberts as well as an more optimistic view about the decision.
I believe Chief Justice Roberts did fall on the sword, but not for the integrity of the court, but for the Republic, to save the Republic.
And the reason I'm saying this is he used the government's argument that this was a tax.
The government, Obama's government came and argued this was a tax.
He used that against them to find a ridiculous law constitutional.
Now, in defining that as a tax, he has exposed the fraud, the lies that the Obama administration, that the Democrats in Congress have foisted upon us.
But Chief Roberts doesn't live in a bubble.
He knows that they've been saying this is not a tax, when in fact it is.
And now, what this has actually done is turned it back to we the people this November.
The brilliancy of it was he trusts we the people, the first three words of the Constitution, to do the right thing.
He has faith in we the people.
I have faith in we the people, and I know you do too, Rush.
I know it's a gamble, but I truly believe this man is brilliant and he did.
He sees the country going down to tubes.
He sees us being wouldn't it have just been easier to find the thing unconstitutional and be done with it?
Absolutely.
But at this time, he takes the rallying points away from Obama, away from the liberal and liberals, and he throws them to the conservatives, the Tea Party activists.
He's frozen into the rallying points to us.
The man made himself a pariah for the Republic.
I loved it.
Look, I hate, you know, I know I don't want to throw cold water on you, but he has just given commerce or Congress the power to tax anything that's not in the Constitution.
Mike in Baltimore was our last caller.
I understand people want to look at it the way he does.
Robert's really brilliant.
He knows the problem here, but he set it up so that we can slam Dunk Obama the Democrats forever and be done with him.
Here's the problem with that.
Even if this decision makes it easier to repeal this, it offends me we have to.
This thing should have died yesterday.
This thing never deserved birth.
If there was ever anything that deserved an abortion in this country, it is this bill.
So we got a bastard child that has just been given life for some strategic purpose to make it easier for us to repeal.
Okay, fine.
In the process, what the Chief Justice did was expand the taxing power that Congress has to practically limitless.
It's a whole new world of power.
He authorized taxes that are not in the Constitution.
They don't have to hide behind the Commerce Clause anymore.
They can get exactly what they want with the tax code now.
Thanks to this ruling, Congress can mandate whatever they want.
Alan West, I was told, I got an email from the right scoop.
Alan West said, how would Pelosi feel if Congress passed a law mandating everybody go out and buy a 9mm Glock pistol?
Nether Limbaugh, don't be ridiculous.
What do you mean it would never happen?
It most certainly can happen.
You guys lose.
We get into power and we get some guy in the office that wants to make sure everybody's got a gun to protect themselves and mandates it and you pay a fine if you that's what the hell just happened yesterday mr. Limbaugh was restricted to health insurance.
No, it wasn't.
This is a brand new limitless taxing authority.
You can be taxed for not buying chewing gum at the 7-Eleven.
If somebody says so now, but they would never say so, what do you mean?
They would never say so.
They just did with health care.
I don't.
I'm sorry, I just I don't.
I don't think that's brilliant.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who's a former director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, told the Washington POST that once the CBO recalculates the cost of the bill to incorporate the tweaks included in the court's decision, the new price tag on this thing will be $500 billion over the next 10 years.
But see that's, I don't even care about that.
Okay, everybody knows the cost is going to go up because it's a government entitlement, and that's what always happens.
What about individual liberty?
That's being lost here.
Everybody looking at this as though it's just a government program, another entitlement for crying out loud.
This is going to Folks, we have a political party that is in bed with tyranny.
This is not your Democrat Party of 50 years ago.
This is not JFK's Democrat Party.
This is a Democrat Party that wants to punish people who disagree with them, wants to criminalize political differences.
These are people that want to put you in jail if you don't have health insurance.
Pelosi said she didn't see anything wrong with that.
So, if Holtz Eakin's figures are right, the cost of this thing just went to $2 trillion.
Now, if you don't think that's going to have an impact on your freedom, if you don't think there's going to be rationing and death panels, and the cost to health care will be determined by virtually every physical activity: what you eat, what you don't eat.
Do you jog, do you not?
Do you drive, do you not?
What risks do you take being alive?
And what stresses on the healthcare system are you thus imposing?
People, it might well determine who gets coverage and treatment based on who they voted for for crying out loud, or at least establish a pecking order.
Here's Peter in Manassas, Virginia, a retired lawyer.
Great to have you on the program, sir.
Hello.
Hello.
Good to talk to you, Rush.
Thank you.
And I think that guy from Baltimore has got it wrong, and so do lots of the pundits who are saying, well, at least the Commerce Clause can't be used to expand government.
But this decision, opinion written by Roberts, doesn't do that at all.
Why do so many people think that it does?
Well, because they want to find something good about it.
And so they're trying to just take these words, and people won't doubt that these words are in the opinion, but the words are unnecessary for the opinion, and that's why it's called dicta.
And that means it cannot be used as precedent.
Okay, so this is what Justice Ginsburg was mad about.
She wrote a dissent on the winning side.
She was upset that Roberts even mentioned commerce.
Yeah, but I think she began to realize that it was unnecessary.
And I don't think they want to bring that too much attention to everybody because then there's nothing in this decision that's good for either side.
That is, at least it's not good for the conservatives because it is dicta, and you could read the opinion, leaving that part completely out, and it doesn't change Robert's logic at all.
That's an excellent point.
And that means the next time they want to expand the government authority and using the commerce clause, nothing's to stop them from it because when a case is brought to the Supreme Court, they can't really get away with using, oh, but Robert said it can't be done.
We can't uphold the mandate under the Commerce Clause.
Well, he didn't need to say it in order to come to his ruling.
So it's like for naught.
DICTA is not precedent, so nothing he said about commerce will have any legal bearing in the future, right?
Yeah.
And it's sort of.
So all these smart legal beagles who are patting themselves on the back are missing that point, it seems.
It seems to be that is the case.
I don't know why, you know, there are plenty of smart people out there, and Mr. Krauthammer said this was a little straddling and nuance that Roberts did in order to, I really don't understand what he was saying, but it's not good in any way you look at it.
What he was saying was that Roberts performed a little sleight of hand and found a way to accomplish everything that he wanted to accomplish.
Well, Krauthammer said he would not have ruled this way, by the way.
Yeah, he did.
And I respect that.
But why should the Chief Justice use a sleight of hand?
Why shouldn't he just use ordinary English and logic to come to a conclusion?
Exactly my question.
Well, obviously, he's quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes in the New York Times as saying, if you can save the act, you got to save the act.
You know, I have a prediction about this opinion.
It will not be a famous opinion like Marlbury versus Madison.
After this all shakes down and we get Obamacare repealed, this decision will just wilt away and it will not be important for anybody.
And Roberts will be seen eventually as a person who pandered to public opinion instead of doing the tough job of ruling on the facts and the law.
Oh, you may have a point.
Let me ask you a question there, Peter.
You like iced tea?
Do I what?
You like iced tea?
I dislike iced tea?
Yes, unsweetened iced tea because I shouldn't have the sugar that's in sweetened tea.
Well, I'm going to tell you what.
We're coming up here on the 4th of July, and the Boston Tea Party and all that.
And I've got this little tea company called Two If By Tea, One If By Land, Two If By Tea.
And we just came out with a brand new unsweet version of our tea.
And I want to send you a couple cases of it because you've helped everybody feel better.
This is strip tea.
There's nothing in it but the tea, and it's great.
So I want you to hang on, Peter, so Mr. Snerdley can get an address where we can send this to you because you made everybody feel better today with your call, and I really appreciate it.
So don't hang up.
And we'll take a brief timeout and be back after this.
Don't go away, folks.
Say, folks, I want to apologize a little bit.
I have not intended to be a downer, but I decided today when I started the program, and I was just going to be as honest as I could be in trying to describe what I thought about this, not just how I felt about it.
I normally ascribe feelings to a secondary status, and I wanted to incorporate them.
I have not meant to be a downer.
I think this is going to end up making everybody angrier.
This is going to gin up turnout against Obama like nothing else has.
I'm confident it's all going to work out.
It just, for the sake of the people of this country, this thing bothers me.
And I just, I wanted to try to explain why today.
So I've not lost my optimism and enthusiasm for the country, but I just wanted to strip it all away here and just be as honest with you as I could about it today.
Our last caller, Peter from Manassas, Virginia, basically his addict is just the judge's editorializing.
That was not germane to the ruling or germane to the case.
Therefore, there is no precedent here on the Commerce Clause and all of these pundits who are writing about this great victory.
There isn't any in this.
There's no victory here.
We didn't win anything is the point.
Now, secondly, Drudge has a story up.
The headline's been his lead item all day.
Secret wiretaps rock Department of Justice.
It's a roll call story, and everybody's trying to read it, and nobody can click on it because their servers are shut down.
So I got people emailing, what's that about?
What's that about, Rush?
Here it is.
Let me tell you what it's about.
The wiretap angle on Fast and Furious is this.
Federal law requires a prosecutor seeking a wiretap to describe to the judge what investigative techniques have been used in the investigation.
You don't just get a wiretap because you ask for it.
You've got to tell a judge what you're doing.
Now, those wiretap applications must by law be reviewed and approved by Justice Department officials before they can be submitted to the judge.
Now, Holder is claiming that he and other DOJ officials didn't know about the gun walking, and this puts the lie to that.
That's why the wiretaps have rocked the DOJ.
Now, if the wiretaps complied with federal law, the wiretap applications would have had to reveal the gun walking to the court.
They would have had to been told about that.
DOJ officials would have had to review and approve those wiretap applications before they could be submitted to the court, which means that the DOJ officials must have known about gunwalking long before Agent Terry was killed in December 2010.
And therefore, it's likely, very likely, that Holder was personally informed about it too.
And he's out saying he didn't know anything about it, that it was Bush's program, McCasey, and he and Obama didn't know anything about it.
Department of Justice has so far refused to show ISIS committee the wiretap applications.
They're hiding those two.
So you put two and two together.
Everybody's saying, what are they trying to hide?
They're trying to hide that they knew about it while they're trying to deny anything of it, any knowledge of it.
That's why everybody's trying to click on that and find out what that's all about.
So, yeah.
No, no, that in order for the wiretap applications to be approved, the judge has to be told about the techniques being used and the program, basically.
And the Department of Justice has to provide that information for the judge.
And we've got to be led to believe that there may be some rogue people inside the DOG running the program that Holder didn't know about.
I don't know.
It's a stretch.
Anyway, that's that.
I got to take a brief time out here as we wrap up on Open Life Friday.
Don't go away.
One more thing.
Now, the information in the wiretap affidavit is sealed, not supposed to be released in public, but Daryl Issa is using constitutional protections for speech and debate in Congress to get it released to the public.
It's a legal way to show that Holder probably lying about the documents, Fast and Furious.
So we'll track that.
Have a good weekend, folks.
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