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July 2, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:46
July 2, 2012, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
John Roberts, the Rodney King of Chief Justices, can't we all just get along?
Except Chief Justice Roberts didn't drown in his swimming pool as Rodney King did.
No, no, I'm not in a bad mood.
I just, my MacBook Pros, the retinas, I ordered a bunch of them.
They've been in a warehouse at UPS in Louisville since Saturday.
Supposed to be delivered today by 10.30.
Still says that in the tracking.
They're still stuck in Louisville.
I was like, why is Apple holding these things?
I mean, the release dates come and gone.
Anyway, folks, great to have you here.
How are you?
It's EIB Network and El Rushball behind the golden EIB microphone.
Telephone number is 800-282-2882.
The email address LRushball at EIBnet.com.
Are you happy if you're in DC, if you're in a D.C. area, are you happy you don't have an electric car?
Yeah, with the power outages, are you happy you don't have an electric car?
Because 2 million, 5 million, 3 million, whatever.
Aren't you glad you don't have an electric car?
By the way, how those windmills working out for you?
How the windmills and solar panels working out?
Is it running your air conditioning for you?
As you sit there and sweat away how things doing in the nation's capital.
Oh, those windmills are really working out, huh?
Solar panels?
Yeah, man, that's the future.
There you are sitting there sweating, stinking like a stuck pig for three days, and it's going to be this way for another week.
And good thing you don't have an electric car, or you couldn't get around.
You couldn't escape.
Isn't it amazing?
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm not kidding.
DC area power outages after storm could last for days.
I wonder how many people have solar panels on their homes.
They're wondering why isn't their air conditioning working?
Well, seriously, all this, and now, of course, global warming is back.
Forget the fact that it hadn't been hot like this in 10 years.
Global warming is back.
Every day, every day, you got to show up here and beat something back.
Every day, well, yeah, maybe it could be customs, holding.
That's right.
The MacBook Pro retinas came from Shanghai.
But they've been there.
I mean, they still have the delivery date is today at 10.30.
Still says on schedule.
Why don't they change that?
You know, I went deeper down their tracking website and clicked on the tracking numbers, all five of them, being held in a warehouse.
So, yeah, I thought maybe it was, I thought maybe Apple was waiting to make sure that they're all, because this is the delayed model.
And I thought they were waiting to make sure they're all distributed at the same time.
But customs probably does make more sense.
How many windmills would have been destroyed by that land hurricane?
I'm just sitting here wondering.
How many windmills would still be standing if they were there in that land hurricane?
It was 90 mile an hour winds that came along there.
Didn't face Tiger Woods, though.
Tiger winds at Congressional in the heat and the humidity.
Ladies and gentlemen, on Friday, when I opened the program, I told you I felt sick.
And I spent the next two hours explaining why I felt sick.
Today, I'm scared.
I'm a combination of angry and scared.
If this CBS report from Jan Crawford is accurate, and I happen to believe that it is, I'll just, she cites two sources.
She doesn't name them.
But I happen to believe that her report is true.
Well, basically, her report is, let me summarize it for you, that the Chief Justice did indeed cave to left-wing media pressure.
Roberts originally voted.
And by the way, this does lend credence to the notion that Obama was told.
And I'll explain how.
It's just a wild guess on that.
She doesn't get into that in the story.
Originally, Roberts voted with the other conservatives to strike down the mandate and pretty much the whole bill.
Then, and that was in March, April, that was early on, Roberts voted with the conservatives to get rid of the whole thing for the most part, certainly the mandate.
Shortly after that, Obama and the media go on a tear about Roberts, specifically Roberts, and they go on a tear about the court in general.
And they start this horror story about how the court will be destroyed forever.
Its integrity will be blown forever if they overturn major landmark legislation and sitting president, first black president, blah, blah, blah, all of that stuff.
And then Roberts changed his vote.
And for a month, you hear this, Dawn?
For a month, Anthony Kennedy tried to get him to change his mind.
Anthony Kennedy did everything he could.
Anthony Kennedy, say what you want about him being the swing vote.
One thing you can deduce from many of Kennedy's decisions where he has written either the majority opinion or the dissent is that he is totally devoted to individual freedom and liberty.
And in that sense, this whole thing could not stand.
So he spends a month trying to twist Roberts' arm and to no avail.
And then Roberts, after a month, starts working on Kennedy to join him to make this 6'3.
Roberts' change of heart.
In fact, the conservatives, Alito, Thomas, Kennedy, Scalia, found Roberts' reasoning so flawed that they refused to join or even acknowledge his opinion, even in the areas where they agreed.
That is why in their dissent, they didn't even mention Roberts.
They were so ticked off at what he had done.
They were so ticked off at the way he was changing his vote that they didn't even acknowledge his opinion in their dissent.
Some thought that meant that theirs was originally a majority opinion.
The story is, no, they were just mad.
They didn't even want to acknowledge his existence in their dissent.
Jan Crawford, CBS, also reported that Roberts' change of heart was almost certain to have been driven by left-wing media anger around the possibility the law would be overturned.
Roberts reads the papers, very concerned about the court's image, she reports.
If that's true, folks, do you know what it means?
The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States is now run by the American media.
And that's why they are happy.
If you've noticed giddiness in the media, they're not talking about Jan Greenberg's report, folks.
You have to look long and far and wide to find mainstream coverage, analysis of, commentary on her report.
But they are giddy and they are happy, and it's not just that the whole thing was upheld for the most part.
It is that, according to this report, they did it.
Now, Justice Roberts is going to be the Chief Justice for 20 years.
I don't know what in the world this says about the integrity of the court or whatever he was worried about in terms of the court having lost its integrity or appearing political if he had voted to overturn the bill.
He could not have done something that would have more damaged the court's integrity than this, if this is true.
Because now the American, the Washington, New York media runs the Supreme Court of the United States.
They run the Chief Justice.
They can intimidate, and they did.
I saw this.
I said, how far could I have gone if I cared what was said about me?
All these years, if I cared what was said about me and I decided to change my core beliefs in order to avoid the criticism to get praise, but how far would I be along now?
I'd probably be a movie star.
There'd be TV shows about me.
But I have never, well, not never.
It took me four years to come to grips with all of that, how to react to it, how to respond to it.
And now I don't give people the power to offend me or worry about what's said about me.
But apparently, according to Jan Greenberg at CBS, that's what did it.
And Chief Justice Roberts tried to lobby Kennedy to join him and leave the other conservatives so that this would end up being 6'3 and look even better for the court.
Kennedy refused.
The conservative dissent was not originally written as a majority opinion, as some have speculated, but reads strangely because the conservatives refused to acknowledge Roberts' opinion.
So if Jan Crawford at CBS, if she's right about this, then at least one conservative justice that we know of can be blackmailed in a manner of speaking.
And she says Roberts' change of heart was almost certain to have been driven by left-wing media.
And it's an incompetent opinion.
It is incompetent.
It is rewritten.
It's outrageous.
This opinion is disastrous.
And I'm still marveling.
I'm reading some of the analysis by the conservative media intelligentsia looking for a silver lining here, a silver lining there, praising Roberts for being a political mastermind, setting all this up, that people have to decide.
People are the ones that have to make big decisions like this.
What happened?
What happened to the reason he's there?
What happened to the reason the court exists from Marbury versus Madison on?
Basically, the court is now confirmed to be a political institution that bends and shapes According to media pressure, just like a lot of Republicans and conservatives can be made to bend and shape according to media pressure.
This is this is I can't tell you how troubling this is.
I'm still a little sick about it, but more than that, and I'm just flat out angry.
It comes down to the fact that we've got to win the House.
We have to win the Senate.
We have to win the White House.
And after we do that, the people that win have got to be committed to getting rid of this.
I'm not going to lie to you.
What we face to get rid of this, and we must, is daunting.
When's the last entitlement you can think of ever been thrown away?
That's right.
The answer to the question is when's the last entitlement was thrown away is what's the first one.
And once people get entitlements, this thing doesn't fully implement until 2014.
So all the horror stories that we have to tell about this, people aren't going to see it.
It doesn't.
Every horror story, every true, like Steve Moore, who is editorial writer, deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, said on TV over the weekend and this morning on Fox, he's looked into this and the CBO numbers and everything.
He said that 75% of all these new taxes are going to be paid by people who make $125,000 or less.
Not $200,000 or more are going to pay all the taxes, but $125,000 or less will pay 75%.
Well, that's all well and good, except that's not going to happen until 2014 or 2015.
So this summer and going into the fall, we got to tell everybody you make less than under $25,000 a year, your taxes are going to not see it.
Meanwhile, the benefits start kicking in.
And you can look at Europe.
Once people have entitlements, they don't like giving them up.
Look at Greece.
Look at Spain.
Look at wherever.
They don't like giving them up.
Look at Stockton, California.
We have American cities that are being boarded up because people don't want to give it up.
They don't want to give it away.
They don't want to give it back.
Crawford, in this CBS story, sources it says this, quote, at least one conservative justice tried to get Roberts to explain his change of position, but he was unsatisfied with Roberts' response, which is peculiar.
Why would it be hard for Roberts to explain his change of view if he had?
I'll tell you something else about this, if this is true.
And again, I'm to tell you that based on the way she wrote this, I think most of it is.
This stuff doesn't normally happen.
These judges don't talk to each other.
They don't twist each other's arms.
They don't debate.
They don't argue.
I asked a justice once, and no, it's not Clarence Thomas.
I asked a justice once.
Okay, you go in there and vote, and you guys debate.
Oh, what do you mean debate?
Well, I mean, you try to change their mind.
I'm not going to change their mind.
They're not going to change their mind when he's talking about the libs of the court.
This stuff doesn't happen.
The stuff that she said happened regarding Roberts and the four conservatives and all this arm twisting and debating back when normally doesn't happen.
So there was quite a lot that was unique about this.
But this silver lining, somebody show me the silver lining of the Titanic sinking.
What, there hadn't been one since?
What's the silver lining?
We got a movie out of it with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.
What's the silver lining head of the Titanic?
They got a big, big task ahead of us.
Kennedy himself was the last justice known, now known to have changed his mind, and that during deliberations, and that was a Roe versus Wade case back in 1992.
Anyway, I had to take a brief timeout.
There's another thing.
Pelosi, the Democrats do not want this called a tax.
It is a tax.
That's how it's freaking law, is that it's a tax on what you don't do.
It's just outrageously incompetent.
In fact, John Eastman, one of the lawyers involved with it, he was on Hannity Friday now.
We got the tape coming.
He thinks Roberts ought to resign over this.
It's so incompetent.
Anyway, now Pelosi and the Democrats are all of a sudden talking about free riders.
Their whole party is devoted to creating free loaders and free riders.
And now they're out there ripping into them over this.
I have to take a break.
I'm going to regain my composure.
I'm going to find out what's happening with my MacBook Pro retina displays, and we'll be back.
Rush Limbaugh on Independence Day week.
It is a thrill and a delight to be with you.
Jan Greenberg at CBS says that her sources told her that Chief Justice Roberts went wobbly back in May, which is when there were countless news articles warning of damage to the court and Roberts' reputation if they struck down the mandate.
And when leading politicians, including Obama, were warning the court not to strike down the law.
She says that that's what her sources told her is when Roberts started going wobbly.
She said that word of Roberts' unusual shift has spread widely within the court, is known among law clerks, chambers, aides, and secretaries.
It also stirred the ire of the conservative justices who believed Roberts was standing with them.
Her sources also say there was a month-long, desperate campaign to bring Roberts back to his original position led by Justice Kennedy.
But Roberts held firm.
And again, at least one justice tried to get Roberts to explain his change of position, but he was unsatisfied with what Roberts said, which is peculiar.
Why would it be hard for Roberts to explain his change of view if it was legitimate?
Well, it used to be Jan Crawford Greenberg, and she dropped the Greenberg, and I still think of her as Greenberg.
So I guess she just goes by Crawford now.
Jan Crawford is the CBS info baby.
She used to be at ABC, I believe.
Anyway, got some audio soundbites on all this coming up, so sit tight.
Hi, welcome back, Rush Limbaugh, America's real anchorman, truth detector, doctor of democracy, all combined as one harmless, lovable fuzzball.
Let's go to Nancy Pelosi.
This is yesterday on Meet the Press.
David Gregory said, to the extent that you believe, others believe, Supreme Court has conferred an extra level of legitimacy on Obama tax.
The reality is that the court also said that the act is in effect a tax, that the individual mandate requiring people who can buy insurance is a tax.
Won't that make it more difficult to sell the popularity of this program to the American people?
Who is the penalty on?
The penalty is on people who have the wherewithal but refuse to buy health insurance, figuring they won't be sick.
And if they do, other people will have to cover it.
So these free riders, as they were identified by Governor Romney himself, he said people who have the ability to pay and don't can't expect to be free riders.
And I think that he turned it exactly right.
These free riders make health insurance for those who are taking responsibility, making it more expensive.
Personal responsibility is a principle of our country.
Conservatives claim it, progressives claim it, liberals claim it.
We all claim it.
What a crock she is asking us to swallow now.
One more soundbite.
We have, I guess this looks like a mon.
Well, she just adamant here that it's only a penalty on the free riders.
Still here with David Gregory on Meet the Depressed.
The president was adamant saying the individual mandate is not a tax.
Well, in fact, his own Solicitor General went to went to the Supreme Court and said, this is constitutional under the taxing authority of Congress.
That's right.
So that's not how this was sold to the American people.
No, it's a penalty.
It's a penalty that comes under the tax code for the 1% perhaps of the population who may decide that they're going to be free riders.
But most people are not afraid of the people.
It's a new tax.
No, it's not a problem.
It's a new tax on the American people.
No, no.
It's not a tax on the American people.
It's a penalty for free riders.
All right.
I've not had all this I can have.
Free riders?
A penalty for free riders?
What an attitude shift is this toward the uninsured.
What an about face this is.
Pelosi, the Democrats were pushing for Obamacare back in 2009 and 2010, and they were bombarding us with heartbreaking stories about the 30 to 50 million people who had to go without health insurance.
And they weren't free riders, they were victims.
They were victims of a mean country, victims of the rich, victims of corporations, victims of small business.
They were victims of the 1%.
We were even told that 45,000 people die every year because they couldn't get health insurance.
And all of a sudden, they're a bunch of freeloaders.
Now, all of a sudden, since the Supreme Court ruling has come out and made this effectively Obama tax instead of Obamacare, now they're free riders.
This is the party that celebrates free riders.
This is the party that devotes itself to creating even more free riders.
This is a party that could not survive without free riders and freeloaders.
This is a party that does everything it can to make people as dependent as possible on the government.
Free riders, free loaders.
And now this ruling is apparently so distasteful that the Democrat Party has to do a 180 and start attacking their own voters.
Well, what happened to the precious 30 to 50 million uninsured?
This is the piece and la résistance.
Democrats like Nancy Pelosi mocking free riders.
Isn't the entire mission of the Democrat Party to create more and more free riders?
Haven't they seen to it that almost half the country doesn't pay income tax?
A bunch of free riders isn't their goal to get more and more people dependent on the government.
Didn't they spend millions advertising for more people to take free handouts from the government?
Isn't there a big advertising campaign on right now to expand the scope of food stamps to the food free riders?
Hell's bells, folks.
The Democrat Party is the Free Rider Party.
How do you say free riders in Spanish?
Joe Muniz up in our Soundbite Central.
Joe, I want you to write for me.
I want you to send me an email or a text.
Send me a phonetic spelling of free rider in Español.
Well, guess what?
That's what Obamacare is all about now: punishing the free riders.
It's just you evil people who can pay, but you don't.
And you go to the emergency room when you get sick.
What the hell is insuring pre-existing conditions if it's not a bunch of free riders?
According to their definition, everybody with a pre-existing condition, and now with Obama tax, you know what?
You don't have to have insurance.
In fact, we're not even talking about insurance anymore.
If pre-existing conditions are now mandated to be treated, covered, then you don't buy insurance.
You don't have any.
You pay a little nominal fine as a free rider.
And then all of a sudden you're diagnosed with a terminal disease or something close to it.
So you show up and you now have to be granted insurance.
Well, you're free riding.
According to Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Party, you who have pre-existing conditions, who don't want to get insurance until the pre-existing condition becomes something really bad, you're not a bunch of free rotors.
Well, the party that creates them invents them, lives off of them.
What a bastardized thing we've ended up with here.
And it is a tax.
And worse than that, it's a precedent-setting tax on what you do not do.
Now, all these people talking about, on our side, all the conservative intelligence, hey, wait a minute, we got a diamond in the roof here, Rush.
We got a silver lining here.
Do you see what Roberts said about the Commerce Clause?
Congress can't use the Commerce Clause.
He didn't say that.
And we had a former lawyer call here on Friday, and others have written extensively on this too.
Roberts was writing for himself when he wrote the bid about the Commerce Clause.
He was not writing for the court.
It's not part of the court's opinion.
It's what's called dicta.
Didn't even need to be in the ruling.
His references to the Commerce Clause.
I don't know.
All these people, and there's some smart people that are really fooling themselves on this into thinking the Commerce Clause has been dealt a mortal blow.
It hasn't.
You wait.
But what does it matter?
The next controversial case that comes before the court that the media doesn't like, all they got to do is threaten the same stuff.
And they're pretty confident they'll be able to change the Chief Justice's vote to get it to be whatever they want it to be.
They've got four in there that they can count on.
I mean, this whole thing is a win-win for the government because instead of buying insurance, we're going to be giving money to the government.
And wait till you hear the details of this and what all about you.
The IRS is now empowered to learn about you, your entire family, your business via your tax return and how they're able to share it with other government agencies.
Yeah, I'm still sick, but more than that now, I'm just burning.
I'm really just angry about this because this I don't know what it is about people on our side.
My good friend Mark Levin says our people of Washington are so used to losing that they look at it as winning.
Anyway, brief timeout.
We're going to come back.
I'm going to get to your phone calls.
And well, no, before we go to the break, let me stay here.
Grab the top sound bites.
I want you to play three of them.
I got two from Carvin, one from Eastman.
Mike Carvin was on the O'Reilly factor on Friday night.
Laura Ingram was the guest hostette.
And Carvin has argued this case, healthcare case, before the Supreme Court and at a couple of other levels.
And he is stunned by this.
He was literally stunned by this.
Ingram said, you were at the court arguing this case, and I know you were shocked by the way the decision came down.
But do conservatives have a right to be mortified and really disappointed with what the Chief Justice did here?
Obviously, it was a very strange opinion.
The Chief Justice said that what Congress did and what it said it was doing was unconstitutional.
So I'm going to pretend they did something different and therefore make it constitutional, which not only rewrites the statute, but eliminates all the safeguards that he had found under the Commerce Clause.
So it produces a bad constitutional result only by someone who's deliberately ignoring the laws that was actually written.
Chief Justice Roberts said during his confirmation that he was going to be an umpire who calls balls and strikes, but this time he saw a ball and called it a strike.
So the next question from Laura Ingram was, well, any sense that there might have been some last-minute change of heart on the part of the chief?
That thought's been circulating among some of us former clerks.
She clerked for Clarence Thomas.
You've argued so many cases before the court over the years.
Any sense there might have been a last-minute change of heart?
A lot of people have noticed that the opinions are very odd in that they're referring to the concurrence as the dissent, and the dissenting opinion never refers to the chief justice's opinion, which suggests that there might have been some changes during the process.
If that happened, that would be doubly unfortunate, of course, because it would validate President Obama's wholly unprecedented effort to politicize the court and attack them while they were writing an opinion.
I think it would leave a sour taste in everyone's mouth if it came out that Chief Justice Roberts had actually switched his vote after that criticism because it would create a terrible perception that the court is subject to political lobby.
And Jan Crawford CBS has that exact story.
It hit yesterday.
That's the exact story.
She sourced it twice.
Now, I've said that I happen to believe it, but it's also possible that the story is BS because one of the favorite memes, one of the favorite memes of the media is to write about conservatives at war with one another.
And that's what this is.
The four justices, conservative justices at war with Roberts, and they love that theme.
So, well, I knew something was wrong because I had been warned.
Anyway, that's Carvin.
Where's what's out of order here?
Number three, John Eastman.
John Eastman, he is, I got to take a break, but John Eastman is a law professor at the Chapman University.
He's a good friend of our buddy, Dr. Larry Arne, who runs Hillsdale College.
Eastman's a great guy.
His soundbites are coming up.
Sit tight.
Don't go away.
And we are back.
Rush Limbaugh.
Talent on loan from God.
All right.
The term in Espanol for free riders is a provechados.
Aprovechados.
Aprovechados.
Somebody who takes advantage of the situation.
That is the term that would most likely be applied here to free riders.
Aprovechados.
So any Hispanics in the audience that are speed dialing here and they happen to come across aprovechados.
Guarantee you they stopped in their tracks.
I know what that's about.
All right.
You know, any of you ever been on a jury?
Okay, you've seen television shows where a judge tells a jury, do not read the media.
You know, the judge gives jury instructions.
You are specifically told by the judge you are not to be influenced by the news media or, in fact, anyone or anything apart from the facts of the case.
But Jan Crawford says that the Chief Justice was in fact directly impacted by just that.
John Eastman from the Chapman University Law School, he's a professor there, and he was mad on TV Friday night.
He was on the O'Reilly Factor Laura Ingram guest host editing.
He was mad.
You could see just his facial expression.
He was mad.
She said, some people saying that this is a brilliant twist for the Chief Justice.
This is a victory for the Republicans because it narrowed the Commerce Clause jurisdiction, the region of Commerce Clause.
So isn't that a good thing?
The issue here is whether the federal constitution limits the power of the federal government.
And I don't care whether they act under the Commerce Clause or under the spending clause.
If they do things that were not delegated to them, the role of the court and the Chief Justice in particular is to say to Congress no.
And if the assumption is right that he thinks this was unconstitutional, but found a way to uphold it, to preserve the integrity of the court, then he really ought to resign because it proves that he doesn't have the judicial fortitude to do the job that he's been chosen to do.
I sat up straight when I saw that.
Ought to resign.
Assumption is right.
Really, if going into this, the reason for this was to protect the integrity of the court.
But of course, you know, as far as the integrity of courts concerned, we're back to the same old thing.
As far as the media is concerned, the integrity of the court's just fine.
Everything's cool.
Everything's fine.
There is no problem here.
The media says it's okay.
Whatever they say is okay.
The media approves of what you're doing.
You're home free.
Grab soundbite 23.
I just want you to hear, this is Jan Crawford herself on Face the Nation on Sunday morning.
And this is in her own voice reporting the story that hit the wires on the CBS website on Sunday.
I am told by two sources with specific knowledge of the court's deliberations that Roberts initially sided with the conservatives in this case and was prepared to strike down the heart of this law, the so-called individual mandate, of course, that requires all Americans to buy insurance or pay a penalty.
But Roberts, I'm told by my sources, changed his views, deciding to instead join with the liberals.
And he withstood, I'm told by my sources, a month-long, desperate campaign by the conservative justices to bring him back to the fold.
And that campaign was led, ironically, by Justice Anthony Kennedy.
And why that's ironic is because it was Justice Kennedy that conservatives feared would be the one most likely to defect.
Come on, Jan.
Kennedy was the one you guys feared was going to defect.
Kennedy's always the focus of your attentions.
It's always you guys are afraid of Kennedy.
You also hold out all your hope for Kennedy.
It's not just us.
Anyway, that's from the reporter's own lips.
So, brief timeout again, an obscene prophet timeout.
It is just to tell you about Jan Greenberg or Jan Crawford.
Greenberg is her name.
She, remember, Clarence Thomas's great memoir came out.
She did the profile.
I think for now, wait a minute.
That was 60 minutes.
I know she did some.
She was ABC.
I don't know.
She was, she did a report, and it was very fair on Clarence Thomas's book and his life.
She's wired in there.
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