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July 1, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:39
July 1, 2014, Tuesday, Hour #2
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Ha!
How are you and welcome back.
Rush Limbaugh on the left coast in Los Angeles.
You're in our left-wing studios.
Great thing, left coast.
Sorry, left, left coast studios.
Nothing changes.
As long as I'm here, it doesn't matter where here is.
Telephone number 800-282-2882, the email address.
Lrushbaugh EIBnet.com.
Now, I'm going to stay in this hobby lobby business for just a little bit more because there's much more you need to know about this.
I would urge any and all of you to review the first hour of this program at rushlimbaugh.com later.
You can listen to it again.
You can read the transcript.
I would urge you to read the transcript of the first hour.
In fact, I think it's another way of absorbing the massive amounts of content on this program each day.
Just go to the website and read some of the transcripts of the monologues and the phone calls that occur here.
The next thing that I want to explain to you is something in the Supreme Court ruling referred to as the RFRA.
It is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
And it dates to 1993.
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act was signed into law by Bill Clinton, and it is exactly what it says.
It is a bill that was designed to restore freedom of religion to people who had seen it evaporate over the years.
And it is remarkable that if you go back to 1993, Democrats voted for this bill unanimously.
Well, in the House and Senate, it was unanimous.
That's how much things have changed just since 1993.
It is a 1993 United States federal law.
It's a statute aimed at preventing other laws that burden anyone's free exercise of their religion.
The bill was passed by unanimous vote in the House, a near unanimous vote in the Senate.
There were just three dissenting votes there.
It was signed into law September 93 by Clinton in the middle of his first year.
It is important, I think it's really interesting to note here that there was a time when Democrats supported in near unanimous fashion the concept of religious freedom.
It was November 1993, not October, but regardless.
It's pronounced RIFRA when you pronounce the acronym.
And that, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, is what was essentially on trial in the Hobby Lobby case.
The Supreme Court ruled that the government's contraception mandate, which was after Obamacare was signed into law, remember, Sebelius did all of this after the bill was passed by Congress signed by Obama.
This was an added regulation.
It was essentially an executive order that Obama made Sebelius do.
And the Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the government's mandate that employers provide contraception Was a violation of Bill Clinton's law.
Hobby Lobby was simply saying, we already have a federal law that supports us.
It is a Bill Clinton law that was signed into law in 1993.
We have had our religious freedom restored.
We already have the freedom to do this.
We are not violating a law.
And indeed, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was essentially upheld.
And Obama's regulation or executive order was slapped down.
And yet there's Mrs. Clinton out ripping the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, not knowing, or unaware, or either aware and trying to escape any knowledge that she knew what she was doing, attacking it.
Can I make another point?
Because I think that is quite profound.
And it was not something I was going to be able to figure out during yesterday's program.
I didn't have time to delve into this before the program started.
1993, Democrats, House and Senate near unanimously agreed with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
And so the court held that the government could provide coverage or contraceptives and abortive fashions without forcing Americans to violate their sincerely religious beliefs.
And so Hobby Lobby said, look, there is this thing out there called a Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which gives us statutory law.
We are not going to provide these four contraceptives.
They violate our religious tenets.
And the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is what we're standing on.
And the court said, yep.
The court said the government didn't have the right to unilaterally slap down a federal statute with an executive order.
So I don't think this is narrow for Obama at all in that regard.
But there's another interesting aspect of this, and that's pretty profound to me.
Why did we even get here?
Why did we even end up here at the Supreme Court?
The president acted, as usual, outside the Constitution.
He acted without Congress.
He unilaterally imposed this mandate on Hobby Lobby and other corporations and basically commanded them to violate their religious beliefs.
That is how it came about.
It was not a congressional law.
And therefore, when Josh Ernest shows up yesterday and says, well, you know, as the constitutional lawyer who sits in the office, office over you, he would need to read, there was nothing constitutional being discussed yesterday.
This was totally statutory, folks.
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
1993, a bunch of Democrats thought it mattered.
In 1993, a bunch of Democrats voted for religious freedom being restored.
Corporations and individuals.
You'd never know it listening to them yesterday.
You'd never know it watching the media, listening to the media yesterday.
So essentially, Obama got taken down by virtue of his own action in the first place.
What he did was issue a mandate, and we had Sebelius do it, that was in violation of a federal statute signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1993.
That's what the Supreme Court decided.
They said the government can't do this.
The government, the president, simply can't come in and pretend a federal law doesn't exist and override it.
The fact that we won this narrowly has not come from, I mean, I won't take it obviously, but this shouldn't have been five.
This should have been nine to nine.
This should have been another unanimous defeat for Obama, like the 12 or 13 previous that he has suffered.
Now, if Congress had passed the mandate, if the mandate for the contraceptives had come through Congress,
then the Hobby Lobby people would have had a much tougher legal road than they had because there would have been a statute behind the mandate, but there wasn't.
So you have here the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Let me sum this up.
You have the Religious Freedom Restoration Act passed by Clinton, or Congress, signed by Clinton in 93, establishes the right that people have a right to practice their religion.
It needed to be restored.
It was under assault back then.
Democrats all in favor of it.
Barack Obama, because he's got a problem with corporations, because he's got a problem with the Catholic Church, because he's got a problem with statists, just decided, you know, screw you.
I'm going to mandate that these people got to do what they don't want to do.
Because I really like making people do what they don't want to do, that I think they should do.
So he came along and he simply mandated in, and despite a federal statute telling him he couldn't do it, he did it anyway and got slapped down yesterday.
So the remedy now, since Obama got slapped down, there's a remedy.
If he's really worried about all of these women who now have been denied and they haven't, there are 20 FDA-approved contraceptives.
Hobby Lobby provides 16 of them.
The only four they didn't want any part of were those that kill a fetus, human embryo.
They didn't want any part of that.
And they used the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to say they could.
Court upheld.
So now women that work at Hobby Lobby are not going to have their contraception, those four paid for by Hobby Lobby.
But there already is a unilateral executive order requiring insurance companies to buy those contraceptions for women that work in nonprofits.
Nobody's opposed it.
Nobody's taken it to the court and said they're going to be raised.
So it stands.
It's unilateral.
And Anthony Kennedy and a number of others have said, and even Alito, look, if Obama wants to fix this, he's already got a mechanism.
He can simply demand that the insurance companies fund those four contraceptions for women that work at Hobby Lobby and be done with this.
And Obama has chosen not to do that.
Obama has chosen not to restore these contraceptives to the women who could have them today.
Obama has instead chosen to make the Republican Congress do this, pass a new law.
He knows they won't.
He wants this to look like it's the Republicans that don't want women to have contraceptives so that he can continue to wage this phony war on women and fundraise.
So when you hear Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton wringing their hands and talking about the poor women who've now been denied their precious contraceptions, it is a lie.
They have not, there is nothing in the ruling that denied women anything yesterday.
The only thing that happened was a federal statute, the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act was upheld, which means Holly Hobby Lobby doesn't have to pay for them.
And anybody else can, and women can buy them themselves.
Isn't it amazing?
If they really want these four contraceptives, they can go buy it themselves.
Nobody says they can't.
Or Obama could make their insurance companies do it.
Insurance companies can't bill it back so that Hobby Lobby doesn't end up paying for it.
That's not permitted.
So he could solve it.
It could have been solved last night by an adult president who's really serving his constituents.
It could have been solved last night.
It could have been solved yesterday afternoon.
Instead, Obama has chosen to do what he always does, politicize everything for the purposes of mischaracterizing Republicans and conservatives and fundraising.
Leaving, and meanwhile, these women are being told they can't get these contraceptives.
Now, they're being lied to about that.
Obama is treating his own supporters as dirt.
He's using them as political footballs as well.
And based on the comments of social media, they all believe they can't go get contraceptive.
Now, they think they're faced with unwanted children left and right, because I guess these women make love 15,000 times a month.
And so they're just, they believe that they can't get these contraceptives because it doesn't occur to them to buy them themselves.
Somebody else should.
That's recent too, but nevertheless, there are any number of solutions, but Obama doesn't want one.
And so that's basically the long and short of this, folks.
There is no constitutional concept here.
There's nothing more than a statute that Obama violated.
He was called on it and offered remedies to fix it and chose not to accept them and has now decided to provoke an unnecessary fight for the purposes of politicizing, fundraising, and mischaracterizing Republicans.
And that's Hobby Lobby, and we'll be back.
By the way, there was late in the day yesterday, Reuters tweeted the following.
White House will consider whether president can act on his own to mitigate the effect of the Supreme Court contraception ruling.
That's why we ended up where we ended up in the first place because he acted on his own.
He's going to get slapped down again if he does it.
He's in violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Had he not acted on his own, we wouldn't be here.
So he's going to compound the effort if that's what they do.
I want to read to you two things.
I went and actually got the law.
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act purposes, the purposes of this chapter are one, to guarantee its application in all cases where free exercise of religion is substantially burdened.
And number two, to provide a claim or defense to persons whose religious exercise is substantially burdened by government.
Right there it is.
Number two, the Supreme Court had no choice.
Obama was in violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which provided defense to persons whose Hobby Lobby, whose religious exercise is substantially burdened by government.
Government is subelius regulation mandating they give away these four birth control bills.
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act states that its purpose, one of many, is to provide defense to people, Hobby Lobby, whose religious exercise, i.e. denying the distribution of those four abortive fashions, is substantially burdened by government.
A Bill Clinton-era law, that he's very proud of, I assume, and Hillary very proud.
Bill Clinton law, Democrats nearly unanimously agreed with that, 1993.
Here is Carol of Vienna, Virginia.
As we head to the phones today, I really appreciate your patience and holding on.
Hello.
Hello there.
How are you?
I'm fine.
Thank you very much.
I'm so glad to be able to speak with you.
I wanted to tell you, first of all, that I love your first children's book.
I bought it for my grandson, and I'm looking forward to the second one.
Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims was the first book.
And the second book is Rush Revere and the First Patriots, and it's out now.
You don't have to wait for it.
It's out there now.
Oh, I know.
I know.
I just haven't had a chance to get it yet, but I will.
Oh.
And so anyway, it is so nice to speak with you.
I thank you for everything you do.
Thank you.
I really appreciate that.
Well, and there are two things I wanted to say.
Yesterday, I was following all of this Hobby Lobby case fairly closely.
And from a good source, I heard two things which the left will never, ever know or say if they do know.
And that is that Hobby Lobby pays twice the minimum wage to their employees.
Which, you know, all things being equal, would be one of the things that supposedly the administration would absolutely love.
No, no, no, no.
That doesn't matter.
It doesn't count.
It's like the Koch brothers giving $25 million in check.
It doesn't count.
They don't appreciate it.
That's right.
You will never hear about this.
No, of course.
It was like when President Bush tried to defeat AIDS in Africa and sent all of the help, all the financial help.
And you never heard about that either.
But the second thing was that Hobby Lobby has been giving employees birth control with their health care plans long before Obamacare.
Well, this is a point that I made.
No, I did it in two ways.
Long before there was Obamacare, employers were free to provide whatever kind of benefit they wanted.
It depended on how competitive the job market was.
What did they have to offer as a benefits package to get the best people?
And as feminism took hold and women became more assertive and powerful, these kinds of birth control medications were demanded, and some companies provided them and some didn't.
Hobby Lobby provided 16 contraceptives as part of their health benefit package.
16.
There are 20 approved FDA contraceptions, contraceptives.
And Hobby Lobby provides, yes, current present tense provides 16 of them.
The four that they didn't want to have to provide because of their religious beliefs were those contraceptives that killed a human embryo, i.e., caused an abortion.
That's what this is all about.
But the hobby lobby people are on the right side of it.
They pay minimum wage much higher than what the national average is.
But none of it matters because they're religious people.
It means they're probably conservative.
They're the enemy.
Carol, it's just that simple.
Meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day, El Rushbo at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
And I made a suggestion in the last hour, and I'm going to make it again.
I think this would really be helpful.
I think all of you, and this is self-serving, it is, but it's not, I don't mean it to be self-serving in a commercial sense.
You listen to this program every day, and I know that you hear a lot of monologues that you're cheering and going, yeah, yeah, right on, and you enjoy them.
You really need to go to rushlimbaugh.com and read the transcripts.
There is, you know, the impact of the written word is undeniable.
How many times, give me an example, how many times have you heard anybody on the radio make a brilliant point three or four times for years, and all of a sudden, somebody will say the same thing on TV or write a column saying the same thing, and everybody goes, My God, is that brilliant?
And you say, well, I heard that three years ago.
It's the power of television, the written word.
Radio done right is the most intimate of all media.
I finally figured out what it is about television I don't like.
Or why television doesn't do it because camera is so far away.
There's no intimacy.
I don't have a when I'm on TV, I don't have any sense of intimacy or of actually relating to people.
It's this box with a lens on it that's way the hell over there on the other side of the room.
That microphone is right here.
And that microphone is you in my mind as I'm speaking.
That television camera is way the hell and gone, and there's 15 other people in the room not paying attention while whatever's going on is going on.
They just can't wait.
The next commercial breaks and have to pay any attention to what's going on.
And it's an entirely different setting.
Radio really done well can have the most impact of any of the median.
Well, I don't particularly think I did TV well.
That's my point.
I mean, it was okay.
But let's face it, you know, the people like my TV show because of the clips we played, not what I was doing.
Fine and dandy.
Look, I'm not, I don't mean it just to be negative.
I'm just trying to share with people.
You know, I'm made for radio.
Television is, if that camera could be right in my face, it'd be a whole different thing.
I'm telling you, it would.
But anyway, this is why, I mean, you hear it on the radio and it makes an impact, but then you try to tell somebody else what you heard and you forget half of it or you get it wrong, just like when anybody tells you a story, even if it's a story that has a lot of impact.
But we transcribe all of this.
Every one of these segments, everybody's monologues at rushlimbaugh.com.
You go listen to them again or read the transcript.
And I guarantee you, when you read the transcript, there's another entire different level of impact, which is why we do it also for the preservation to eternity for what happens here.
And so if you visit my website, you ought to take some time to read some of them, especially those that you have been very interested in.
Because I'll stack them up against anything else you're hearing out there anywhere.
And it's just an added bonus here that I think is available.
And for example, these discussions today on Hobby Lobby, I mean, boil it all down, when I finally got to the end summary, I was able to do it inside of three minutes, but it took a whole first hour of setup so that the summary made any sense.
If you just tell people the summary, they're going to say, no, you don't know what you're talking about.
Hobby Lobby is a bunch of, well, they don't give anybody what they lobby.
And you can refute that if you've got the ammo.
Or you just learn it better and find a way to recall it faster, if you will.
So just another suggestion as a way of upping the comprehension level.
Here's Scott and Calhoun George as we head back to the phone.
Scott, thank you for the call.
Great to have you here.
Hello.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you so much for taking my call.
You bet.
The best part of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is that it was passed specifically to reverse a Justice Scalia decision.
Justice Scalia wrote a decision, I think, in 92 in a case called Smith versus Department of Employment.
And it talked about religious right to smoke peyote.
And Justice Scalia said, you do not have the right to carve out little individual exceptions and claim that as a religious freedom when the law is generally applied to you.
And that was the argument that the government made against Hobby Lobby.
The RFRA was passed to reverse that decision.
So if the law had stayed as Justice Scalia said it should have been, the government would have won yesterday.
And that's a wonderful little irony in this.
You can call it Scalia's last laugh.
Scalia's last laugh.
That's exactly what this is.
Well, you know, now that you mentioned this, Scott, I do recall this.
And for those of you who were listening and found it odd that Democrats unanimously, even in 1993, nearly unanimously supported something called a Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Do you know who one of the sponsors of that bill was?
Chuck Schumer.
I kid you, Chuck Schumer introduced it.
March 11th, 1993, Chuck Schumer, Democrat New York introduced the bill in the Senate.
And old Scott here, I remember this.
I had forgotten it until he reminded me there was a very controversial case involving some Native Americans on their reservation, and they were using peyote, and some bad things happened, and it was equated by some to marijuana, and there's always been this war on drugs, and the decision came down.
You can't use peyote, and you can't call it a religious exercise.
And then Scalia said, you can't have all these little carve-outs here and there, because then pretty soon anybody's going to come along and claim that, say, whatever perversion that they want to enjoy is part of their religion.
Then we can't have that.
So the Democrats, to defend another group victimized by evil conservatives, the Native Americans, came up with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was designed to say peyote is fine with us.
And Jesse Helms voted against it, as did Robert Byrd.
Sheets Byrd voted against it.
But other than that, it was near unanimous.
I had forgotten the peyote aspect of this.
I appreciate that, Doug.
What was that, Scott?
That was Scott.
That's right.
Okay, here's Jason in Dallas.
Jason, you're next on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Hi, Rush, mega lone star state dittos.
How are you today?
Excellent, sir.
Always love getting calls from Texas.
Well, we love listening to you.
Thank you.
So I see everything going on in the world.
I see the world falling apart with American absence.
I see our economy in tatters.
I see people out of work.
But I don't see mass protests by hordes of women saying, where are my free contraceptives?
When did this become a thing?
When did free contraception become a thing?
Do you really not know?
Are you baiting the host?
No, I'm not baiting.
I remember Stephanopoulos asking the question during a Republican primary debate in 2012 and the stunned looks of disbelief of what is this guy talking about.
Well, that, that, that was.
It's like ever since then, it's just been a thing.
And I don't know where it came from.
Well.
Well, because the Democrats, Stephanopoulos is a Democrat who happens to be working as a journalist at ABC.
And it was in a Republican debate, January 2012, asked Nitt Romney about contraception.
And you're right, Romney, and everybody's, contraception?
Nobody's talking about contraception.
Well, what?
That doesn't matter.
Do you think women should have a right to contraception?
George, I don't know if he was talking about, just answer that question.
You think the states should have the right?
And Romney eventually said something that allowed them to then say, see, the Republicans are conducting a war on women.
And then once that happened, there was already a plan in place.
Once that happened, then a bunch of college co-eds started demanding that it be paid for by everybody else as a benefit because it was so expensive, they couldn't be expected to pay for it given their tuition costs and everything else.
And so it just, it then blossomed into another entitlement where women were entitled to contraception because pregnancy is in many cases a disease and we need medication for the disease, which is contraceptives.
And then the whole notion that it'd be paid for was designed, of course, gin up Republican opposition.
And then the Democrats could claim, see, they hate women, war on women.
But you're right.
There wasn't a mass clamor for it.
They created it.
Well, the left expands what these so-called rights are.
We do nothing.
And the bigger issue, I think, is that if they're allowed to do that, and either A, they believe people will fall for it, or B, people actually do fall for it.
I think that is the real issue, which then underscores the fact that what you're doing with your books, for example, is really the most important thing we can do.
Because if people fall for that, it's our problem.
Well, in a land of free will and in a land of free, yeah, people have responsibilities.
Freedom is something it has to be fought for.
Yeah, the stick to the issues, crowd, have it wrong.
When you're talking about your books, that is the issue.
Educating the next generation on what the American values are, what it means to be self-governing, and what individual responsibility looks like, that is the one and primary issue that we should be worried about right now.
Well, I really appreciate that because I happen to agree.
I think, you know, freedom, people born to it take it for granted and think that it's what is.
And particularly young kids today, they're not learning.
They're not learning about freedom.
They're learning that their government is horrible, racist, sexist, bigoted past, and it was unfair and it was unjust to people.
They're not learning the truth about it.
They're also not learning that freedom is not the natural state.
It's the natural yearning of human beings, but it's not the natural state.
The natural state is tyranny.
That's been the history of human civilization from the beginning.
That's why the U.S. was such an exception.
First nation in the history of mankind.
Well, Magna Carta, huge, huge precedent, but first nation in history that enshrined in its founding documents, the role of government is subservient to the people.
That had never been stated, and it had never been created because it was never the case.
The people were always subservient.
The people were always dependent.
The people were always afraid.
Tyranny, bondage, if you want to call it that, statism, authoritarianism, was always the natural order.
That was the way people lived until the United States came along.
And what we're trying to do in the Rush Revere Time Travel Adventure series is to teach, and maybe for the first time, just how difficult securing the kind of freedom everybody takes for granted was.
How it happened.
Who did it?
What they went for.
What they lost.
What they risked.
Why?
All of these questions we are trying to answer in these series of books, the Rush Revere Time Travel Adventure Series.
It's written for ages 10 to 13, but it's actually written for everybody, for parents and grandparents to read to the kids who may not be able to read it yet because they're too young.
But it's such a great story.
It doesn't need to be embellished.
The story of America is unique in world history.
It's unique in human history.
It does not need to be exaggerated or anything.
It's just a great, great story.
And this is a great, great country, and people need to love this country, and they need to be proud of this country, and they need to understand why.
Well, yeah.
Now I got to take a break.
And I was just on the verge of having a really good.
Last thing I was going to point out is how difficult freedom is to maintain.
How difficult it is to hold on to.
Because the forces of nature are always aligned against it.
It's just the way it is.
The forces of nature are aligned against, I don't know, maybe not the forces of nature because The forces of evil are always aligned against freedom.
The allure for that kind of power and the desire to control and dominate and enrich oneself as a result of that control is something that is constantly we face.
Since the founding of this country, we've faced it.
It's not new today.
What's new today about it is that we've never elected people to the highest levels of power who believe that this place sucks.
We've never elected people to the highest levels of power who have openly spoken of transforming this country into something it isn't because they don't like what it is for whatever reasons.
That's what's new.
But the forces arrayed against liberty and freedom are everywhere, and it is the natural state of things.
So in these books that we write, the Time Travel Adventures with exceptional Americans, with Rush Revere and his talking horse, is designed to get to young people and counter what they're being told elsewhere.
Make them proud, but let them know how difficult it is.
They were born to this.
They have a different understanding of it, that people fleeing oppression trying to get here.
So I really appreciate those nice words about the books, because it is a seminal issue.
Education, I guarantee you, and something that we've lost.
Significant control of.
Back after this, folks.
We wrap up another exciting excursion into broadcast excellence.
I mentioned yesterday we had some global warming news, and we do.
And I will get to it and other things that have nothing to do with the Hobby Lobby case as the next and final hour of the busy broadcast day kicks off.
So sit tight, my friends.
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