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March 4, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
30:59
March 4, 2015, Wednesday, Hour #3
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Oh yeah, yeah, I forgot to mention that.
Ruth Buzzy Ginsberg, one of the libs on the Supreme Court, she started out in oral arguments challenging the standing of the anti-Obamacare challengers.
She said, I don't even think you people should be here.
She really jumped in there chilly.
How dare anybody oppose this law?
So she won four committed votes to uphold on the Supreme Court.
Greetings and welcome back.
Great to have you.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network.
Great to have you.
800-282-2882 in the email address, El Rushbo at EIBNet.com.
If I had to give you just a quick down and dirty judgment right now, I would have to tell you that the media and the leftists all think that the court is going to uphold Obamacare precisely because of one thing Anthony Kennedy said.
He's the swing vote.
They think he's going to vote to uphold it because he worried that the state insurance exchanges would collapse if the federal subsidies were to be taken away.
And if the Supreme Court says that people will suffer in this and that, the least damage they could do would be to leave it alone.
So that's now others, Jeffrey Toobin, the legal analyst at CNN, he's very worried about the outcome because John Roberts didn't say anything during oral arguments.
Man, I don't know, what is it like?
What must it be like to sit there and fret and be worried when somebody doesn't say something?
And try to anticipate what the meaning of it is.
The story from Betsy McCoy in the New York Post is typically excellent for her.
We all win if the Supreme Court guts Obamacare.
She starts out by saying on Wednesday, the fate of Obamacare will again be argued before the Supreme Court.
Supporters are flooding the media with ghoulish predictions of what will happen if the court rules against the regime.
Victims supposedly losing their insurance, their medical care, and even their lives.
And that has been said.
But don't be bamboozled by the talk of disaster.
Senate Republican leaders indicated on Monday that they'll be ready to provide financial assistance to help Americans keep the coverage they picked for a transitional period.
Republicans also announced a plan to create a bridge away from Obamacare.
Losing in court will force the president to finally negotiate changes to his expensive, unworkable health law.
Anybody think that's going to happen?
We still have way too many people who do not understand who Barack Obama is.
So Obama loses at the court and he's automatically going, okay, okay, uncle, I give, I give.
Let's sit down and talk.
Isn't going to happen.
But Betsy McCoy is optimistic.
She says, suddenly the politically impossible compromise on Obamacare will become politically inevitable.
Look for big changes in the second half of this year.
King versus Burwell is about the subsidies that make Obamacare plans, quote-unquote, affordable.
But remember, it isn't affordable.
That's the takeaway.
It isn't affordable.
The letter of the law allows consumers to get subsidies only in the 14 states that set up their own exchanges.
But the regime is ignoring the law, and they're doling out subsidies everywhere.
If the high court reigns in the subsidies, here is what's likely to happen.
So this is in contrast to the stories of crisis and doom that are out there if the court reigns in the subsidies.
The first thing she says that'll happen, people with Obamacare subsidies who would lose them will still be helped.
No matter how the justices rule, it'll have no impact on the poor.
Nine out of every ten people who are newly insured because of Obamacare are on Medicaid anyway, which is unaffected.
Yeah, close to 6 million middle-class Americans get the questionable subsidies, and so they pay a fraction of their plan's actual cost, while taxpayers pick up three-quarters of the bill.
I want to try to explain what that means.
So we have a bunch of people who cannot afford Obamacare without the government paying a percentage of it, right?
And those people who can't afford it will be able to afford it because the taxpayers are going to pay for it.
The taxpayers can't afford it.
The government is the taxpayers.
We can't afford this.
How in the world can you say that taxpayers who can't afford this to begin with are going to provide subsidies to people that can't afford it?
Which is the circumstance now.
This bill is in the red.
There's no way we have the money for this.
We just don't.
Not that that matters to anybody, but I think that the money arguments in this are just worthless.
If the court mixes those subsidies, these people will be facing big premium hikes, and the administration insists that it has no contingency plan to help.
In an obvious effort to sway the justices, the regime warns of massive damage.
But chairman of the three key Senate committees just announced that Republican lawmakers will be set to provide help.
She writes here that the insurance companies will be the biggest losers.
The insurance company stock prices have soared since the rollout of healthcare.gov.
Humana is up 66%.
Cigna is up 53.
Aetna up 52.
And it's no wonder why Obamacare forces the public to buy their product, thanks to John Roberts.
It's like a law requiring all Americans to buy cars and subsidizing those who don't afford it.
That would send automaker stocks skyrocketing, too.
The insurers are expected to haul in over a trillion dollars of taxpayer money over the next 10 years.
No wonder insurance companies are bombarding the Supreme Court with arguments defending their deal.
And here we have a great illustration once again of crony socialism.
Everybody thinks that business is aligned with Republicans.
The insurance companies all sided up to Obama.
They made peace with Obama.
And they agreed with this bastardization of the health care process because the government mandates everybody buy their product.
So the insurance companies said, what do we care about the Constitution?
What do we care about whether people can afford it or not?
We're sitting in Fat City.
The government's going to make a law that says people have to buy our product.
How can we lose?
And when you have everybody thinking only about themselves, This is how things end up becoming disasters.
Betsy McCoy then writes that Republican governors will also need Congress to provide a remedy.
So her point is, don't worry what the court does because the Republicans have made it clear that nobody's going to lose anything.
Which takes me to Bobby Jendel.
Why are Republicans planning to rescue these subsidies?
Jendle had a piece of national review.
He said eliminating the subsidies nationwide would therefore cut Americans' tax liability by about $48 billion on net.
Now, granted, these sums from CBO apply to all 50 states, while the King ruling would apply only to the 37 states that have not established exchanges.
But the trend from the numbers is crystal clear.
The tax reduction from eliminating the employer mandate and weakening the individual mandate outweighs any tax increase from eliminating the subsidies.
And here is where some on the right want to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Conventional wisdom in Washington has assumed that should the courts strike down the subsidies in 37 states, that the states will immediately act to establish their own state-run exchanges, allowing the subsidies to flow once more.
Alternatively, Congress might be tempted to pass language extending the subsidies to the federally run exchange, allowing Obamacare to comply with the court ruling.
That's a solution in search of a problem.
If eliminating the subsidies represents a net tax cut, then restoring the subsidies would reimpose a sizable tax increase.
Anyway, what Jendle eventually gets to is, what in the world, why even bother winning this?
If all we're going to do is reinstitute the subsidies, if the Republicans are going to rescue these subsidies after the court outlaws them, then what's the difference between us and them?
And what he's proposing is instead of this, an alternative to actually sit back down and fix this bill and rewrite it or start from scratch or what have you, which nobody wants to do because we're too far into it.
Anyway, that's where this is right now.
And I don't think that there's anybody in the media who can tell you, no matter how firmly they say it, how this is going to end up.
So once again, experience, intelligence guided by experience.
To me, it comes down.
We know there are four votes to uphold the administration on this.
The four votes announced it today and yesterday in the oral arguments.
The four liberals announced it.
So there's no mystery there.
And then you've got the four conservatives and Justice Kennedy.
And Kennedy left himself out on whichever way he goes, which he always does in oral argument.
He always leaves himself room to go either way.
The Chief Justice didn't say anything.
Depending on where the Chief Justice comes down, he will determine who writes the opinion.
If he's in the majority, he will determine who writes the opinion.
And if he's in the majority and he writes the opinion, then he can do this time what he did last time, change the law to make it fit.
And that's my point.
Using intelligence guided by experience.
The last time Obamacare came before the Supreme Court, the court did everything it could to make it fit the Constitution when it didn't.
So why would anybody expect that the next time the law comes before the court, that the court is going to rule the law unconstitutional when the first time the court did everything it could to make it constitutional?
What in our experience here would tell us the court is going to find against the regime?
Experience tells us the court's going to do whatever it has to to find for the regime.
That's the intelligence guided by experience.
The only thought here, well, there are two possibilities.
A, that these people hold a theory that the court knows it made a mistake and using this case as a chance to correct.
I think that's a stretch.
I don't think that's how these people think.
The second possibility is that the court, aside from these four committed liberals, that the other five justices will look at this and judge it strictly on the merits of the law, in which case, this case, this law doesn't have a prayer.
The administration's violating the law.
There's no question about it.
The sad thing is that that's even up for debate here.
Well, no, that's understandable.
The sad thing here that there's even a possibility that this thing is going to be found constitutional.
But our experience is that whatever Obama wants, he gets and gets away with.
I'm not trying to be pessimistic here.
I'm just trying to be realistic.
I'm firmly hoping that at some point, and not just the court, I'm hoping that everybody, all of a sudden, someday, for whatever unknown reasons, starts to respect the Constitution again.
And I'm hoping that one day, somewhere, someday, somehow, that people will start standing up for Western civilization again and our culture and what Americanism is, all of which is under assault.
Let me take a brief time out.
I mentioned House of Cards.
There is a storyline on House of Cards that has been written about today in the Washington Post.
It is totally absurd.
And they are treating it seriously.
A piece in the Washington Post asking if a plot line on House of Cards this season could actually be done.
And I'll explain before the program ends.
Don't go away.
Here's how the regime's doing it.
The regime and the drive-bys are trying to intimidate the court, trying to influence the court, trying to shape the court.
Josh Ernest, press briefing in the White House today, a reporter said, hey, one of the justices this morning suggested the court could give states time to prepare for the impact if it decided to rule against the government in this case.
I'm just wondering if you have any response to that, Josh.
Would that be feasible?
Just wait till next year for the decision like that to take effect.
It's important for people to understand that there is no contingency plan that could be implemented that would prevent the catastrophic damage that would be done by essentially undermining the Affordable Care Act with an adversarial ruling on this.
The truth is, is that there are no easy answers.
There is no simple step, no obvious step that anybody can take that would prevent this catastrophic damage from taking place.
Okay, so what's supposed to happen is Justice Kennedy, Justice Roberts are supposed to go home tonight and turn on the news.
And they're supposed to see the White House press secretary say that if they rule against the administration, it's going to be a nationwide catastrophe.
And you don't want that on your shoulders, Judge.
And you don't want that on your shoulders, Mr. Chief Justice.
It's going to be a catastrophe.
We don't have a contingency plan.
You're going to be wiping people's health care up.
That's how.
And it's not just Ernest doing it.
This is happening throughout the drive-by media.
And the reason is they think it worked on Roberts the first time.
They are convinced that it worked on Roberts the first time.
And note, by the way, it worked on Roberts, not Kennedy, the first time.
Everybody thinks Kennedy is the swing vote that we need to be worried about.
And I'm thinking you may need to change your focus on that, folks.
Just a little bit.
Back to the phones.
This is Jerry in Phoenix.
Jerry, great to have you on the EIB network.
I love it.
Good day, Professor.
It's great talking with you today.
Thank you, sir.
Yep.
I have a quick pointer, if I may.
Last week you had the net neutrality.
How come the same people that are post-sargasmic about that are the same people that were in horror that Obama, just a short few years ago, suggested on that circuit breaker for the internet?
Remember that in case of national security?
You know, that is a good point.
That's a great point.
The president was given the authority by Congress to literally shut down the internet with the circuit breaker switch if he judged there to be a national emergency, right?
Right.
And the same people that are applauding the government taking over the internet opposed that like crazy.
They were dramatically opposed.
They were scared that one guy can shut down the internet.
No way.
But I guess they've forgotten.
But see, they don't think the enemy this time is Obama.
They think the enemy is Comcast and ATT and all of the providers, big corporations, they hate them.
And they think this net neutrality is going to get even with those people.
They're young.
You have to cut them some slack.
They need to be allowed their inconsistencies.
But your point, your point is well taken.
Here's Tricia, Columbus, Ohio.
Hey, Tricia, great to have you on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Hi, Rush.
How are you?
I'm fine.
A little worn out today, a little tired, but I doubt you'd have known that if I hadn't told you.
No, we didn't.
I'm cold, though.
We're cold up here.
Hey, the reason I called was I was responding to your opening comment about Hillary and the email and where she is going to be with the party and how they're in disarray.
And I was thinking that she's actually in a really great position.
She has nothing to lose.
She has two generations that don't want to go back to her.
And, you know, like I was telling your co-screener, she knows where all the bodies are, you know, where they're buried, literally or figuratively.
Literally?
Are you saying literally she knows where some bodies are buried?
Maybe.
But my point is, is that if she goes down, she could take down every single person she wants to.
She has nothing to lose at this call.
Why didn't she do this in 2008?
Because she still thought she had a chance.
Now she's got two times.
They're undercutting her.
And she knows that this is it because she's too damn old to go any further.
And if she takes them down, she'll take them down hard.
And she will ask them.
Maybe so.
I think the takeaway from all this is that some people didn't want her in 08, and they don't want her now, and they're on the Democrat side.
Okay, have to give you a spoiler alert here because they're going to talk a little bit about House of Cards.
It was just released, season three, on Netflix on Friday.
And many people have not seen it all yet.
But in order to discuss, the Washington Post has a story about a plot line.
In this particular season, President Frank Underwood, and by the way, there's no mention of Barack Obama in this series.
He doesn't exist.
He's never been president.
Doesn't mean anything.
I'm just throwing that in as a tidbit.
Frank Underwood is the president in present day, played by Kevin Spacey.
And when season three begins, Underwood has become president by engineering the president to be impeached.
And he was forced out of office.
Underwood, under the table, forced the guy out.
Underwood has not been elected.
He's the president, but he's not been elected.
He's up for re-election.
And unemployment's in bad shape.
Unemployment is at 10% in the country when Frank Underwood decides to do something about it.
He creates a program, major policy proposal called America Works.
Am Works for short.
It is a universal employment program.
And it's controversial because it is designed to end entitlements.
Now, Underwood's a Democrat president.
He's a big lib.
But his way of creating full employment is to eliminate Social Security and Medicare.
And he goes on television and he tells people, we can't afford for you to be reliant on government anymore.
If you can work, you had better work because we're not going to pay you not to work anymore.
And when I first saw this, I stood, I actually sat up, I said, whoa.
I was later brought back to reality.
But it's the last thing I expected to see on a program written and produced by the Hollywood Left.
He wants to create 10 million jobs.
He describes America Works as having the size and scope of the New Deal.
He says, if you want a job, you get a job.
Here is how it would work.
Unemployed people would register with the government to get a job.
New jobs created by the government in infrastructure, maintenance, repair, and defense.
And for new jobs in the private sector, the government, are you ready for this?
According to this plan, the government would pay up to $45,000 of the salary for every hire in the private sector.
Now, remember, one of the funding mechanisms here is to eliminate Social Security, is to eliminate entitlements.
He goes on television.
We can't afford entitlements anymore.
We just can't afford it.
They're bankrupting us and it's causing too many people not to work.
So where does he get the money after that?
He raids FEMA.
There is, he ends up declaring unemployment a natural disaster.
And in an oddball reading of the Stafford Act, claims that he can go get money from FEMA to fund his massive employment program.
And a battle ensues because the FEMA people don't want to give up the money and Congress does not agree with him.
He doesn't Obama.
He goes and gets the money without congressional approval.
The money is intended for disaster relief, hurricanes, floods, fires, what have you.
There's four billion dollars, whatever the money is in it, he takes it by executive order, isn't it?
Just takes it.
The Republicans run Congress.
They hate it.
They despise it.
They can't stop him.
He goes ahead and does it.
And naturally, a hurricane happens and they don't have any money and it's a mess.
The point of all this is, there's a Washington Post story today.
Could the House of Cards America Works program actually work?
They're actually taking this seriously, a plot line in a stupid television show.
A socialist wet dream.
Government jobs creating, or government money creating jobs in infrastructure and all of this, with the government giving the private sector $45,000 of the first dollars of salary for every new hire there by taking the money from FEMA.
And of course, cutting social security.
Any president came along and gave the speech that Underwood gives in this show might not get home alive that night.
The public reaction to this is not portrayed in the program.
What's fascinating to me is, and I haven't gone into great detail because I'm really conscious of spoiler alerts.
I don't want to give this whole thing away for those of you who plan on watching this but haven't yet.
The program is going to cost $500 billion.
The money for it is covered by cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and stealing FEMA money by claiming unemployment is a natural disaster.
FEMA money only available for disasters.
Unemployment is a disaster.
He goes and gets the money.
And here's the Washington Post thinking it's brilliant and asking, wow, could this really work?
And it's kind of a window because this is how, this is apparently how leftists really think jobs are created.
That presidents and government policy actually come up with the money to pay for people to work.
There's a lot of things I could say about this season that I'm not going to say until enough time's gone by that a lot of people have seen it.
But it's nope, I'm just going to stop there.
There's a bunch, not even about this, other plot lines I could talk about, but I'm not going to go there because I'm not going to do your, I'm not going to spoil whatever you haven't yet seen.
I want it to be surprising as it was to me when you watch it, if you do.
But I just, I had to mention this because I just, the Washington Post salivating for the podcast, man, could this really work?
Could we really raid FEMA?
And could we go get money from other federal departments and actually create all these?
Don't forget, we tried this.
It was called the Obama stimulus.
And we did it not with $500 billion that's in this show.
We did it with a trillion dollars in 2008.
And look where we are.
It didn't work.
It never does work.
Government does not create jobs.
Government does not create wealth.
It destroys it.
Government does not create economic growth.
It retards it.
Yet there are going to be people who watch this show thinking this is a brilliant scheme.
And maybe it would work.
And the poisoning of the minds of the American people continues.
Okay, better get this soundbite in.
I mentioned the past couple of days that I have been blamed for the run on AR-15 ammo.
And it was, actually, it was yesterday morning.
It's the second day.
Yesterday morning, CBS This Morning correspondent Mark Strassman reporting on the proposal by ATF to ban armor-piercing ammo for the AR-15.
Last month, the ATF said they wanted to restrict the armor-piercing rifle rounds to better protect police.
The reason?
Some new handguns can fire the same ammo.
The move prompted Rush Limbaugh to tell his radio listeners last week that the proposed ban was a backdoor gun grab.
President Barack Obama is using executive actions now to impose gun control on the nation.
And around the nation, gun stores have reported buying frenzies, similar to that in 2013 when the president urged Congress to ban automatic weapons.
Yeah, but the regime says that this is a panic city.
We didn't think about gun control, but it is gun control.
Everybody knows they want gun control.
And if they can't get your gun, what better secondary way than to get your bullets?
Anybody with a brain knows what's going on here.
And here is the regime's explanation.
Josh Ernest, Monday afternoon at White House, dutifully, here comes a reporter, unidentified.
He says, hey, Josh, last week there were reports about the ATF looking at banning certain types of ammo for automatic weapons.
I mean, what's going on here, Josh?
We are looking at additional ways to protect our brave men and women in law enforcement and believe that this process is valuable for that reason.
Well, stop the take.
This administration, via Eric Holder, just issued a proclamation that the police department in Ferguson, Missouri is racist.
They didn't touch Darren Wilson, the cop in the Gentle Giant case, because they have no evidence of the guy.
But right here it is.
Department of Justice has been, has claimed that the police department in Ferguson, Missouri engages in racial profiling and racial practices, primarily at traffic stops.
And yet, here's Josh.
Oh, we just want to protect our brave men and women in law enforcement.
Right.
You just proclaim a police department racist.
Here's the rest of what Ernest had to say.
It seems to be an area where everyone should agree that if there are armor-piercing bullets available that can fit into easily concealed weapons, that it puts our law enforcement at considerably more risk.
So I put this in the category of common sense steps that the government can take to protect the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans, while also making sure that our law enforcement officers who are walking the beat every day can do their jobs just a little bit more safely.
Really?
I thought they're a bunch of racist pigs.
Really concerned about their safety.
By the way, how does this fit in the category of common sense steps the government can take to protect Second Amendment rights?
I don't quite follow that.
Well, I don't know where the time goes.
I bet you should have seen the stuff that I didn't get to today.
Of course, you'll never know what it was because I didn't get to it.
Plus, I tell you, I may save some of it for, like Bush, Jeb Bush asking donors to limit themselves to $1 million so that it doesn't look like he's being influenced by big money.
I'm not kidding you.
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