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June 25, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:19
June 25, 2015, Thursday, Hour #2
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Hi folks, welcome back.
It's great to have you here.
It really is.
Can't tell you how much I appreciate it.
You being here every day.
Telephone number if you want to appear on the program.
800-28282, and the email address is Lrushbow at EIBNet.com.
I I gather, Mr. Snerdley, you don't believe this story that I told you about right for the break.
Let me share it with you here again.
You better believe it, because I guarantee you this is what they're going to say.
They've got a built-in campaign issue that's just been handed to them on a silver platter again.
No, no, no, no, it's an important distinction here.
The Hill.com says GOP pledges to fight tooth and nail to repeal Obamacare.
Senator Oran Hatch, Republican Utah, added that Republicans will continue to move forward with their legislative alternatives, including the Patient Care Act, which would repeal Obamacare.
He said, Fortunately, Republicans have a plan to reverse this course by repealing and replacing Obamacare with reforms that put patients not Washington first.
That is my precise point.
What conservatism becomes is fine-tuning socialism.
The left has figured out how to get all of these things, socialism, call it what you will, make it look really appealing to the great unwashed, the low information voters.
End up being implemented.
The public ends up accepting all these things.
Like social security.
Obama's out there touting it in.
Social Security was guaranteed to see to it that our seniors were no longer consigned to starvation and death in retirement.
It's not what it was.
But it doesn't matter.
Social Security has become government paid retirement now.
It's not what it was intended to be.
Actually, it was intent.
Actually, it was.
That's not what they said, though.
I'm it's another fine point.
The liberals never give you the truth of these things.
Well, anyway, that's the great appeal of socialism is that the downtrodden will be taken care of.
And finally, very well will they be taken care of.
And these entitlements get implemented, and for the most part, people don't complain.
I mean, they complain about the operation.
They don't complain about the existence.
When's the last time you heard any Social Security recipient say, you know what, we gotta ditch this program?
They don't.
What do they say?
We need to increase the benefits.
They always talk about improving it, but not getting rid of it.
They don't complain about the existence.
So then the conservative movement ends up becoming a movement to fine-tune or make more efficient all of these social programs instead of being what it should be, and that is a debate.
Conservatism should present an alternative to all of this.
But that's not what the uh Republican Party has done since Reagan.
The Republican Party has assumed, or it has been presumed the Republican Party equals the conservative movement, and the Republican Party simply seeks to fine-tune all this stuff.
We can do it smarter, they say.
We can do it better.
And Redon Q, here comes Senator Hatch.
Republicans will continue to move forward with their legislative alternatives, including the Patient Care Act, which would repeal and replace.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, what's this replace business?
Senator Hatch said, well, fortunately, Republicans have a plan to reverse this course by repealing and replacing Obamacare with reforms that puts patients, not Washington, first.
Moving forward, we will continue to seek input on our legislative proposal and use every opportunity available to give both states and patients more freedom and flexibility.
But the structure isn't gonna change.
The Republican leader Mitch McConnell, in this story, said tried to pressure Democrats who supported the law, saying they Face a choice to either crow about Obamacare's latest wobble toward the edge or work with us to address the ongoing negative impact of a 2,000 page law that constitutes or continues, I should say, to make life miserable for too many of the same people it purported to help.
So the headline here is GOP pledges to fight tooth and nail to repeal Obamacare.
Let me tell you how that's going to manifest itself.
I have no doubt that before you can finish whistling Dixie, Republican presidential candidates are going to start tearing into this reaction today, this decision today.
And they're going to start campaigning on repealing Obamacare, just like they did the last two elections.
And people are going to go, yeah, man, you go, you go, get rid.
And some people are going to vote for Republicans based on this pledge to repeal Obamacare.
And then let's say the Republicans win at everything in 2016.
There won't be any repeal of Obamacare.
That's been the lesson.
Again, intelligence guided by experience, or vice versa, experience guided by intelligence.
Our experience has been the GOP campaigns on a pledge to get rid of this.
But then they don't.
After they get elected, they start to fine-tune it.
Or to make it more efficient, or what have you.
By the way, I checked email as I always do during the break.
Rush, why are you so sure?
This is several emails.
Why are you so sure that the court is going to legalize gay marriage nationally?
Yeah, really.
I mean, yeah, peep.
I had a bunch of people want me to explain why.
I made the prediction.
I don't know how any after today, I don't know how anybody can doubt that's going to be the result, but let me give you a practical reason why.
How many times have we joked on this program about Justice Kennedy being the subject of profiles in the Washington Post style section or the New York Times Sunday magazine to influence him and so forth.
And Chief Justice Roberts, too.
Well, this past Sunday, I I don't know if it's the Sunday Times magazine or just the newspaper itself, but there was this fawning profile.
I mean, it w you could have put this profile on your pancakes, it was so syrupy about Justice Kennedy and his days in Sacramento.
Now, I happened to be working in Sacramento at the same time Justice Kennedy was there.
In fact, uh we both left Sacramento, he for Washington, me for New York the same year.
You know, when when when the Bork nomination was rejected, Anthony Kennedy got it now.
Ginsburg was going to get it, but then he discovered he had blown the evil weed at some point in his earlier life, so he's disqualified.
So they found Justice Kennedy.
It was a McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento.
And Sacramento, McGeorge is a big deal.
The dean at the time was a man named Gordon Shaber.
And Gordon Shaber was a closeted, said the New York Times, I did not know this.
I it didn't matter to me, but the New York Times reported something he was a closeted gay man.
And there were rumors at the time, I mean, everybody, I think knew it there.
Rumors of who his boyfriend was and their partner, partner and all.
Anyway, the New York Times story just ladled it on about how Gordon Shaber and everybody deeply synthesized Tony Kennedy to the gay life.
Deeply sensitized him to the problems of having to stay in the closet.
It detailed many social evenings where Tony Kennedy was a guest at gay dinner parties and how everybody was just so pleasantly surprised at how accepting he was and non-judgmental he was.
Now, I'm I'm reporting this without this story right in front of me, so I'm giving it to you paraphrased.
That's pretty close to the tone of the piece.
Well, folks, I mean, it's clear as a bell that that piece isn't gonna run.
If if Kennedy is in the dissent on gay marriage, there's gonna be a revolt at the New York Times.
I mean, the there's just things happen that give you an indication of what's coming down the pike.
And I but I would make the prediction even without the New York Times piece this past weekend.
Based on everybody's past rulings, based on the inertia.
Just based on the inertia of where we are headed right now as a culture.
I don't think there's any.
I mean, somebody I'd be willing to see it.
Somebody somebody point out to me where the breaks are being applied here.
I don't see any place.
So why should the court that that's not this court's job?
This court has made it plain that it's going to survey public opinion and get right in line with it.
Or what they think is public opinion.
Here, let me let me give you just a little sample from the New York Times story on uh Justice Kennedy this past weekend.
Now, as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on whether to grant a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, Justice Kennedy, a one-time alter boy, has emerged as an unlikely gay rights icon.
At 78, he has advanced legal equality for gays more than any other American jurist, making his friend Mr. Schaber, the dean of McGeorge Law, who has since passed away look presciant.
Meaning Shaber is largely credited for convincing the Reagan administration to pick Tony Kennedy to uh sit on the court.
I got uh new justice Justice Kennedy uh invited me to attend a Margaret Thatcher lecture with his family in New York one night.
And I knew his son Justin for a while.
And they're fine folks.
Don't I don't want anybody to misunderstand what I'm saying here.
Not saying anything more than what I'm saying.
People want to know why do you think the ruling is going to be what it is?
It's it's staring at us.
It's right in front of our face.
You don't you don't need to be prescient.
All you have to be is aware.
I don't think there's any doubt.
And I also don't think there's any doubt that they waited until the last two days of term to release these two things.
This is called flooding the zone.
I don't doubt that uh there's strategy in this.
Let's go some audio sunbites quickly.
No, I have not forgotten about this Confederate American flag stuff.
I've not, folks, it just it understandably is going to take a back seat.
Maybe in the next hour, maybe later in this hour we'll get to it, because it was yet another prediction made by your host that everybody ridiculed that came true in less than 24 hours.
Anyway, here's Jonathan Gruber.
Let's go back to January 18th, three years ago.
January 18th, 2012, False Church of Virginia at the Noblist Innovation and Collaboration Center.
MIT economics professor Jonathan Gruber, talking about the Obamacare Health Exchanges.
And during the QA, he was asked, Mr. Gruber, it's my understanding that if the states do not provide subsidies, the federal government will.
I think what's important to remember politically about this is if you're a state and you don't set up an exchange, that means your citizens don't get their tax credits.
Bingo.
He's the architect.
He wrote the law.
He was out bragging.
And caught on tape bragging about how they took advantage of the gullibility and the stupidity of the American people to fall for what they were saying.
Play it again.
Audio Sunday 21.
Mr. Mr. Gruber, it's my understanding that the states don't provide the tax credits, the subsidies, the federal government will.
I think what's important to remember politically about this is if you're a state and you don't set up an exchange, that means your citizens don't get their tax credits.
It means you don't get subsidies.
If your governor doesn't set up an exchange, you are up the creek, pal.
You do not get a subsidy.
Thank you.
That was the intent of the law.
And here he goes on to explain that the law was written that way intentionally to put maximum pressure on the states to set up exchanges.
But your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill.
So you're essentially saying your citizens you're going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country.
I hope that that's a blatant enough political reality that states will get their act together and realize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these exchanges and that they'll do it.
But you know, once again the politics can get ugly around this.
So he's admitting, Chief Justice Roberts notwithstanding.
He's admitting here that the whole point of these subsidies was to withhold them from states that did not set up exchanges because that was intended to put pressure on states to do it.
The federal government, the backstory here is the federal government was trying to offload some of the cost so that they could present a phony document to the CBO showing that the total cost would come in at no more than the Iraq war.
One trillion dollars.
They had to do in the way they did it, did many things, but they shifted a lot of the costs to the states, including on Medicare.
And the states from the get-go said, wait a minute, we can't afford these mandates on us.
We can't print money like you do.
It didn't matter.
The only thing that mattered to the regime was getting those costs off the federal ledger.
And as an enticement, they basically were threatening these governors with not being re-elected, because if we're going to provide subsidies to people so they can afford this, which would otherwise not be affordable, and the only way they can get those subsidies is if the governors in those states set up exchanges, then we think that political pressure will force every government to set up an exchange.
Because if they don't, the citizens in that state will not get any help.
They won't get a subsidy, and they won't be able to afford Obamacare.
He's admitting that the whole thing was indeed political to put pressure primarily on Republican governors to make Obamacare possible, to make it happen.
Despite all of this, I don't know if the forces for good, meaning our side, argued this at the Supreme Court.
I have no idea.
But it's plain as day.
I wonder what Justice Roberts would say if he heard this.
Well, that may have been what Groomer said, but uh clearly the context of the law is that everybody was gonna get it.
Oh, it wasn't.
And here's Lawrence Tribe.
Last summer, one year ago, Fox News channel real story, Gretchen Carlson talking about Judge Roberts.
It's gonna depend in the end on the Chief Justice.
Now, he too was a student of mine, and I think he's got a lot of common sense.
And he is not very likely, in my view, to take the language of the law, which says that exchanges established by a state are the ones on which people can get financial help, and emphasize that little word buy.
We're talking words that are designed to protect ordinary people, middle class people, should they be tripped up by what even the DC Circuit Court of Appeals said was an intentional gap in the language.
Okay.
I'll have to analyze this for you when I get back.
Don't go on.
Okay, what Lawrence Tribes soundbite means, look, it's gonna depend at the end on the chief.
He was a student of mine, he's got a lot of common sense, and he's not he's not likely to take the language of the law and emphasize that little word by meaning, look, he was a student of mine, and I taught him well.
And he's not gonna let the language of the law get in the way of doing what the left wants.
Or what Obama wants, or what and that's basically what he was saying.
I taught him well.
He's not gonna let the language of the law stand in his way.
Well, the language of the law is all there is.
The language of the law is what it is until you start interpreting it and then imagining the context of it.
I'm gonna tell you something here, folks.
The left and the media out there telling a big bogus lie today, that is just four words in the law by the states.
It's not just the four words and mentioned nine or ten times throughout The law.
The fact that only states will get subsidies if they set up an exchange is mentioned at least nine times in various places of the law.
It's not a throwaway, and it doesn't mean what the chief said it means.
Here's uh here's Ted and Little Rock.
Hey, Ted, glad you waited.
Great to have you on the program.
Hi.
Hey, thank you.
It's a great pleasure to be on the radio with you.
Thank you, sir.
Mr. Lumbaugh.
Um, to me, the meaning of this latest decision uh the court, the one regarding what we call Obamacare, is that the court has basically voided statutory law.
And so if they've avoided statutory law, then I don't I don't need to worry about statutory law.
I need to worry about what I think uh the tyrants, the people with guns might enforce.
What they decide is the law today.
That's exactly right.
That's and let me just finish, add one little thing here.
Next up, this session of the court is common law.
We're gonna decide whether or not, or the court is going to decide, because all of us individually can decide whatever we please.
We're gonna decide whether man and wife means man and wife, or it means something else.
And when that's done, we don't have statutory law, we don't have common law.
We got nothing.
And then it's everybody for himself and figuring out what the best move is going to be, based on what people who have the power to enforce.
Hang on, I want you to emphasize that point until we get back.
Hang on just a second.
Yeah, we're back.
Great to have you with us.
El Rushbow behind the golden EIB microphone back to Ted Little Rock.
Ted, I want you to go to the common law aspect uh of what you said again.
But would you do me a favor for people?
Statutory law is pretty simple to understand.
Statute is a statutory law passed by Congress.
What do you mean by common law?
Now you've given marriage as an example, but give an example of common law.
Because what, for example, what's to stop the chief justice if the court accepts the second amendment case.
Given what happened today, what's to stop the chief justice from saying it's clear the framers really meant that only members of uniformed militia should have the right to bear arms.
Nothing.
No.
He's become the sole arbiter if he can get enough people to join him on the court.
That's still statutory, but what is, as you understand, a common law besides marriage?
Give some other examples.
Well, let's I'm a structural engineer.
I design buildings.
You might jokingly say I protect you from architects.
And uh I understand that, by the way.
I appreciate that.
Um so if I am a structural engineer and there's nothing in the code that says I should uh design with a particular factor of safety, then we go to what's uh broadly described as customary practice or usual practice, or in other words, what everybody else is doing and has been doing for a very, very long time.
And hopefully that's based in some level of reality, though occasionally uh we discover in my profession that, well, how about that?
That really doesn't work the way we thought it did, and um, so we're going to uh change all the building codes in California after Northridge.
Um we got that kind of stuff that goes on and in my profession.
But you know, if we are at the point now where that kind of argument is no longer valid if we can't say whether it's marriage or my engineering practice, well, everybody else has been doing it this way, and we've all run under the same set of assumptions for a very, very long time, and we have no reason prior to this to believe anything was otherwise.
But suddenly something's changed, and now I'm liable for the change.
Even though I didn't know and nobody knew at such and such a time.
You might say the same thing's applicable to the Confederate battle flag for that matter.
Suddenly this has become a symbol of this, that, or the other.
Well, you should have known it was a symbol of racism and hate and divisiveness, and And and and and so suddenly everybody has to pull it off their shelves.
Having it is proof that you are in fact a racist.
And I here's the next step for battle flags as far as you want to go.
I own a battle flag, therefore I'm a racist, therefore I cannot have a federal or state or local government contract.
Okay.
So the term in the in the example of gay marriage, common law has always said that marriage between a man and a woman, that's what you meant by man and a wife.
Now, all of a sudden, the Supreme Court, despite the fact that we've never voted on this.
American people actually there have been votes in the states.
It's been voted down.
Gay marriage has been defeated.
Just like Prop 8 in California was defeated, but here comes the Supreme Court, and they're probably going to declare that marriage is now defined by whatever they say it's going to be defined as.
Well, again, the the statutory law doesn't matter.
So you're you're you're you're unusually behind.
The what the people have voted constitutionally, or the legislatures of the various states have voted in, whether it's constitutions or laws, are irrelevant because the statutes, the legislative decisions of the people don't matter.
That's what this court case says.
Right.
And so now the only thing left is statute.
Well, not statute is common law, which is custom, which is history, which is the past, which is what we've always done, sans some decision to make the change.
Well, the decision to make the change has been pulled out of the hands of the people.
It's been pulled out of the hands of the representatives of the people.
It's been pulled out of heck, you know, the tyrants that might rule over the people.
We are down to whatever somebody says who has sufficient authority to back it up.
And if this if the common law falls at that point, there's nothing left.
We're done.
Wave bye-bye to traditions and standards and the way things have been done.
Well, I know that's that is the actual one of the direct results of this ruling today.
And the chief justice's own words pretty much say so.
He said, Look, I I uh I've I've got to interpret this.
And I have to use context and intent to interpret this.
And it uh it just it it just can't mean what it says here.
I'm just gonna tell you it doesn't mean what it says, and I got five other judges to agree with me.
So this is the government the left has always wanted, folks.
You have an authoritarian megalomaniac like Obama ruling, non-governing, ruling like a monarch.
The opposition is paralyzed in fear, so they usually just bend over.
And then, according to the highest court in the land, which is supposed to provide a check and a balance against just this kind of thing, the Supreme Court comes along and says, Well, wait a minute, the law, this law doesn't mean anything.
Uh the words don't mean anything.
Like Scalia said, the words of this law, the words of the statute don't mean anything.
I'm changing what they mean to mean what I want them to mean for whatever reason I want them to mean what I want them to mean.
So therefore, there is no meaning.
And so Ted's point is that at this point there is no statutory law, and therefore common law is next, and so now we just have authoritarian rule.
Everybody's free to say whatever they want to say, do whatever they want to do if they have the authority to back it up.
And of course, people in the federal government have the authority, many ways to exercise it to uh to back it up.
Now look, folks, uh I, for one, as I've told you earlier today, am not surprised.
I thought this was gonna happen, but it's still it's still depressing and shocking when you see it.
Knowing that it was coming and expecting that it was coming does not in any way make it palatable.
Now my point about votes on same-sex marriage.
I just not that I'm behind things.
I'm trying to make a point that what's happening is in many instances happening against the will of the American people.
Obamacare is happening against the will of the American people.
The American people in poll after poll after poll have never supported it.
The Republican Party did not provide even one vote for this law when it was passed by Congress.
Not one Republican in the House or Senate voted for it.
A number of really questionable tactics were used in order to get the number of votes Obama and the Democrats needed.
So you can say that the people's representatives did indeed pass the law, but it was purely partisan, a bunch of tricks, but there has never been majority support for this, and there isn't now.
In the case of abortion, there have never been public votes on this.
The same thing happened there.
The Supreme Court, nine men in black robes simply decided.
And our culture has been arguing and roiled over this ever since it happened.
And now here comes gay marriage.
There have been 34 votes.
same-sex marriage has only won twice in the 34 elections where it's been on the ballot.
Since common law is based on tradition and custom, It has been under attack a lot longer than statutory law.
So it's it's um this is what I've been trying to say, I guess, and I guess it's not been perfectly clear in this.
There's an all-out assault on the culture and the traditions and the institutions which assembled and defined the greatness of this country and provided the glue, by the way, which kept the country the greatest country ever.
All of that is under assault now.
And when you can't even turn to the Supreme Court to have the brakes on this, put on on this, then there's a genuine feeling of helplessness.
And more, obviously.
Another brief time out, take it now, be back and continue after this.
Sit tight.
And back to the phones to Hartford, Connecticut.
Bethy, great to have you with us.
How are you?
Hi, Russ.
How are you?
Well, I'm fine and nandy.
Okay.
I'm calling in reference to your earlier um commerce communications in reference to re um the remove the different states starting to follow removing the Confederate f flag.
And um the reason why I'm calling because people are failing to r understand here is the Confederate flag.
I understand that there are people in the South who don't honor the flag for the ugly that came along with the flag as far as slavery and things of that nature.
I understand that there's a large audience who just see it as heritage and not the ugly part that comes with it.
But this young man who committed this murder, these this crime, this terrific crime in South Carolina.
We have to you have to understand that he's responding to a very large audience in reference to what he did.
Yeah, that large audience, believe it or not, is marveling what he did.
So what in it it goes back so deep that it's just sad, and it's just not people in the South that he's um claiming a victory for what he's done while showing standing behind this flag holding his gun.
Who is this audience that's marveling at the moment?
From people who believe in slavery should have never Been demolished, not just in the South, all over the world, because we remember people from the South migrated north, south, east, west, or whatever have you.
Do you know people who think slavery should still be the uh Well, we've had some senators who remember who stepped down for saying that they should never have gotten rid of slavery.
Who?
What senators?
I can't remember the Senator.
There was a senator in Congress who stepped down or who stepped down from his position because of a remark similar to that.
Who who was he?
Oh, God, I can't remember his name.
He was he was he was either a senator or oh god, I I forget who who he was, but I'll have to Google that and find out.
Anyway, I think you're making an assumption here.
This is this is one of the problems.
You're making an assumption that Dylan Roof was the leader of some kind of army or has the ability to inspire others.
The guy's a lone wolf.
No, he wasn't even wearing the connector the Confederate flag on his so-called uniform.
No, I realize that rush.
I realize that rush.
But if you look at it at the different at his Facebook page, he's standing there with a gun.
And this Confederate flag is behind him.
He he's he's he's this young man has been coerced and motivated to do such a thing.
He's he's he's been dealing with the wrong people.
And I'm not saying that everybody that um wishes the Confederate flag to be in the state, to be left in the state, it's of that nature.
What I'm saying is this young man is responding to an audience that is marveling.
And I'm not saying he's the leader of the pack.
He's just one of many.
And so you think that that that taking the flag down or getting rid of the flag is going to remove from that audience the inspiration to do what Dylan Roof did.
No, I'm what I'm saying is the removal of the flag by the governors of the different states and the state leaders' decision to remove it, they're responding back to that audience.
That's their way of responding back, saying, Look, we are not in agreement with what you did.
We are not in honor of what.
See, that's my problem here.
This is my point.
You are automatically assigning or accepting a premise that the Confederate flag and slavery and the antebellum days are what inspired Dylan Roof to do what he did.
And therefore we've got to rid ourselves of the symbol.
I'm telling you that what he did didn't have any do with that.
They are taking what he did and converting his action to mean all kinds of things.
One, there's a giant set of interpretations going on here.
And what's happening is a political opportunity has been seized as a sad horrible, devastating event is now being used to advance the political agenda of a particular party.
And the purpose of this agenda is to make sure that that is to try to convince as many people as possible that Dylan Roof is common, that what he did is common among Southerners who can't let go of the Civil War days.
They can't let go of the flag, they can't let go of slavery, and he is an example of what we're dealing with, and as such, an all-out assault on Southern culture is justified.
An all-out assault on the Republican Party is justified.
The Republican Party got nothing to do with this.
The Republican Party has nothing to do with the flag flying.
The flag was hoisted by Democrat governors.
The flag was believed in and sworn to by Democrats.
They were the segregationists.
What this has become is a political opportunity to once again blame it on the Republicans.
Blame it on Southern culture, which just happens to be, as far as Democrats are concerned, the last remaining geographic Republican stronghold.
So my problem with this is that here you have a s a horrible, unique, isolated incident, which is now being used to tar and feather and and and to impugn an entire section, geographic part of the country.
Tempting to get many people to believe just like in Ferguson, after Ferguson, the bul that the attempt there was to convince people that white cops are murdering young black, innocent black kids every day.
It's happening every day, and this is it.
This is the final straw.
We're not taking in fact it's not happening.
It doesn't happen with any frequency at all.
But false images, false narratives are being created here.
And so we're taking symbolic action that is designed to have a political positive impact on the Democrat Party.
When if anybody wants to talk about the Confederate flag, that flag is linked to the Democrat Party, not the Republican Party.
This is how out of balance and out of whack all of this is.
I shudder when people so easily fall for this technique and what's happening.
Two days ago I made a prediction, and everybody thought that I was all wet.
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