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Jan. 2, 2017 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:10
January 2, 2017, Monday, Hour #3
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Greetings, my friends, welcome back.
It's great to have you here, Rush Linboa, and the excellence in the broadcasting network.
The most talked about program in America, the most talked-about host of the most talked-about program in America, and the most envied and the most imitated, but never equaled broadcast presentation out there.
It's great to have you.
Telephone number 800-282-2882 and the email address L Rushmow at EIBNet.com.
Okay, can we go back to Lynn in Noblesville, Indiana?
You still there?
I am.
Okay, let me recast this, and you correct me if I get anything wrong.
She has four kids, among them some millennials old enough to be millennials, and they have uh been questioning the value of the Electoral College.
Why doesn't the popular vote matter?
Seems like that ought to be the way we elect the president, not state by state.
Uh they came up with an idea that we would apportion states like we do in primaries.
Uh Republican primary, if uh if Trump wins a state, he gets uh whatever percentage of the delegates in that state according to the vote he got and so forth and so on, because that would make every state count, you say.
But before before I before I address this, and I know that your your uh uh your th your mechanism there, I'm you're I don't doubt that you're well-meaning at all here.
And I have to say that at the outset, because I don't want you being offended by what may or may not be said following that.
But before I can continue, you said that you had done your best to explain it to them, and I I don't mean to put you on the spot with this, but it would help me in responding to you if I could know what you told them that they rejected.
Well, I think it's got more to do with the fact that they're bombarded with a lot of their friends and an education system and a media system that doesn't give them the actual historical facts.
What I've been telling them is the purpose in the Electoral College, as the founding fathers had put it together, was designed to make sure that heavily populated areas did not overwhelm the more rural areas or the needs of people who didn't live in densely populated um portions of the country.
And that in doing so, it ensured that everyone had a say, regardless of your demographic, and that the possibility of voter fraud or rigging the elections because you they would never know where to target, because they didn't have to, you know, they had to worry about everybody.
Um, the main concept that the Founding Fathers had had in mind when they made the Electoral College a part of our election process.
All right.
And your kids rejected that because Well, they still they don't understand why the pop the popular vote, especially, as I said, I think it's more the bombardment of the media and how they're making it sound so.
Well, there's no question, but it's it's even it's it's the reason the media and the bombardment of their friends is able to work, is that when they were in middle school, they weren't taught about the founding of America.
They weren't taught about the founding fathers.
They weren't taught about the concept of federalism.
You can't understand the Electoral College unless you know what federalism is.
And federalism is one of these terms that in in many cases means the exact opposite of of the word as it's currently applied.
If you the word federalism, you might think that means federal government trumps everything.
Federalism is federal domination.
It doesn't not, it does not mean that.
Um it it means the exact opposite, in fact.
It means uh that the states are sovereign and the federal government cannot tell them what to do, uh in so many different ways.
But the I I think you are very close with with your your assessment of population centers.
The founders did not want population centers to dictate to the rest of the country.
It was they had already seen that happen in Europe in their day.
And they had seen the kind of people that gravitate toward various areas.
I mean, it ev even in the early days of the country, it was largely an agrarian or agricultural farmer type economy.
There were still cities and there were still elites.
Um there were widely different ways of thinking, and there were various different power locations and power points, and it was it was a popular vote was considered a way of relegating a lot of people to irrelevance based on population center and the fact that the country is always changing and always always shifting.
The primary purpose of the Electoral College is to maintain the power of the states and to support the idea that the election is decided by the states.
It's not decided by the general population, and it never was.
The reason for its founding, I mean, some people would even tell you that the Electoral College was established to protect the country from the votes of a bunch of ignoramuses and people uninformed out in the sticks who didn't know what they were doing.
I mean, there were people even telling you that that was one of the original thought processes involved in establishing the Electoral College.
But it is it is a way of having a flat-out popular election without calling it that.
If if you if if you didn't do this, if you didn't have the Electoral College, we would be at the mercy of how state legislatures draw their electoral districts, and we would have electoral districts drawn strictly for the purposes of winning presidential elections and not for the purposes of state and local representation.
Right.
But the the the sh the short answer to this is is almost identical to why every state has two senators, but a different number of members of the House based on based on population.
And it is to make sure that there is equal representation across the board.
There are some states based on population that would not even have a senator if the Senate were not established the way that it is.
: Some practical examples.
If the popular vote elected the president today, two states.
California and New York would be all you would need.
And that means campaigns would occur only there.
And campaigns would focus only on issues relevant to those people in those states.
Right.
And there wouldn't be anything national about it.
There wouldn't be anything that that would that would lend anybody any any uh evidence or enlightenment as to what candidates were going to do as president because they'd all run in these various states, and there might be three, it might be more than California, New York, you might throw Texas in there.
But the point is it's always changing.
Population's always changing.
Look at North Carolina was never a battleground state until recently, now that now it is.
And it's because of migration from the Northeast.
People that live in the Northeast are leaving the Northeast for a whole host of reasons.
They're relocating in Southern states and midwestern states, no income tax states, the milder climate states, and it's affecting the balance of power in those states.
North Carolina used to be reliably red, now it's a battleground state.
The Electoral College guards against all of this.
The Electoral College protects state sovereignty.
It actually is one of the most brilliant, brilliantly conceived electoral mechanisms ever.
Let me ask you a question here, Lynn.
Because if we are not a democracy, I th I think if your kids understood that, and most people don't.
We are representative republic.
We're not a direct democracy.
Correct.
And most people don't know that, particularly young people.
They think we're a democracy.
Tell your kids this.
If we lived in a democracy, if this house were a democracy, and how many are in your house?
Well, currently three, but I have one thing.
Let's pretend six people live in your house.
Okay.
And you propose that that only four people get to eat every day.
And you put it to a vote.
And the four people, if if if if four people vote that only four people get to eat, two people that's that prevails.
That's what a democracy is.
It's strictly majority minority rule.
We do not have that.
We have what's called a representative republic.
Correct.
Well, so my so what would be for the people that are, you know, petitioning and complaining that we need to go to popular vote, and I understand the Electoral College.
What would be the benefit or the possibility of, as I said, doing the Electoral College based on the number of votes, the percentage of votes an individual candidate received.
For example, Pennsylvania has 20 electoral votes.
Because it would dilute the power of the State.
The state sovereignty is key here in the Electoral College.
And if you're going to start divvying up the power of each state's elections, you are destroying state sovereignty.
You cannot you cannot in a national election.
It's not a primary.
It's a national, it's a national election.
You can't apportion votes that way because you are you are causing the state to lose power.
It is a dilution of the state's sovereignty and power.
What I was going to ask you is this.
Yes.
Yes.
Let's take a i uh without getting into arguments.
Hillary Clinton appears to have won this election by not won the election.
She has appeared to garner two million more votes than Donald Trump.
Right?
Could you explain to me why is there not a national outrage over this that Hillary won?
Why is it only just a few people?
Why is it only just a few pockets of the media?
Why is it a very small minority of people running around complaining about this?
You would think that if somebody won an election by two million votes, that there would be a national outrage over it, and that Hillary would be demanded to be declared the winner that people would think they're being scammed left and right, but that's not happening.
Why?
Why do people accept the Electoral College is the question?
Why do they accept it?
I think there are enough currently that understand the importance of it.
My concern is as this new millennial generation moves forward, not tr not totally understanding the premise and and the and the protections that the Electoral College provides, that ultimately in the in future generations, they'll try to dismantle it without being aware of the government.
Well, that's always look, that's that's always a risk in a in a free in a free society.
I mean, I've been worried about that my whole life that the left is going to rip apart everything that makes this country what it is, and they have been trying for the last eight years and even longer.
And the reason they've gotten as far as they did is because young people haven't been taught.
Young people have been ill-educated, miseducated, propagandized.
I see it in everything I read, written by young people.
It's just if you can spot it a mile away.
They're ignorance, and it's coupled with they think they're the only people that know.
They're arrogant, they're a little bit smarmy about what they think they know and nobody else does, which is a characteristic of young people.
Uh anyway, I was that way when I was young.
Well, I've seen our daughter that's studying ministry.
She is she is seeing it.
She is the youngest of our children, and she sees it now because she sees it from a true conservative and a and a better understanding instead of all the hype and but I also see my daughter that's in the Navy who lives in California, I'm so sorry, that has moved to more towards the Bernie Sanders socialism, even though she understands that socialism can't work in a population like the United States, even though she understands that you know, governments like Denmark don't support their own military.
They they rely on us so they have more.
Okay, wait.
Then why does she support if she knows it doesn't work, why does she support it?
She's overwhelmed in in that in that demographic in California with the social consciousness that's supposed to be so prevalent.
That's that's the only way I know to say it.
That's what I hear.
No, it's exactly right.
She knows it doesn't work and yet supports it.
The answer is psychological.
She wants to love herself.
She wants to feel good.
She thinks if she doesn't support socialism, people are going To think she doesn't have a heart, that she doesn't care about other people.
So she knows it doesn't work.
But it's more important for her to be seen by people as somebody who cares and has the proper compassion than to do what she knows works and what doesn't work.
The psychological peer pressure that the left has has employed and deployed, actually, on uh on young people, has been overwhelmingly successful.
It has it has created droves and droves of people who vote against what they know is right, vote against their own self-interest, in exchange for feeling good about themselves.
And also being immune from criticism.
Don't discount that part of this, too.
Uh there's a there is a lot of there's a lot of factors in this.
And the uh I think the the root of this is like anything of the solution to this, or the understanding of it, is in a more proper education for young people about civics and about the kind of country we are and and the founding and the Constitution, and it simply isn't taught.
And so, in a sense, you can't blame them.
They're simply they're simply relying on what they think makes emotional sense, psychological sense.
Somebody got more votes than somebody else.
Why why didn't they win?
Doesn't make sense.
I mean, if the Yankees score more runs than then the Orioles, they win the game.
There isn't a.
It doesn't compute to them.
They're comparing apples to apples or apples to oranges and don't know it.
Uh because we do not have a democracy.
It's not what we have.
We have a representative republic, and then therefore the rules and regulations that have been written to maintain it are not truly democratic in in, not purely democratic in uh in origin.
They are about protecting and defending the establishment of this republic.
Well, the reason more people aren't complaining is because they instinctively know the electoral college is justified and right.
They instinctively know it.
My point is if if the electoral college were not at some level understood, tens of millions of people would be out there protesting, thinking that what they just did has been taken away from them.
You have an election, I don't know what the total number of people voted is.
What it I've taken a wild guess.
Let's say 120 million people voted, and Hillary got 122 million people.
Hillary gets 62 and Trump gets 60 and he wins.
I mean, if people didn't understand and accept the Electoral College, we would have gazillions of people protesting and burning down the Capitol building and torching anything else they could get close to.
They do understand it, and they accept it.
Whether they understand it or not, in an intellectual sense, they accept it because of the way election coverage is presented, the way elections are talked about, the way campaigns are conducted.
Campaigns are conducted specifically because of the Electoral College.
And people accept it and they understand it.
Whether they know it or not, they're accepted.
Now, I mentioned earlier in the program that I've found something yet again that is bubbling up, it's effervescing out there, and it's not yet broken the surface in a national way.
It's about the story about this Harvard lecturer who wrote in October, out of fear that Trump would be elected, that our democracy is unstable and rife for being eroded and torn apart.
And his theory is because Trump is going to just rip everything up and do it his own way.
He's an autocrat and so forth.
It's deeper than that.
But this would be an ideal time to get into this, although I don't have the time to do it right now.
But I'm gonna before this, the end of this week, I'm gonna delve into this stuff.
The story is basically how stable are democracies.
And this guy is Harvard lecturer, and it's in the New York Times, and they're they're convinced that our democracy is so fragile.
And it's only it's only one election torn apart and Trump's gonna do it.
Oh my God.
And this article even misses the point.
Why is it the United States is the longest lasting government of its kind in human history?
I mean, why haven't we crumbled already?
Why haven't we been felled by internal corruption already?
Not only the longest lasting, it's the it's one of the one of the most stable where the population is free.
Now fine, here you can find eons of dictatorship and tyranny, but I'm talking about our way of it's precisely because we're not a democracy that we have survived.
It's precisely because majority rule does have checks and balances on it.
It's precisely because this is a representative republic that we have survived.
So this guy's article is all about how stable are democracy.
Democracies are not very stable.
But we don't have one.
When you get right down to it, a lot of people think that this is a conspiratorial point of order, but it isn't.
It's genuine.
There's a big difference in a representative republic in a democracy.
We do not have a democracy.
There are elements of democracy in votes here and there, but in this the actual structure of the government, we are a representative republic.
Primary reason we've survived is that we have had leaders who've respected the Constitution, feared it, and the rule of law.
And we've been very lucky there.
Half my brain tied behind my back every day.
Every day, just to make things fair.
All right, speak of the devil, the politico just posted in the past couple of hours, and I just now became aware of it.
Anti-Trump forces launch attack on Electoral College.
The subhead is the last ditch effort to stop Donald Trump is gaining momentum.
And from the article, this excerpt.
Anti-Trump forces are preparing an unprecedented assault on the Electoral College, marked by a wave of lawsuits and an intensive lobbying effort aimed at persuading 37 Republican electors to vote for a candidate other than Donald Trump.
Ah.
I would take issue with intensive lobbying effort, uh politico.
There's no lobbying effort, there's intimidation and threats are being made against these electors.
They do have to move, they have to move 37 votes.
And they don't have to vote for Hillary.
They just vote for anybody, keep them uh well, now they have to vote for one of the two.
But they don't have enough to get Hillary to 270.
But they're trying to deny, and really, here's, folks, let's say this succeeds.
Let's just pretend that it succeeds for a second.
Let's say that these people succeed in getting 37 electors to not vote for Trump, and that means Trump doesn't get 270.
Okay, then what happens?
Well, it doesn't mean Hillary wins.
It means the election, if nobody gets 270, despite the fact that these states have certified, this means that the election will go to the House of Representatives.
The Republicans control both the House and the Senate.
So theoretically, the House would elect Trump and the Senate would elect Pence.
But how many Republicans are faking this adulation and support they have for Trump right now?
How many are going along just to go along?
How many of them privately still seething?
How many of them still hate the guy?
We don't know.
But let's not go there.
Let's let's assume that Trump wins the vote in the House, Pence wins the vote in the Senate and is still president.
So you ask yourself, why do this then?
Why go through all this?
Why deny Trump the Electoral College if he's going to end up being president anyway?
And this is where you have to understand the left.
Because then the scenario That they would begin talking about endlessly.
Trump lost a popular vote.
He didn't win the electoral college.
And his buddies in the house conspired to make him president.
He's not elected.
He's been forced on it.
He's not legitimate.
We don't have to do one thing Trump says.
And it would be a continuation of what they've already started, and that is an effort to portray Trump, his election as illegitimate, a violation of law, and his presidency is illegitimate.
That's the objective here.
I mean, they may actually think they can get Hillary elected here.
I mean, they there's deranged people everywhere, and they may in this bunch, maybe some people actually think they can succeed in getting Hillary to winner to win it.
But the overall objective is to give the Democrat Party strength, resolve, and energy to oppose anything and everything Trump does.
Because he's not legitimately elected.
That's what this is ultimately about.
Back to the phones we go.
Brad, St. Petersburg, Florida.
Welcome, sir.
Great to have you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Rush.
Um, I'm calling in to what you kind of started the show with the media, the establishment, the drive-by's the left, um, not understanding Trump.
Right.
As a as a private citizen as opposed to a lifetime politician.
And I I think the one thing I agreed with most everything that you said, but the one thing that we miss, and we I'm a conservative.
I I do this as much as they've done it to us over the last eight years, when there's disagreements or lack of understanding, we just say that the other side doesn't get it, they're dumb, how can they not grasp the fact that this guy has this movement or whatnot?
When in actuality, I believe they grasp it fully, and the problem is their fear is not that he you know keeps the media out and uses Twitter or things like that, but that he'll actually succeed.
And when he does, it will be because of the way he does things, not what he's doing.
And and when I say that, our government for years, Republicans and Democrats have worked in gray areas.
You know, if Republicans have the House and the Senate and the presidency, they do a little bit to be conservative, and the you know, the Dems will do a little bit to move to the left when they have power, he doesn't want to work in the Greys.
He wants to cut out the bureaucracy and go black and white and just get things done case in point with carrier.
And and I think that's what scares them, because they know that can be successful.
Whether you agree with the policy or not, it's more successful way to run a business, i.e., more successful way to run a government.
And I think that's where their fear is.
Okay, so you think at the end of the day, they fully understand Trump.
They fully understand his appeal.
They are threatened by it, and that's why they've got to cut him off at the pass.
Correct.
Correct.
When you talk about, you know, adolescent arrogance or you know, laughing him off, or or the way that they've treated him, well, he got elected.
And and and they said, well, that couldn't happen.
And and then, you know, without even being sworn in, without even being, you know, a certified election, he quote unquote saves a thousand jobs in Indiana.
It's it's they they can't that that makes their heads explode.
Not because of the way he does his things.
That's what they'll say.
You know, they don't like the fact that he's brash or he's a misogynist or this, that, and the other.
It's that what he does actually works.
And and the one example I can say is when he was running, he was the worst businessman in the world, and everything that he touched went bankrupt.
That was their plea.
Well, now that he's elected, they're bringing up the fact that he has successful businesses in over thirty-five countries and hotels and this, that, and the other, and he needs to split ties.
They go with whatever message they can because they know he can be successful, and I believe that's their true fear.
Well, I they have to know that because he has been.
When I say that they don't understand Trump.
I guess let me be more specific then.
I think they really resent the fact that people love him.
I think they resent that people support him.
They resent that they cannot use their usual tactics to destroy him.
And they don't understand that.
They literally don't understand a guy surviving the access Hollywood video.
And they not understanding it adds to the resentment, which is now bordering on hatred.
I do believe the left wholly owns hate in America, by the way.
I think they I think it's a subsidiary of what they do, while accusing everybody else of it.
I think they don't understand why so many people support Trump, why so many people are not my evidence for this is the political consultants who failed.
If they understand it, then they could have made some changes during the campaign to accommodate their understanding of why Trump is succeeding, but they didn't.
They continued to try to get rid of Trump the way they would get rid of anybody in the system.
They used the same tactics, the same theories, the same philosophies, the same tricks.
And as they kept failing, they kept trying more of it.
They never adjusted because I don't think they knew how.
In their world, money equals success.
Jeb Bush was going to win because he had a $115 million pack.
That was it.
That's all they needed.
They were going to be able to wipe everybody else out with that.
They got six delegates with their 115 million.
And I will guarantee you, they're still scratching their heads over this.
There's there's resentment and and they may when you say they understand, I think they're fully threatened precisely because they don't know how to stop him.
The media doesn't know how.
Every tactic the media has used to successfully destroy Republican candidates, Donald Trump has not only survived, he has thrived.
He's built on.
He has expanded his base after each one of these assaults.
I guarantee you they don't understand it.
And if we'll find out.
You know, politics, Hollywood, everything's a copycat industry.
Let's see if the next time around the Democrats try to come up with their own version of what they think Trump is.
That'll be another way we find out whether or not they understand it or not.
Could they go out and find somebody in America in the Democrat Party who is their version of Trump?
Okay, you could throw some names out, but will they do it?
Would they do it?
Would they go get an outsider?
You think so, huh?
Well, the difference there is the Republicans didn't go get Trump.
They fought him too.
Trump came out of the primordial soup all by himself, with both parties opposing him.
There is not one member of the Washington establishment, if you sat him down and say, okay, you're an architect, design the candidate that can beat everything we can throw at him.
They would have never in their lives chosen Donald Trump.
So why do you automatically conclude they could go out and find their version of Trump to do battle with him?
Well, what choice they have is not the point.
Could they do it?
They would have to fully understand Trump's appeal to be able to do it.
And I'm telling you, they don't.
They're scared.
They understand he succeeds now.
They understand all that.
They understand he can nuke them, they understand that he can overthrow everything they've done, but they don't understand how he's done it.
They don't have it in them to understand it, is my point.
It's not In their makeup to understand it.
I could give you other examples of other people they don't understand that they've tried to destroy.
But no need to look that far and hard.
I gotta take a break.
Back after this.
By the way, in many ways, the Democrats already think they've found their version of Trump.
This guy Tom Steyer, the Hollywood guy that funds global warming, climate change drivel.
This guy has uh he has he has donated a hundred million dollars this time around to Democrats' uh $67 million in 2014.
$167 million this guy spent on politics.
He wants to be governor of California.
They think he could be the next version of Trump on the Democrat side.
They haven't a clue.
They haven't they're gonna they're gonna get a donor.
And by the way, why isn't the FBI investigating all of these threats, these emails, these phone calls, this intimidation effort that's underway against these electors?
Why isn't the FBI investigating this?
I'm serious.
I know who runs the FBI, Obama runs the FBI.
But still, why isn't somebody demanding it or calling for it?
This is the kind of stuff the left does.
I'm just telling you.
This is the kind of stuff they do that everybody says, eh, they laugh at it, they shrug it off, they they shove it way out to the extreme.
Nothing's gonna come of this, and something always does.
I'd keep a sharper eye on this if I were in the Trump team, and maybe they are, I don't know, but I'd keep a sharper eye on this than than what it it appears people are doing.
More pay more attention to it, because this is a sleaze bag effort if there ever was one.
And these are the kind of people that me need to be pounded into the ground.
They need to be defeated to the point that they're demoralized and don't ever try this again.
That's why.
Well, I'm thinking signed surrender papers on the deck of the USS Missouri.
No, I'm asking whether or not this effort to pressure the electors, 37 of them have changed the vote, is that not voter intimidation?
I mean, this is the bunch out there laughing at Trump, claiming there's all kinds of fraudulent voting going on here, and these people are engaging in an attempt at it.
All the while telling us Trump is a conspiracy kook.
Where is the FBI on this?
Where is the civil rights division?
See you tomorrow, folks.
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