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Jan. 27, 2017 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:00
January 27, 2017, Friday, Hour #3
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Buck Sexton in for Rush today on the EIB.
Hour three already upon us.
Time flies when you're having so much fun here with the Golden Mike.
Oh, this one's actually not golden.
Do people know that people always ask me that?
I'm like, this is this mic isn't really golden.
But it's an awesome mic nonetheless.
I want to bring on our friend Kim Strassel now.
She is an author and a uh journalist at the Wall Street Journal, her latest which we're gonna talk about now is a GOP regulatory game changer.
She's also got a book out that you should check out the Intimidation Game, How the Left is Silencing Free Speech, Leaving Women Behind.
Thank you so much, Kim for calling.
Oh, it is so great to be here, Buck.
All right, you're gonna have to walk us through the your piece in the journal about the regulatory game changer for the GOP.
It's fascinating, it could have a big impact, but it there's some intricacies here.
Take us down into these regulatory weeds because the whole point of this is to take a weed whacker to those regulatory weeds.
So walk us through.
Well, I think the first thing everyone has to understand is about this law called the Congressional Review Act, and I'm sure a lot of listeners have heard about it.
It's all the talk right now.
And what it is is it's a law passed back in nineteen ninety six that gives Congress some say over voting down regulations that they don't like.
And what the law specifies is that Congress has up to sixty days to have an up or down vote on a regulation.
They only need fifty-one people uh in the Senate to to vote down a regulation.
Um and if they do so, it goes away.
Now, the problem is that in the past, uh obviously a president is the one who uh promulgates these regulations, and they are not very keen on getting rid of their own regulations, so they usually tend to veto any of these Congressional Review Act uh passages that come to their desk.
Uh, but we're in a unique time here, and you have Republicans now about to embark on using this rule this law because they're going to have a vote on a number of different recent Obama regulations and send them to a President Trump who will sign them.
And so it's a very quick uh and useful way of getting rid of bad regulations.
And what are the ways the Democrats could go about trying to stymie this?
Or if the Republicans stick together and go forward on this, are they essentially from a legislative standpoint unstoppable?
Can they do this?
They are absolutely unstoppable.
If they have fifty-one votes in the Senate and a majority in the House, and it goes to Trump and he signs that bill, then that regulation is gone.
Not only that, but one thing that makes this law incredibly effective is that if they vote down a regulation, an agency is barred from ever crafting a regulation that is uh essentially the same unless a future law gives them permission to do so.
So not only do you kill the regulation, but you make it so that future democratic presidents can't easily bring them back.
Now, where do all the the the different sources of of regulation when when Trump talks about cutting the red tape and this administration says they're going to tackle this problem that that is causing uh so many issues for businesses, particularly small businesses who can't handle the the costs of the regulatory burden as well as as larger and established businesses.
What the Federal Register is over what o over eighty thousand pages already.
Obama added all kinds of things into it that have tr that uh will have real costs uh on businesses and in the marketplace.
But some of these come from the agencies themselves, don't they?
Isn't that h how do we get a handle on that?
What can Trump do about the EPA and and other agencies that are just putting things out there and saying, well, this is how we're going to enforce the law.
They have to just come to heal, don't they?
They have to obey the executive branch, and does that mean he can pull away things that Obama put in place?
Absolutely.
I mean, there are many different ways you can go about doing it.
He can uh in some ways, although this is the the least valuable way he can issue executive orders on some things.
Uh for instance, the executive order he issued about Obamacare.
He ordered all of his agency heads to find ways to minimize the burden of Obamacare.
Uh that may mean that they uh simply decide to interpret some of these regulations in a different way.
Uh they can also, the agencies can go about actually dismantling the regulations uh by issuing new ones or rescinding the ones that are there, although that takes time.
This is the big news of the week, though, uh, Buck, is that this Congressional Review Act, Everyone had always assumed that when you talked about Congress having sixty days to get rid of regulations, that that meant that in terms of using this tool, they would only be able to use it on regulations that President Obama had passed in the last year essentially, uh, basically going back to June of last year.
However, this week, and this is what the column was about, we had a fascinating man who actually helped develop this law twenty years ago, the Congressional Review Act, and he informed a bunch of conservatives this week that in fact the law has other requirements.
And one of those requirements is that not only does the agency uh not only does Congress have the ability to vote these down, but the agency has a requirement to send a report about any rule that it makes to Congress.
And the law says that in fact they have sixty days from the time that that report is submitted.
Well, guess what?
There is a big belief that a lot of Obama agencies never submitted reports on their regulations.
So in theory, any rule that Obama passed going all the way back to the beginning of his tenure, if there was not a report submitted on it, the Trump agencies could now submit a report and Congress would have sixty days to decide whether to get rid of those rules as well.
So finally the the Byzantine bureaucracy that we uh deal with with the federal government is is an advantage in this instance because they didn't put these reports out in the timely fashion or at all, and so that leaves an opening then to repeal these different regulations.
Uh, Kim, when you're looking at this, and I'm speaking to Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal, she is a piece up on the Wall Street Journal right now, a GOP regulatory game changer.
Uh when you're looking at this issue, uh what are some of the worst of the regulations?
Just so everyone gets a sense of this, because I think when we're talking about the processes to remove them or to stop them, I know Trump has put a a freeze, and so the EPA has dozens of of executive orders that were or d uh dozens of regulations rather that were going to go into effect and and are at least on pause for now.
Um but what are some of the worst legacies, regulatory legacies of the eight years of the Obama era?
The sorts of things that could be undone either by uh this process you're talking about or others.
Oh, well, there's so many.
I mean, there's the huge body of regulations that accompanied uh Obamacare, for instance.
Uh there's the Clean Power Plan, which was essentially Obama's attempt through the EPA to implement a carbon reduction plan without Congress's authority.
Uh there's the overtime rule, which rewrote uh longstanding labor regulations and essentially uh made it so that millions of more Americans were eligible for overtime with no say at all from the corporate community.
There's the streams rule, which for instance uh it was another backdoor attempt to shut down the coal mining industry by basically making it very difficult for that activity to take place anywhere near a waterway.
There's the waters of America rule, which gave the federal government unprecedented uh control over navigable rivers across the country.
I mean, these go on and on uh because we had an administration over the past eight years that wasn't happy unless it took over pretty much every sector of the economy.
Dodd Frank and the thousands of rules that have come out of that.
Um, all of these are potentially up for the chopping block now.
And you are confident based on what you've seen so far in this this last week with the Trump administration, y you think they're gonna are they gonna tackle these issues?
Do you see this happening?
I am very confident, and part of that comes from uh seeing the tenor of the people that he has chosen to head a lot of these agencies.
What a lot of people miss, especially with all of the controversy that Democrats are trying to create about these nominees, is most of them are uh incredible practitioners of the area in which they are now about to go take over.
I mean, people like Tom Price, the doctor from Georgia who's gonna run the Health and Human Services Administration, he understands health care law and he understands where all these regulations are.
He's been keeping track of them while he was in Congress, he knows where the bodies are buried, and he is absolutely determined to get rid of a lot of these things.
Scott Pruitt at the EPA just spent all of his time as an attorney general launching lawsuits against the EPA, claiming that it had exceeded its authority over the state.
So he knows what regulations are most pernicious and need to go.
So they are intent on it.
Also, just if you look this week, very good news, for instance, these pipeline authorizations that President Trump put out.
Uh not only did he put out those authorizations, but with them, executive orders that would require a a vastly expedited system by which to sign off on permits and environmental reviews for major projects.
That all suggests an administration that understands the problem of regulatory burdens on the economy and is determined to fix it.
So he is taking a sledgehammer to some of the red tape here, following through on a key campaign promise.
I know it's very early in the game, but all s so far all signs point to a Trump administration that's going to try to pull some of these strangling regulations off of businesses and off of the American economy.
Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal, read her latest GOP regulatory game changer, and check out her book, The Intimidation Game.
Kim, thank you so much for making the time.
Great to have you.
Nice to talk to you again, Buck.
Phone lines are open because it's open line Friday, 800-282-288-2.
We'll talk about it.
I got to tell you about that State Department thing.
Because I used to work with the federal government.
This is going to be fun.
We'll be right back.
There was a story.
I think it was I think it was yesterday.
Uh story where you had the press just very flustered and flummoxed and very sad because some top State Department officials were leaving, and there were concerns that there was a brain drain going on at foggy bottom.
How will we ever survive?
That remember, this was I think it was four people who were named.
Maybe it was uh a half dozen or so, something like that.
State department spent some time there.
It's a huge place.
A lot of a lot of a lot of people there.
And we were told, and this was framed.
I I know our friend uh Mark Stein hit this yesterday.
The press was saying, look, they don't want to work for Trump.
Trump is so crazy that these amazing, dedicated, nonpartisan civil servants, they speak fifteen languages each.
Did you know that?
Pass the impossible foreign service exam.
It's not that hard.
Based on some of the people I know that passed it.
I'm just saying uh I am keeping it real.
I was at Langley, they were at Maine State, you know, not always I wasn't always that impressed.
I'm I wasn't always that impressed.
I'm just gonna say it.
Some of them were great.
But the story the press was running with yesterday was they don't want to work for Trump.
Trump is a monster.
He's a till of the hun.
He is he is Genghis Khan without being the guy that kind of started the transcontinental postal service and coined.
Oh, yeah, that's a r that's a thing.
That's the people say the Genghis Khan was important for the postals because they had the ponies.
I guess they weren't ponies, but they were horses, whatever, on the step.
I'm getting way off the rails here.
But they uh they said that Trump is so awful that these fantastic these fantastic State Department employees are leaving.
And it's worth noting that you don't get a lot of federal government employees who resign in protest.
And that's a I kind of miss those days where I at least thought that would happen.
That somebody would leave a generally cushy, well paid.
You don't get rich in government, but in federal work and the federal workforce, you don't get poor either.
Uh good benefits and process is the product, so you just gotta show up and be there for the most part, and you know, there you go.
Uh they had a few that you rarely see people that leave because of an administration or a policy.
And especially at the very top, uh there's not a lot of resignations that seem to occur.
Because, you know, it just hurts your book fee and your speaking fee.
If you're uh well, I don't know, it depends.
If it's a Republican and you resign, it's gonna it's gonna help you a lot.
It's gonna help you a lot.
If you're a Democrat and you resign, you know, you you've sort of sold out the one-party monolith, so I think you're gonna get less cash for going around reading speeches that other people wrote for you, senior Democrat folks.
Um but we were told that this was more evidence.
And this is it's not I wouldn't this isn't fake news, but it's False news, we could say that.
And the difference between false and fake starts to come down to a question of intent.
And I don't know how you could get something so wrong.
But here's what we were told yesterday.
That these senior State Department, four senior career State Department officials, according to Politico, who worked under Republican and Democratic leaders left their posts left than a week less than a week into Donald Trump's presidency.
Fueling questions.
By the way, that means that when they say fueling questions, it means that this is what other media people are asking.
That's how that goes, right?
So when when you want to position a narrative a certain way, you're just like, well, I'm a politico, and my friends at the Huff Post and my friends at Slate, they're all totes asking the same questions, and I mean for real, like whatever.
Um fueling questions about the new administration's plans for the department and fears of a possible exodus of talent from the foreign service.
Oh, good heavens, what's going to happen now?
We're just gonna have a lot of guys that the Trump administration's gonna have to appoint the foreign service who are like, you want to do a trade deal?
You do you like my trade deal?
You want to talk a trade deal or what?
Am I here to do business or what?
I mean, I know this is the way they think of it.
They have these fancy pinstriped diplomats who go around chin side to side just trying to tell everybody how wonderful they are and representing America.
Actually, a lot of the time, some of them are a little too friendly to the other countries they're spending a lot of time in.
And just saying there's a bit of the cosmopolitanist internationalist streak is quite common and prevalent in foggy bottom.
But you know, uh we're supposed to read this and take from it, as I'm sure many did yesterday, good talented government employees that are in a the particularly unique spot of diplomacy, which is so important.
And look, diplomacy is important.
I'm I'm being a little glib, but uh that they're irreplaceable.
And it's a small number, as I said, the State Department's huge.
Huge place, lots of uh huge, uh lots of embassies and consulates all over the world.
Uh, and I know we're supposed to think of this guy's, it's gonna be a lot of Trump guys hanging out, and they're like, Are you are you the are you the attache from Hong Kong?
Are you are you my POC?
Are you my contact?
Are we having this discussion?
Is this and that's what you're supposed to think.
The reality though came up later, after the story had already happened.
And the reality is that the Trump administration asked for their resignations.
Because in at least one case, we're talking about someone who's a known Hillary Clinton or believed to be a Hillary Clinton partisan.
Uh I think he's been referred to as Hillary Clinton's fixer in the press, and was brought into some of that whole email controversy shit situation.
Um they were told, you know what, your services are no longer needed.
So the Trump team sees a bunch of Hillary partisans who are very tied into the Democrats and their appointees.
They're people that were put in the position, yeah, maybe they served under uh both administrations, a Bush and a Clinton administration or pardon me, a Bush and an Obama administration.
Good heavens, Buck, get it together.
Good heavens, and I sound like uh Teresa May.
I have to listen to what she sounds like, actually, otherwise my Theresa May impression is going to just sound like Mrs. Doubtfire, and I'm totally that's like a microaggression.
You know, she's like, oh, hello, but that's not how she sounds.
I know, I know.
She's uh she's like the modern Thatcher.
I get it.
I know.
We we know.
What am I what am I even saying here?
Oh, yes.
So the Trump administration asked them to get their resignations ready, and they were accepted.
So all the stories about how we were losing this irreplaceable talent that was walking out based upon their immovable principles, and that these are the sorts of federal government employees that we should be particularly sensitive to their needs and their concerns about a Trump administration.
Yeah, that's all not true.
That's not what happened.
They weren't they weren't resigning because Trump is such a monster.
The Trump team came in and said, It's been nice.
See you later.
We'll take your resignations now.
They weren't terminated for cause, but they were told that their services were no longer needed.
You're not gonna see nearly as much coverage of that.
You're not going to see, quote, fueling questions, end quote, about why the press is so incapable of doing a little minimum of fact checking before they run with these things.
But this is tied into the whole fake news anti-Trump narrative that's all over the place, which is you run with the story when it hurts President Trump and the administration, and you run the correction a couple of weeks later on page C seventeen when no one cares, no one's gonna read it, and the damage is already done.
You see, because the other side they play dirty.
Alright, we're gonna talk about some Obamacare.
Stay with me.
Oh yes.
Buck is here on the EIB.
I cannot believe we're already in the third hour of the show today.
It's crazy.
This is a whirlwind, a whirlwind.
A whirlwind, a whirlwind, Buck.
Annunciate, annunciate young man.
Uh Rosie in Texas, you are on the Rush Limbaugh Show, you're speaking to Buck.
Hello.
Um, the reason of my phone call is I'm really, really frustrated with the Democrats saying that all Hispanics are offended and all all Hispanics are complaining and things of this nature.
I am Hispanic.
I am all for all the items that um President Donald Trump is um has signed.
Um I feel that Hispanics should not fear as long as they are hard workers.
Race does not matter here.
The lazy asses are the ones that are complaining because they're not gonna get everything for free the way they're used to.
Well, when you when you talk about the attitude of Democrats toward uh Hispanics and Latinos in this country, Rosie, uh you you highlight a very important point, which is that they treat Hispanics and Latinos as a monolith.
They want to balkanize the American people to break them up into identity politics groups, and they expect Hispanics and Latinos to fall in line behind big government Democrat policies or else.
You sort of see this with the women's march in D.C., where if you're not with the pro-choice movement, then you're no longer apparently a woman.
And with the Democrats, if you're not a Hispanic who votes Democrat and believes that government has to be there for you, providing for you and doing many different things for you, including legalizing illegals from within the Hispanic community, then it's almost like they they take away one's Hispanicness.
Exactly.
No, I totally agree.
I think they just throw the races to try to irritate people and try to gain people on their side instead of you you know, bringing unity to this country.
That's what we need.
Get over it.
You know, you are lost.
You know, let's jump on the wagon to try to make America better.
Oh yeah, I would I love this idea of making America better.
You could even say making America great again.
Oh snap.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I know.
Womp womp.
So I'm sorry about that, Rose.
Thank you for being kind for my womp womp over there.
That was very sweet of you.
Rosie in Texas, great to talk to you.
Thank you so much for calling in.
I appreciate it.
Uh I know.
They're not all, you know, Mr. Snerley and Mike, they're not all winners.
You know, sometimes I sometimes I have a Yeah, I know.
I know.
It happens.
I'm not the good news is I'm not a comedian.
What can I say?
Uh Johnny in uh Grand Prairie, Texas.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh Show, you're speaking to Buck.
Johnny.
Hello.
Do we where's Johnny?
Here's where's your up, let's go to line one.
Jay in New York City.
What's up, Jay?
Yeah, hey, how are you doing?
Uh I just uh wanted to raise a point.
I just listen to your show.
How come it is that the press can come up with all these lies about Trump and then they have to when they retract it, they uh they put it, they hide it on page C A team and and the Times.
Can't uh someone make it so that they have to put it on the front page with the headline, you know, we lied.
Well, it's an you it's an excellent question, and and I do have the answer for you is that the major newspapers and media organizations in this country are and have been for a long time engaged in advocacy journalism.
And so running a story that creates a certain narrative or uh creates the belief in a certain set of facts, uh that one if you can do that, uh undoing it is uh Largely irrelevant to them because they want to push in a certain direction.
I mean, you see this with some of the big stories that have been uh debunked recently from major papers, whether it was a Washington Post piece that said that there were all these fake news Russian based sites that had this huge impact on the election.
It was all the the data set they were using was an anonymous web uh web based uh analytic organization that no one's ever heard of that no one knows anything about and that doesn't even stand behind the data.
There was the other hacking, because we were all in hack hysteria for a while, the hacking story out of Vermont where they had tr where Russian hackers had access to power grid.
Actually, it was some malware on a laptop that wasn't even wasn't even uh I believe it wasn't even internet connected.
So that was a story that was a front page headline, oh, they had so much attention on it, and then it went away.
And there are others as well.
I mean, the Martin Luther King bust being removed from the Oval Office.
That could have required and that was a time a time magazine reporter.
That would have required all of three seconds to verify whether that was true or not.
He was in the Oval Office, but decided to tweet out that the MLK bus with all the implications of what that would mean, right?
I mean uh uh America's most revered uh African American figure, civil rights hero, pulling that bust out of the Oval Office, just like there was the there was the uh Churchill bust, but that's not nearly as sensitive as pulling the MLK bus out of the Oval Office, and put that out there, and it was retweeted thousands and thousands of times, and I'm sure there are still people who believe that, and yet the left wants to lecture us on fake news.
When instance after instance of fake news or false news, we can make that distinction, I guess, because fake they say is intentionally wrong from the start.
But there's also a recklessness that we see with these stories.
There is an inability or an unwillingness to check basic facts.
They throw journalism out the window.
It doesn't matter anymore because there's an objective and they can achieve the objective without checking on the facts, and they know that their credibility among their own readers isn't really going to be damaged as long as they are damaging Trump in the process.
So at some point you have to look at this and say to yourself, well, if they're running false news story after false news story that requires an enormous correction that's really a retraction, but they don't like to call it that, they'll call it a correction.
When you correct the underlying premise of an entire story, that's really a retraction.
But when you see the trajectory of all these things, very clear that it's they run out with the story, they don't check the facts, they don't care because it hurts the administration.
It's never the opposite direction.
Tell me the story, Jay.
Tell me the story from the New York Times, the Washington Post, where they've had to say, whoa, whoa, we were we were totally wrong.
Um Donald Trump is not uh amazing and kind like Mother Teresa, and we that that doesn't happen somehow, but the other stuff always happens.
Well, that's thanks for that.
I uh I just I think the media really is just becoming completely dishonest, and I have no interest in the right.
I think they've been dishonest for a long time.
I just think they've exposed themselves.
Thank you for calling in Jay.
They did two things simultaneously this last election cycle, and this is this is what is different now.
We've all known about the media bias, we've known about the drive-by's for a long time.
Nothing new there.
Eighty or ninety percent of journalists of the country are Democrat, whether far left or center left.
And what's changed here, well, there are a couple things really.
One is they prostrated themselves, they bowed down before the golden throne of Hillary Clinton, and it was just unseemly and gross.
And in that with that same fervor, they tried to tear down the Trump candidacy and do everything in their power to malign and destroy not just him but everybody around him, and to make Trump voters feel bad about themselves.
That was a part of the process as well.
They did those two things, and also we saw that their power was not enough in this case to get the desired outcome.
And the old tricks, the old ploys, the things that they use against Republicans, Mitt Romney's binders full of women, oh, he had a dog on the roof of his car at one point in a crate or something.
Those old games that they've, you know, Mitt Romney likes to give people cancer.
These are the things that they did to defeat Mitt Romney back in 2012, and it worked.
That doesn't that game doesn't work against Trump.
So they have to reevaluate.
They have to look at a guy who will meet with union leaders and union leaders, and this is a Republican and union leaders are like, we can we should talk to this guy.
We've got something, we've got something to work through here.
Democrats are in a little bit of a freak out mode over that, as they should be.
I'm talking to myself now.
Or I guess I'm talking to myself and millions of rush listeners across the country, so that's cool.
That's kind of a fun thing that happens.
That's nice.
I got that going for me, which is nice.
Uh Buck in for Rush.
I promise you we talk a little about Obamacare, and I will, but you gotta stay with me through this break, and then we will hit it.
You're right back.
Buck Sexton here in for Rush.
Time is running thin here on the uh EIV.
We don't have too much more time today, but we have a very important little item to hit hat tip drudge report for making it the main header.
Behind closed doors, Republican lawmakers fret about how to repeal Obamacare.
Quite a headline.
It makes it sound like Republicans are sitting around like, oh my gosh, what are we gonna do?
So scared.
How could we repeal Obamacare?
I'm sure they're having discussions and there are concerns, but fretting about it.
Ooh, very ooh, fret.
Freding is is what I did when I was a kid, and it was dark outside, and I thought I heard like a, you know, a scary owl or a howling wolf or something.
This would be really weird because I grew up in New York City, so I didn't hear either of those things, but you know what I mean.
Uh fretting is a it is a state of mind that I I don't think the Republican lawmakers are necessarily in about repealing Obamacare.
But more importantly, so this was a meeting be you're seeing a lot of this.
A lot of this with reporting on the Trump administration in its early days, leaks that must come from close sources to the administration, and yet I feel like we could all guess that it's very unlikely any Trump confidant would be like, hey, uh New York Times, Washington Post.
Well, let's have a sit down.
Let's have a chat.
I want to leak some damaging information about the Trump administration to you.
So either they're playing a little fast and loose with their sourcing on some of this stuff, or I don't know.
Is there already a political turncoat inside the Trump team?
I don't think so.
Strike me as very unlikely, but they keep getting these hit pieces.
They get information from the top echelon, and then they use it to run some kind of a story that looks bad for the Trump squad for President Trump and his top aides.
Um but with the Republican Congress, we see the same thing here.
I would like to know where this recording, which came via, I'm trying to give you the sourcing on this.
These are closed sessions at the Republican policy retreat in Philadelphia, and the Washington Post got these recordings from an anonymous email source.
So someone infiltrated or had access to, infiltrated makes it sound like they snuck in there and they weren't supposed to be there.
I'm assuming they probably had right to be there in some capacity.
Somebody got into the Republican retreat.
Trump spoke there, gave a good speech, and then recorded these GOP members who were talking about some of the complexities of getting rid of Obamacare.
Quoted here in the, quoting from the piece, Senators and House members expressed a range of concerns about the task ahead, how to prepare a replacement plan that can be ready to launch at the time of repeal, how to avoid deep damage to the health insurance market, how to keep premiums affordable for middle class families, even how to avoid the political consequences of defending planned parenthood.
Okay.
End quote.
The story for weeks has been that Republicans have no plan.
That's what we were I think.
Others have been saying it too.
Probably Pelosi, although who cares what Pelosi says.
Well, I guess I do, because I just talked about her.
But they've been saying Republicans don't have a plan, so they can't repeal and replace because they don't they don't even know what they're doing with the repeal or the replace.
Well, here we see a story that's supposed to make it seem like Republicans are in dis uh have dissent here and don't really know what to do, and they're overwhelmed by all the complexities of repealing Obamacare.
Meanwhile, I'm sure if I got to listen to the recordings, they're probably just figuring out the steps of the plan.
So you're gonna see the media very quickly go from they have no plan to they're not sure about the plan to the plan is extremist and crazy.
That's what's going to happen.
It's good, it's it's gone from they're so irresponsible, uh, Obamacare has given insurance coverage to twenty million Americans.
I think thirteen or fourteen million of them.
My numbers might be a little off, but it's mostly Medicaid.
And those who have to get individual plans are overwhelmingly hate them and pay way too much money for them and get very little value.
But it was that they had no plan and they're irresponsible.
And how could they get rid of this wonderful thing that Obama did?
And then it became well, or it's becoming, I should say, based on this Washington Post report.
Oh, well, they're concerned about the different aspects of the Yeah, it's a complex thing.
Shouldn't they be talking about this at the Republican retreat?
They're airing out the issues that will come up as they repeal this.
But you see how it's framed.
The piece is framed.
Behind closed doors, Republican lawmakers fret, as in they're scared, as in, oh, what are we going to do?
Obamacare.
They're appealing to a certain audience, but they're also establishing a narrative.
The narrative is that Republicans are out of their depth on this, they don't know what they're doing, they're making mistakes.
And I'm just preparing all of you listening.
Look for this in the weeks ahead, because as they take action to repeal Obamacare, as they do this piece by piece, there will be a shift in narrative, a shift in coverage you see from the major newspapers and media and uh news networks from they don't have a plan to they haven't really thought the plan through to the plan is terrible and they're destroying America and babies and grandmas are going to die because this in the streets.
That's what's going to happen.
And what we'll supposed to forget all about the whole, well, they don't even have a plan.
Oh no.
I have a feeling they're gonna have a plan.
And they're going to be acting on it in the weeks and months ahead.
And in a sense, if you want to talk about repealing a president's legacy, it is called Obamacare.
He embraced that.
It is the way we all refer to it.
He rammed it through without a single I mean, and with the Congress, obviously, but ram it through without a single Republican vote.
And if this thing goes, and we talked to Kim Strassel at the journal before about the ways they can peel back the regulations.
If the regulations go, if the executive orders on immigration and some other issues go, other than being way too friendly to Cuba and Iran and annoying our allies, most specifically Israel, but others as well, and spending us into oblivion with the $20 trillion of debt.
What really does Obama leave behind after eight years of his presidency?
It is a worthwhile question to ask.
Buck in for Rush, back to close it out in just a minute.
Buck Sexton here in For Rush today, closing it out on the EIB.
Gotta say a good week for the Trump administration.
So overall, a lot of things moving in the right direction, and I am dare I say, cautiously optimistic.
Certainly things are off to a pretty positive start.
And I was a bit uh skeptical early on in the primary.
I think I could say that.
So I'm looking forward to seeing how this administration continues to play out, and hopefully we'll see more positive action coming from them.
I think it is likely that we will.
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