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Feb. 9, 2017 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:08
February 9, 2017, Thursday, Hour #2
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I'd say folks, I'm I'm struggling here to maintain my composure.
CNN actually just had a headline up.
Jeff Sessions soon to arrive at his Department of Justice office.
They're quaking in fear.
They had a panel.
They had two people assembled to discuss Jeff Sessions arriving at work.
They're literally panicked and in fear.
Oh my God, Jeff Sessions is going to get to his office soon.
What then?
You mean he's really going to be attorney general?
You mean he's really going to do stuff?
Oh no!
Greetings and welcome back, folks.
Great to have you, Rush Limbaugh behind the golden EIB microphone.
At 800-282-288-2, the email address L Rushbow at EIBNet.us.
Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, the senator, just one more thing on this.
He's out there asking questions of Gorsuch, and Gorsuch doesn't say anything, and it gets characterized as Gorsuch agreeing.
And here's an example from the well, it's going to scroll out of view if somebody doesn't stop real soon.
It's talking to the Hill.com.
And I said to him, this is this is this is uh Blumenthal.
I said to him, if a litigant before your court, and the president of the United States is in fact a litigant right now in the immigration ban cases.
I asked Judge Gorsuch, would you hold him in contempt of court?
Blumenthal said, adding that Gorsuch did not have a response to that comment.
Well, why didn't Blumenthal claim that Gorsuch didn't disagree with him on that point too?
After all, he didn't, he didn't say anything.
And yet everybody's out reporting here that Gorsuch is out trashing Trump for what he said about Judge Robart.
And it look, to the extent that Gorsuch is behaving the way he is, he's just he's he's giving the left less and less reason to oppose him.
Less and less and in a public sense, I mean, with with this stuff being reported, you know, Trump doesn't care.
Everybody thinks Trump's ego is so fragile that if Gorsuch actually would go out there and say that I am very disheartened by what President Trump is doing.
There are people that think Trump would be so mad that he would call Gorsuch and fire him before he even got the Supreme Court.
They they literally believe this.
There are some people who literally believe that Trump would sabotage himself in that way.
That would not happen, but they want people to believe it.
The idea that they are now reporting that Gorsuch is of a frame of mind that Trump's criticism of the judge is disheartening.
All that's gonna do is help Gorsuch in the immediate battle ahead, and that is his confirmation.
And that's the objective here.
Get confirmed, and then after that, none of this matters, because he's on the court for as long as he wants to stay.
It's a lifetime appointment.
So I I I watch all this, and it just it falls into the same category.
You have a bunch of establishment types who are continuing to go after Trump and his administration and everything he does in the way Republicans have always been attacked, sometimes successfully, but it doesn't apply to Trump.
It just doesn't work, and they still haven't been able to get it through their heads that there's an entirely different animal in town and in Washington, and they the the real impetus here, or the real thing to know is they still don't understand who elected Trump.
And this is to me fascinating.
I mean, these are people, you look at the media and you look at the Democrats, it's their business.
I mean, they have to get ratings in one sense, votes in another.
It's their business to understand, in one case, audience, and in the next case, voters.
And in both instances, the media and the Democrats have contempt for a majority of Americans voted for Donald Trump.
And so there is no effort made to reach out to Them, there's no effort made to try to understand who they are.
There's no real effort made to understand why they voted for Trump.
There isn't any effort made to understand why they give Trump such a wide birth.
They don't care to learn any of this.
They just condemn it as it happens, and they think that their condemnation will eventually persuade people to leave Trump or to abandon Trump or to lose their vigorous support for Trump.
That's not going to happen.
Only Trump can do that.
It was the same way during the campaign.
As hard as people were trying to separate Trump from his voters, they weren't going to be able to do it.
And you know why?
It's the same old saw.
The media didn't make Trump.
And the Republican Party didn't make Trump.
Trump made Trump.
Now, if the media happens to make you, by that I mean if you are who you are because the media has sung your praises and done a series of soft soap profiles, if the media treats you as a godlike figure, and that's why you're famous, then the media can destroy you the next day if they want to.
All they have to do is change the way they cover you.
And if the Republican Party is responsible for your success, let's say you're a newly elected freshman from Battle Creek, and you want to rise the ladder of success in the House of Representatives, and the Republican Party helps you do that, and then you go against the leadership, they can take everything away from you that they gave you and destroy your political future.
But if you get there on your own, as Trump has, the media can try all they want, and they're not going to be able to separate Trump's voters from Trump.
And the Republican Party is not going to be able to do that either.
Only Trump can.
But even with all that, you would think CNN, I mean, they clearly want to have an audience.
Look at Hollywood.
They clearly want to have an audience.
They want to have box office, but Hollywood's losing box office, ESPN's losing subscribers.
CNN, for all that people talk about it, doesn't really have an audience, particularly when you compare it to the Fox News audience.
I mean, they're on and all the airports.
They're in places where it appears they have a sizable audience, but if you look at the actual levers, they don't.
And they hold in contempt the people who represent an opportunity to grow the audience.
Hollywood holds in contempt the people who represent the opportunity to increase box office sales.
And the Democrat Party holds in contempt now white working class voters.
They abandoned them in November of 2011, and instead the Democrat Party is trying to get where it wants to go on this belief that the white majority is soon not going to be a white majority.
It's going to be the minority.
And so the Democrats have already thrown in with who they think the combination next majority is going to be, a coalition of a bunch of different minorities now.
The problem is the white majority is still the majority.
There's still 77 percent of the country.
There's still a long time to go before the white majority isn't the majority anymore.
But they're already acting like the white majority's days are over and done with.
And they hold them in contempt at the same time.
And so all of this that you see with Gorsuch supposedly distasteful about what Trump is saying, it's all it all comes under the umbrella that since they find Trump objectionable, and since they find Trump unacceptable, since they find Trump embarrassing, that everybody who matters does too.
And that's simply not the case.
A majority of Americans, even if there are strains of people that find things that Trump does unsettling, they're not ready to abandon him yet.
Because overriding all of this is policy.
And I'm going to tell you what the number one policy continues to be, and this is where everybody on this executive order is blowing it and missing it.
The number one issue, and you're never going to have this represented honestly because the people that report on it and the Democrat Party don't agree with it and don't believe it, but the number one issue is immigration.
Immigration still to this day represents the greatest threat to this country remaining what it is.
That has not changed.
Donald Trump is the only person in the American political spectrum who's on record as wanting to change it, to stop it, to redirect it.
And as such, his support is unwavering.
And this executive order is not redounding negatively to him, much as the drive-bys would love you to believe that it is, and much as the Democrats would hope that it is, and much as Judge Robart would think he's actually going to be able to destroy Trump's efforts here.
The simple fact of the matter is people support, and there's polling data even now to back this up, that people support Trump's efforts here in this executive order, and that they're not happy with Judge Robart, and that are not happy with the judiciary here that's piling on, because it represents illegal immigration and wanton refugees coming into the country unvetted represents it's it's kind of like this, folks.
It's like climate change has everything in it that the left wants and loves in one issue.
Everything or the vast majority of everything they need to get where they want is in that issue.
Climate change as an issue, and then the supposed things necessary to deal with it is a cornucopia.
It's a picnic basket of goodies.
Immigration represents much the same thing to people that do not like America, to people that have a problem with America, to people who think America is unjust and immoral from the days of our founding, to the people who think America is the problem in the world, to people who think that America is why there's poverty in the world because we've stolen so many other countries' resources, or what have you.
Immigration.
Open borders is the simplest, fastest way to cut this country down.
Immigration, open borders, unvetted, mass illegal immigration is the fastest way to end America as founded.
If we're going to let endless numbers of people in, and we're not going to assimilate them, and we're not going to stand for what's always been a distinct American culture.
And the people that voted for Donald Trump know this.
They are frightened by it, and they can clearly see that the Democrats don't care.
In fact, the Democrats seem to support that, and their friends in the judiciary seem to support that policy of open borders and let anybody in on the basis that we owe it to the world to let everybody have some of our prosperity because it's not fair that we are the only ones that have such prosperity.
We must share it because we've destroyed it for so many others.
And Trump ran on this notion of stopping this illegal immigration and re-king kindling some assimilation, and he's the only one who did.
Prominently.
And now that the Democrats and the media are aligned against him in this area, and now apparently a couple judges, Trump's supporters are rallying to him even more.
May not be reported in polling data because the drive-byers don't want to believe it.
They want to believe they're successfully driving a wedge between Trump supporters and Trump.
And they think they can do it with all these protests.
All these protests show that people are unhappy with Trump.
And Elizabeth Warren going bat nuts on the Senate floor, that shows people unhappy with Trump.
And the NAALCP, the congressional black Caucasians marching on the Senate to oppose sessions.
That shows Americans are unhappy with Trump.
And all of these people opposing the border control who are trying to deport illegal aliens.
That shows people are unhappy with Trump.
The whole point of everything in the news that you see, everything is designed to make you think that the country regrets electing Trump, that they're unhappy with Trump, that they don't support anything Trump is doing.
But the people that voted for Trump are not buying it.
They're not of that frame of mind.
And they are still every much every bit behind him as they were.
Where is this Bill Crystal story?
You know what?
I'm going to find it, take a break.
I don't know what to make of this crystal story.
I had it here prominently.
He retired from the weekly standard and he went and made a was it was it Brookings AEI?
Where did he where did he uh I'll find it during the break.
I'm not so sure he meant this, but there are others.
Well, I mean he might have been facetious, he might have been, I'm not sure.
But what he basically said was that he agrees with John Adams that after two or three generations of successful capitalism in our society, what you end up with is so much prosperity that people get lazy and they sit around and they don't work anymore and they've learned to pay themselves benefits, and that you need immigration.
You need people who are poor from other parts of the country who want to get wealthy, who want to get rich, who want to move ahead in life in order to keep the country moving, because the white majority gets fat, dumb, happy, and lazy.
There are people, and even on our side who believe that.
Some of the open borders people do believe that.
Let me find it.
I'll be back here in just a second.
Okay, apparently Bill Crystal's still the editor at the Weekly Standard.
I thought he retired from something.
I thought I were read something not longly retired, maybe, maybe regular to writing, or maybe I read it about somebody else.
Anyway, he was uh he was at the American Enterprise Institute on Tuesday in a seminar with Charles Murray.
Charles Murray has a new book called Coming Apart.
Well, it's not a new book, it's a book called Coming Apart.
And it focuses on the cultural separation between the wealthiest and most educated white Americans and the poorest and least educated white Americans.
It's about the white majority, but the divisions within the white majority based on economic lines, uh, if you will.
And Crystal, at the seminar with Charles Murray said, Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white working class, don't you want to get new Americans in?
Which, of course, is a provocative question.
He says to Murray, well, look, if if things are that bad with the white working class, if they're that poor and if they are that shall we say, stranged, wouldn't you want to get some new Americans in?
And before delving into the theory about replacing the white working class, Crystal said that he hopes, quote, this thing isn't being videotaped or ever shown anywhere.
Whatever tiny pathetic future I have is going to totally collapse.
He said you can make a case that America has been great because every dash, I think John Adams said this.
Basically, if you're in a free society, a capitalist society, after two or three generations of hard work, everybody becomes kind of decadent, lazy, spoiled, whatever.
And then luckily you have these waves of people coming in from Italy, from Ireland, Russia, and New Mexico, now Mexico, who really want to work hard, really want to succeed, really want their kids to live better lives than they did.
And they aren't sort of clipping coupons or hoping they can hang on and meanwhile grow up as spoiled kids and so forth.
In that respect, I don't know how this moment is that different from the earliest uh the early 20th century.
Well, uh the debate is on over whether Bill Crystal was serious here, whether he's being facetious, whether he was uh being sarcastic to be funny to make a point.
Well, but I think you have to look at Bill Crystal, if you put yourself in his shoes, he's not winning much.
Hated Trump, Trump wins.
Uh Trump's not conservative as these people think they are conservative, Trump wins.
Uh Bill might be part of that group that sees everything they spent their life working for going down the tubes here.
So being bitter, suspicious, comical, what might fit in that circumstance.
I d I don't want to characterize it because I don't know.
When I when I saw the story, I I I've never heard Crystal say anything like this.
That doesn't mean I know people that do think this way.
I know Republican elites who think this way, but I've never heard Bill Crystal say anything like this.
So it basically says that in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Americans had got fat dumb and happy because we had had a post-Civil War boom and so forth.
And uh we we had no income tax, and so the the uh robber barons and their families were getting wealthy and wealthier and well, they're clipping coupons and not working and then future gender not working, and we needed people to come in and replace them, start doing work, and hence we had massive immigration from Ireland from Italy, and we shut it down in 1921 so that all those people could assimilate.
But that's the difference.
I mean, if you really want to compare immigration from the from uh Europe, southern Europe and Western Europe.
In the late 1800s to the early 1900s to today, there's a stark difference, and that is that many, not all, but many of the immigrants, the illegal immigrants are not making any effort to assimilate and become quote unquote Americans, what all of them did in that era.
Okay, back to the phone swinging.
Nope, uh not back.
We haven't been yet.
We're gonna start on the phones here, give Wendy something to do in there.
Here is Rob in Detroit.
Glad you called, sir, and I appreciate your patience in holding on.
How are you?
Good uh, sir.
Ditto's rush.
You know, I just wanted to state the obvious.
The judiciary is only a co-equal branch of government.
We can call the president an ass.
We can call congressmen and senators an ass.
Why can't we call judges an ass?
Well, because judges are supposedly not political.
Judges are an independent branch, and they're supposed to be immune from the political process, immune from political pressures.
They serve for life, and they were given lifetime appointments precisely so they would not have to campaign for re-elections, they would be immune from the daily Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times.
That's why traditionally you don't attack the judges.
But we know that's not true, Rush.
We know they are political.
Uh well, I'm just telling you what the what the what the uh conventional wisdom has always been about not attacking.
I'm not I'm not arguing that they're independent.
They're a bunch of pol judges have become political hacks way too many times here.
All right.
Well, I just I think we should call a spade a spade, and uh I think you should definitely call this cat out this robot cat and uh Trump should call him out every chance he gets.
That's my point.
As a Trump supporter, everything's fine.
Robart's an ass say so.
Quote, call her Rush Limbaugh program 133 on February 9th, 2017.
Robart's an ass say so.
Caller, Trump caller, Trump supporter.
That's exactly my point.
This is what Trump supporters think.
And Robart did not rule on the law.
Go with it, read what Robart said.
Read his ruling.
You won't find any legal analysis, you won't find any uh discovery that Trump's executive order violates the Constitution.
You'll find this guy, well, I don't know how many people from these seven countries have committed terrorism acts.
I don't think any.
I don't think there have been any.
Well, fine.
That's not a legal basis to make a ruling.
Anyway, he's wrong about that, too.
There have been 24 different instances of people uh from those seven countries who have been apprehended, uh suspected, what have you.
But it's an interesting subject, this business of not criticizing judges.
Let me give you a real world example.
Trump has gone after the judges on the Ninth Circuit, after the oral argument, which he either listened to or aides listened to and reported to him, because they They they streamed it.
They made it a bit.
You know, they took oral arguments on the phone.
I mean, the Ninth Circuit's out in San Francisco and the litigants were in the state of Washington and Washington, D.C., so they're on the phone doing this, and they streamed it.
And after Trump heard it, he tweets out.
I'm not saying they're biased, but so political, wrong.
That was his tweet.
So political, bad, whatever.
So political.
And they're, and and that's his assessment.
Now, the one one reaction to that was, Mr. President, your force in their hand, you can't openly criticize them.
Because now, if they find for you, it makes it look like they buckled to you.
And they don't want that.
So, Mr. President, you're almost forcing them to rule against you just to show their independence.
That's what some people said.
Mr. President, just don't say anything.
Just let the ruling happen and then go after them if you want to, but don't characterize them beforehand because you're you're you're really limiting, because they're human beings.
And you know, judges, folks, I mean, I have a family of them.
They tell the the good ones take it very seriously.
And they do not want anybody to think that their opinions can in any way be quote unquote purchased or influenced or secured.
So if you start attacking them before, now I know, I know look, I can know what you're saying, but rush people criticize the Supreme Court before their rulings all the time.
I know there's all kinds of political pressure.
I know, I know, but this is a specific ruling that is imminent, like within days, and it's not a Supreme Court decision that's months and months away.
The bottom line is we have always been told that the Supreme Court in this case does not follow elections, meaning they pay no attention to public opinion.
This is what we're told.
But I've always had a problem with that because they're human beings.
They're human beings, and some of them want to be publicly respected.
Some of them I don't look at the four justices on the Supreme Court, that it doesn't matter.
Whatever the Democrat Party agenda is, that's their vote, and they are in lockstep.
And to say that they are deciding these cases on the merits of the law, you can blow holes through that with these four.
Ginsburg, Breyer, uh Sotho Meyer Orr, and Kagan, and before that their replacements.
Whatever the case is, if the Democrat Party agenda is attached to it, you know what they're going to do.
And no amount of criticizing them changes it beforehand or afterwards.
I'm not opposed to criticizing judges.
I don't think they're gods.
I don't think they're their branch of governments more special than any other.
In fact, I would argue that the Supreme Court's become something it was never intended to be.
Who who set the Supreme Court?
Nine people in black robes as the final authority on any issue.
They did exactly right.
That's exactly right.
Marbury versus Madison, when the Supreme Court decided, you know what, we're gonna sit here and say what's constitutional or what isn't.
We just decided that we're gonna do that.
And so precedent being inviolable, inviolable, this is what has evolved.
And it's always bothered me because even low information people now look at the Supreme Court that way, as the final authority.
Yes, Congress, if if the Congress wanted the Supreme Court to have 13 seats, they could do it.
Congress is in Congress's role, constitutional, is the setup, not the operation of, obviously, I mean, but the the establishment of the judicial system, uh setting up the districts, the appellate districts, the state districts, and so forth.
Uh well, the the federal districts within the straight in the states.
Congress does all that, yes.
Um if they wanted to leave it at eight seats, they could.
If they wanted to break up the Ninth Circuit, they could.
If they wanted to, you know, make it two circuits, you know, Northern California being one, put all the county libs in that one, and then put your Orange County contingency in the in the in the other one.
Yes, to answer your question, they could.
But every every since since this has evolved, it becomes almost an unstated part in every bit of legislation.
Look at campaign finance.
I'll tell you how this manifests itself.
Campaign finance laws, something we owe to Senator McCain.
Campaign finance, which is violation of free speech, because speech is money.
Now, the left hates that, but it is.
For people who do not have a microphone, for people who do not have a congressional seat or an elective seat, money becomes the proxy for their speech.
If they can't be heard by going out on the street and telling people what they think, they could buy commercials on TV and radio to get their word out.
That's free speech.
Money is speech because money becomes a proxy for speech.
While McCain and others in Congress didn't like it.
The incumbents were all in favor of campaign finance reform because it was basically campaign finance reform was the Incumbency Never Loses Act.
Campaign finance reform made it harder and harder and harder for challengers to compete with incumbents.
By putting limits on how much money and where it could come from.
And that's what was big about Citizens United because Citizens United, this Supreme Court, made it possible for corporations, which of course aren't people, as we've heard, to participate in the political process by making donations.
The left hates it.
They despise it because it takes away an advantage.
It's really why they hate DeVos, too.
The teachers'union is some of the biggest source of campaign money.
And, of course, the intellectual hold they have over the inculcation of young minds.
But I digress.
Everybody knew that campaign finance reform, as written, was unconstitutional, and it should not have passed.
And it did, and it came before George W. Bush to sign it.
Everybody said, veto it, Mr. President, veto it.
He said, No, no, I'll leave it up to the court.
Well, the court will never find this constitutional.
Well, the problem is they did.
So what happens?
Legislation gets written that is questionably constitutional, or is inarguably political in some way.
And it's written in such a way as to pass constitutional muster because that's where it's going to end up being finally judged as legal or not.
And it affects the way things happen, the way things are done, written, and it also encourages cowardice at various levels of the legislative branch, because they can defer.
Well, no, no, no.
Well, the court will take care of this.
But nobody can ever predict which way the court is going to go on anything.
And campaign finance reform, everybody thought that they would find it unconstitutional.
Obamacare.
Everybody thought this idea that the federal government was mandating that every American buy a product, i.e.
health insurance, that's clearly unconstitutional.
It's in the Fourth Amendment, you cannot make the American people buy a product.
You can recommend it, like Kelly Conway recommending Ivanka Trump fashions, but you cannot, you cannot make somebody do it.
And that was clearly unconstitutional.
And in the original, when we had the reading for Obamacare, and Judge Roberts, Supreme Court, the chief justice, if you remember that day, the first 30 seconds when people got their hands on the decision, the first 30, then the word unconstitutional was in there.
Mandate was unconstitutional.
And I remember the original port reports on the Supreme Court decision on Obamacare, media and everybody flashing the word, they found it unconstitutional.
They found it unconstitutional except after people kept reading, they found out that Roberts himself rewrote some of it in the form of re-analyzing some of it and turned the mandate into a tax.
Instead of saying that people were mandated to buy health insurance.
Chief Justice Roberts essentially interpreted it as the law requiring people to be or uh the government having the legal ability to tax people in order to provide health care for everybody.
And so what was unconstitutional became constitutional because of the reworking of the legislation by the Supreme Court.
So these arguments have been going on for the longest, longest time.
And it's all rooted today in whether or not we should be able to publicly condemn judges or not.
And it just depends.
You know, when Obama criticizes the court to their face, State of the Union for Citizens United, he's applauded.
It's a gutsy move.
It was very courageous, and the president standing firm on one of his beliefs.
When Trump sends out a tweet about Robert, no, no, no, no.
You can't do that.
Our Republic was kidding in a balance anyway.
We're hanging by a thread, and then you go out and do that.
So it just depends on who does it.
And then who's sitting in judgment of all of it.
And we go back to the phones.
This is uh Melissa in Peoria, Illinois.
Welcome to the EIB network.
Hi.
Hi, thank you for taking my call.
Yes, ma'am.
Um a thought that I've had in the past um kind of came up again yesterday when you made a comment about the Harvard study and about the millennials living at home and unemployed.
Um it kind of ties into what you're saying today, and you're talking about Americans being lazy and wait a minute.
That is not me.
Right.
Okay.
You are correct on that.
Um talking about immigrants replacing American workers, what I'm worried about is um when Trump creates all these jobs for us, and I'm confident that he will, um, millennials not wanting to work.
Okay, I'm having a um, I'm trying to remember what the details of that harbor.
I remember the story, I just don't remember the stats, the uh the numbers.
Yeah, it was like 96 percent, I think, of millennials uh living at home or unemployed.
I'll have to find this during a brief.
You know, it's my fault.
I should have noticed your call up there long ago and found it and been prepped for you, but I didn't I didn't uh have a chance to look.
Well, I just love how it ties in with what you were just saying about immigrants, because we have immigrants that want to work and are willing to work for wages that I'm worried that the American people don't want to.
Yeah.
I um but but for me to address this, I've got that number 96 percent is not what I remember.
I remember vaguely the the the Harvard study on on millennials, and but I don't remember the specifics of it.
Right.
And I need to have that in front of me, uh, so I have those actual facts and numbers before I can I can make the connection that you're making here.
I guess it's not so much necessarily the statistics, it's just more this uh attitude of entitlement and maybe not wanting to work even when these jobs are created.
Yeah, Melissa, here's what it was.
It was a it was a study out of Berlin, and it was 92 percent of protesters live at home.
Okay, 92 percent of protesters live at home and are unemployed.
And I I said, I'll bet you the numbers are similar here.
It's not millennials, it was protests.
Now, many of the protesters in America are working, they are paid by donations from people like George Soros.
This is an important point to understand.
They're not just rising up in organic indignant rage and anger.
They're being paid and organized, a surprisingly large number of them.
Anyway, I get I get your point.
Trump is working with companies to bring jobs back, reopen plants, creating.
You're worried there aren't enough people that actually want to work in America anymore to fill those jobs.
Versus we do have a segment, a percentage of people immigrating to this country do indeed want to become Americans.
That's why that's called legal immigration.
Nobody's opposed to legal immigration.
The whole immigration battle has descended into the left trying to tell people that we are opposed to any immigration, which is not the case, and that we're opposed to it for racist reasons and bigoted reasons.
Everybody's for legal immigration, and in the process of legal immigration, you find out who wants to be here and why and what their abilities are.
Every nation has total authority on who gets in.
And if you look around Europe, uh they're way ahead of us on this.
You have much more support for Trump policy as expressed by polls over there than you would believe, because they're living the disaster.
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