RUSH: This is Lindsey Graham. He’s on the Meet the Press yesterday. Tim Russert said, “Senator Graham, you said, ‘This is a defining moment for the Republican Party. If our answer to the fastest growing demographic in this country is that we want to make felons of your grandparents and we want to put people in jail who were helping your neighbors and people related to you, then we’re going to suffer mightily.'”
GRAHAM: There’s respect for the law and there’s justice. If the law doesn’t treat a just result, what good is it? I think it’s not fair for a nonviolent offense to result in the upheaval that would be required, a mass deportation or making people felons. If you’re going to make 11 million people felons, you ought to put them in jail. We as a nation have sat on the sidelines and watched this happen. Most Americans know for a long time, many years that Hispanics have been coming across our border, working all throughout our economy, and it’s like Casablanca, now we’re saying, “I can’t believe there’s gambling going on here.”
RUSH: So, folks, it’s your fault. It is your fault because you’ve sat around and you watched all this happen and you didn’t say anything about it. Of course you did back in 1986, resulting in Simpson-Mazzoli. So it’s your fault because you’ve sat there and let this happen. Now all of a sudden it’s gotten too big for you to handle so you want something done about it. Did you also catch him saying that there’s really no reason to enforce the law if the result isn’t justice? If the law doesn’t create a just result, what good is it? Okay, let’s say that we accept that rationale and that kind of thinking. Do we have the freedom in this country just to ignore the law, then?
Screw that. Screw that law as an unjust result. Enforcing that law gives an unjust result. Screw that law! We’re just going to ignore it. Is that not what the US Senate is saying? Now, once some very astute people figure this out and try to apply this thinking to laws they don’t like or laws they think are unjust and they break them, well, I mean it’s an unfair result, how can you enforce a law that’s an unfair result? Who says it’s unfair? I say it’s unfair. It’s not fair I should be caught doing this. This is not how you go about it. You get rid of the law, which may in fact be one of the intentions of this whole Senate bill.
commentary called the Now, here’s an example of See, I Told You So, an example of we set the talking points on this program. How many weeks ago, must have been a month ago now that I did a Morning UpdateLimbaugh Laws, and then I repeated that commentary on this program outside of the morning drive time periods around the country where that commentary runs, and I recited, went through this Limbaugh law business, and I described under the Limbaugh Laws how we would deal with illegal immigration, and basically you can come here but you don’t get to vote; you don’t get to buy prime property.
You can’t protest. You can’t get a meaningful job, basically you don’t exist. I ended by saying, ‘Every law I just read to you is current law in Mexico regarding illegal immigrants.’ Even so, there were news organizations that printed the Limbaugh Laws or referred to them without issuing the final note that I made, meaning: hey, these are the laws of Mexico. Well, guess what we have now, folks? The Associated Press has run a story on the Limbaugh Laws, although they don’t call it the Limbaugh Laws, because they would have to credit me.
‘If Arnold Schwarzenegger had migrated to Mexico instead of the United States, he couldn’t be a governor. If Argentina native Sergio Villanueva, firefighter hero of the Sept. 11 attacks, had moved to Tecate instead of New York, he wouldn’t have been allowed on the force. Even as Mexico presses the United States to grant unrestricted citizenship to millions of undocumented Mexican migrants, its officials at times calling U.S. policies ‘xenophobic,’ Mexico places daunting limitations on anyone born outside its territory.
‘In the United States, only two posts — the presidency and vice presidency — are reserved for the native born. In Mexico, non-natives are banned from those and thousands of other jobs, even if they are legal, naturalized citizens. Foreign-born Mexicans can’t hold seats in either house of the congress. They’re also banned from state legislatures, the Supreme Court and all governorships. Many states ban foreign-born Mexicans from spots on town councils. And Mexico’s Constitution reserves almost all federal posts, and any position in the military and merchant marine, for ‘native-born Mexicans.’
“Recently the Mexican government has gone even further. Since at least 2003, it has encouraged cities to ban non-natives from such local jobs as firefighters, police and judges. Mexico’s Interior Department ? which recommended the bans as part of ‘model’ city statutes it distributed to local officials ? could cite no basis for extending the bans to local posts. After being contacted by The Associated Press about the issue, officials changed the wording in two statutes to delete the ‘native-born’ requirements, although they said the modifications had nothing to do with AP’s inquiries.” 
AP’s inquiries? I wonder where AP got onto this. From the Limbaugh Laws, no question. We’re on the cutting edge on this. “‘These statutes have been under review for some time, and they have, or are about to be, changed,’ said an Interior Department official… But because the ‘model’ statues are fill-in-the-blanks guides for framing local legislation, many cities across Mexico have already enacted such bans. They have done so even though foreigners constitute a tiny percentage of the population and pose little threat to Mexico’s job market.”
So the immigration laws south of the border in Mexico are just punitive. They are restrictive and impossible, and it’s something that we brought to your attention a month ago. The AP is finally on the case. I don’t know what the… I mean, Mexico is not going to change anything about this. I don’t care what AP thinks. Being on the case is not going to change any of this, and there’s a new phenomena, I don’t know how new it is, but there’s another interesting aspect of this that is occurring. “Non-Mexican Hispanics entering the United States illegally are studying up on Mexican history and geography, even learning to whistle the national anthem in order to beat US plans to fly them home.”
Now, wait ’til you hear this: “As part of a proposal to overhaul immigration laws and tighten border security, the president, President Bush, pledged last week to increase deportations of illegal immigrants from countries other than Mexico caught crossing the border. Mexicans who make up most of the almost 1.2 million immigrants that are detained crossing the border illegal in 2005, are given a criminal background check then sent over the frontier, usually within a day. Many often try crossing again immediately. But other so-called other than Mexican or OTM illegal immigrants, mostly from Central America, are increasingly being flown back hundreds of miles to their home countries, which can effectively end their dream of entering the US to earn a better life.”
Awe. So many these Central Americans are pretending to be Mexicans in order to get into the United States. If they come from anywhere else in Central America, we’ll put them on an airplane and send them packing. But if they’re from Mexico? Hey, amigo, come on in! Senator McCain wants to say hi. “‘We heard we could be sent back to our own countries, so many of us are trying to pass ourselves off as Mexicans,’ Honduran Jorge Alberto Carvajal, 38, said as he stood with a group of Central American migrants outside a shelter in this sweltering city south of Laredo, Texas. ‘A lot are learning the Mexican national anthem and the names of the states, and even the names of the state?s governors,’ said Carvajal, a former street trader from the city of San Pedro Sula. Central American migrants say their journey north through Mexico to the border, often riding train box cars, is so tough they are willing to lie to U.S. agents about their nationality to avoid being flown back.”
Man, when you have to pretend to be… Never mind. I better not say it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I want you to listen to this sound bite from Lindsey Graham. He was on Meet the Press yesterday with Tim Russert, and the question was this. Russert said, “Isn’t this a debate over the future of the Republican Party in many ways? I mean, you believe that states like swing states could go Democratic if Hispanic voters are angry at the Republicans?”
GRAHAM: Yes, I believe it’s deeper than that. I believe that we’ve got a fast growing demographic I want to send the right signal to. One, you’re welcome to be part of this party, you’re welcome to be in America under conditions that make sense, and you have to earn your way to become a citizen over 11 years. It’s not about the next election. What Republicans need to get away from is fear of the next election and do things that are good for the country down the road.
RUSH: Oh, man, that’s absurd. He just says it’s about the election. You’re welcome to be a part of this party, and you’re welcome to be an American under conditions that make sense. Then he says it’s not about next election. It’s about doing things that are good for the country down the road. So there you have it. At least with Senator Graham, ladies and gentlemen, it’s out there. It’s honest. This is about a competition with Democrats for these people and their votes. That’s what this is. Thank you, Senator Graham for making the statement, and then couching it in terms, “and this is good for America, too.”
So what’s good for the Republican Party is good for America, and this is a fast-rising demographic. Okay, let’s say that’s the objective, and he says it is. Is this the way to go about it? Do you just tell the existing base of your party, “Screw you for a while. We’ve gotta go out and recruit these new members because we know when it gets down to the pedal meeting the metal, the rubber meeting the road you’re going to be with us, you’re not going to go to the Democrats. You can get mad at us right now all you want, but you know when the going gets tough you’re going to come back to us.”
So in effect it’s take-for-granted-the-support they have now in the base. Don’t worry about that, and then get into competition with this new demographic, the new arrivals. Then after all that, we get into a competition with the Democrats over how to get these people, and what does it say about competing with Democrats? That in order to have a chance — which we don’t, by the way, in this technique, but I’m just speaking hypothetically, philosophically and theoretically. If we have to compete against Democrats by getting this demographic, by saying, “If you steal it, you earn it. If you pay Social Security taxes, if you’re here illegally, we’re going to find a way to forget it.”
The Democrats have made it clear, with Mrs. Clinton, they’re going after the felon vote. The felony provision that is in the House bill, don’t forget, some guys in the House who are livid at the administration because they say that a lot of what’s in their bill is what the White House asked for, and now the White House has abandoned them and has turned its attention over to the Senate on these various compromise proposals. That felon provision was in there apparently because the White House thought it would be cool to have it in there. The Republicans voted at some point when they’re revising the bill to take it out and the Democrats voted to keep it in for the express purpose of being able to run around and say the Republicans want to call all these immigrants here felons.
They’re trying to make big hay out of it, yet at the same time Democrats are making a move on the felon vote. So it’s really instructive when you see Republicans in the Senate particularly who think that there is a competition for votes, how they think they have to go out and get those votes, and it certainly appears to me that they don’t think conservatism will do it. They think stateism, pandering, demagoguery and all that is the way to compete with Democrats. So, in other words, to outdo a Democrat, they’re going to trying to be better Democrats than the Democrats are rather than be conservatives.
Yet what is it that assembled their base, what is it that put together the base that swept them to power in 1994 and some of these — Graham, by the way, was a freshman class member in ’94 I think, and now he’s in the Senate. What does he think put him there? A bunch of Democrat voters in South Carolina? It’s not what put him there. So it’s clear that they think that they can run the risk here of angering you and take you for granted because when the time comes, for whatever reason, you aren’t going to vote Democrat. You’ll vote these guys back into office, and it’s a calculation, sort of like, if I can draw an analogy, the way the Democrats take for granted the black vote. They said, “Ah, they’re not going to vote for Republicans. We’ve taken care of that for the last 50 years. So we can campaign against Nagin. We can campaign against Carl McCall and we can do all that. The blacks are still going to stay with us.”
I guess that’s what Senate Republicans think of their base, based at least on this sound bite.
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