RUSH: This is from RedState.com. Congressman Perriello from Virginia, his office told a caller that the Congressman wants there to be enough votes to pass cap and trade so he can vote no on it. Now, let me explain this to you. He wants his Democrat leadership to be happy at the end of the vote, but he wants to vote no on this ’cause he knows his constituents don’t want it. So he wants cover. And he ended up, according to RedState, deciding to vote yes on the bill, according to his office just now.
Now, the State-Run Media, NBC, is a little concerned over what’s happening up there on this. Mere moments ago on Andrea Mitchell NBC News Reports show, she talked with their Capitol Hill reporter, Mike Viqueira, the State-Run Media. Her question: ‘Harry Reid says it (H.R. 2454) doesn’t have any prospect of passage in the Senate–‘ By the way, the Senate just adjourned without doing anything on health care. They adjourned for the July 4th recess. They’re out of there. I think I saw that on the screen. I looked at it quickly. And health care’s in limbo. But Andrea Mitchell’s quoting dingy Harry saying this cap-and-trade bill doesn’t have any prospect of passing the Senate, ‘So why force these Democrats to take a vote like this when it isn’t going any place?’
VIQUEIRA: Let’s take, for example, a chairman, Nick Rahall, Chairman of the Resources Committee from West Virginia, a coal-producing state, it’s not popular there. He’s voting against Democratic leadership this morning on procedural votes. That is a heresy. And so the people that are on the fence, a lot of freshman from moderate districts look at something like that and say, ‘Why should I walk the plank and vote for this when the prospects of the Senate are unclear and more senior Democrats aren’t even voting for it?’ So it’s a very, very heavy lift for Democratic leadership in the house.
RUSH: It must be. If the State-run Media is reporting it this way, it must be. Normally State-Run Media, oh, slam dunk, they’d be trying to dispirit everybody and make it look like this thing was going to happen. This is a real test for Pelosi, because if it isn’t going anywhere in the Senate the question is 
a good one, ‘Why make these Democrats vote for this?’ And the answer from Pelosi is: ‘Because I said so and I must be supported. I’m your leader.’ She’s been threatening some of these rookies. She’s been threatening some of the freshmen with no re-election campaign money from the campaign committee, finding opponents to run against them and so forth, all kinds of things. They’ve really had to pay off some of the agriculture states. For example, Peterson, the chairman that we talked about earlier of the agricultural committee, he said back on May 6th: I will not support any kind of climate change bill even if you fix this because I don’t trust anybody anymore. I’ve had it. But now he supports it.
They bought him off. He was chairman of the agricultural committee in the House who was leading the opposition to the bill. He’s from the most rural part of Minnesota. He’s a leading blue dog Democrat. They bought him off. I don’t know how. I don’t know what they bought him off with. But a guy who was dead set against it back on May 6th has been turned, but other Democrats aren’t. Some of these freshmen are saying, ‘Why the hell should I if it’s not going anywhere?’ This is a classic illustration of to whom do they answer, you, the voters or Nancy Pelosi. And there’s fear of both. I’ll guarantee you something. A lot of members of Congress who vote for this thing regardless of where it goes have seen their last days in Congress in front of them. They’re going to lose. The vast majority of them are going to lose re-election. And I’ll tell you, James Carville sent a fundraising letter out from maybe the DNC or maybe the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, I don’t remember which, but he’s warning Democrats: You know what, we have the identical set of circumstances that we had in 1994 coming up in 2010. We had a young, popular president and all of a sudden we woke up on election day in ’94 and they picked up 56 seats in the House and eight or nine in the Senate and we were cooked. The same set of circumstances exists, he said.
They’re worried about this. They’re using it as a fundraising thing. And I do believe they’re worried about it. I think that deep in the bowels of this party — and you’ve got to go deep in the bowels to find these people — there are a couple of them, ‘This is just outrageous,’ but they don’t dare publicly walk away from their president and some of this stuff, but they look at this and this is not what they want. They don’t want a future for their kids like this either. They’re worried about this and I don’t think the circumstances in 2010 are going to be identical to ’94 because in ’94 there was a bunch of corruption that people learned about, the House Bank, the House post office, and a couple of other things. The corruption that we have is still like that, but it’s not as present because the State-Run Media doesn’t report Democrat corruption. Charlie Rangel, folks, ought to not be in the House anymore. They’ve just extended the investigation, the ethics committee. He’s out there charging racism over this.
A Republican would have been gone after one allegation of what Rangel did. He has homes and apartments that there’s no way he can support or own on a congressional salary, for example. But, anyway, Carville points out in his letter: Look, the Republicans don’t need eight or nine in the Senate. They just need one or two and they can totally block anything that’s going to happen. So they are worried about that. I’ll guarantee you that there’s some people, Republicans and Democrats alike, who know full well. I’ll tell you what’s happening here on this bill on Capitol Hill is identical to what happened on amnesty. They’re getting flooded, overwhelmed. The phone lines are busy, e-mail accounts are full, blocked out. You can’t get in. They know how you feel about this. It’s just that some of them don’t care how you feel on this. And those are the ones who are going to pay the consequences.
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RUSH: Okay. We need to make a correction. Congressman Goodlatte’s office called us. He’s voting no. He has always said he’s voting no. And he doesn’t understand how somebody in his office told a caller that they were undecided. Because he’s voting no and they were always voting no. So there. I’m glad to get that straight.
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RUSH: From two sources on Capitol Hill I’m hearing — and I fairly trust these people; they’ve been fairly accurate in the past — that the Democrats right now are 12 votes short with 17 undecided. So there’s 17 Democrats undecided. They need 12 of that 17. Those are not good odds, but it’s not over. Trouble is brewing for them on this. This is no time to relax the pressure on this.
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RUSH: From the National Review Online, the Corner, which is the name of their blog, a post by Steve Hayward: ‘Word flying around DC as of 1:30 is that Waxman-Markey is being pulled…’ Now, I haven’t heard that it has been. This is just ‘word flying around.’ This might suggest ‘Pelosi doesn’t have the votes. It may be they need a little more time to buy off one or two more people, or possibly they simply can’t get enough committed votes,’ because all these people are running around saying they’ll vote yes as necessary, but they’ve got to deal for cover with a no vote because they know what their constituents want. So that would complicate the ability of the whip to get an accurate count of how many Democratic votes there actually are. My two sources say that there are 12 votes short with 17 undecided. That would mean they would need 12 of 17 votes today, which is a pretty high percentage.