RUSH: All right, Priscilla Owen has been confirmed to the appellate court. She got 56-43. Not everybody voted. It was 56-43. She got two Democrat votes. Robert Byrd and Mary Landrieu voted for Priscilla Owen. I don’t know if there were any Republican crossovers, but one of the things that is interesting to note about this, I know there was a deal, but what I want to do here is point out the intellectual vacancy of the deal. There are 55 Republicans. She gets 56 votes. This is a strict party-line vote other than Landrieu and Byrd. Now, a lot of people sent me e-mails, “Hey, Rush, how come the cloture vote was 81-13 or 81-12, and it’s only 56-43 here for the actual vote?” Two different votes. One vote is to cut off debate, to get 60 or more to stop debate. The other one is the actual vote on the nominee. So some guys on the Democratic Party decided to vote to cut off debate but they didn’t vote for her.
But five of the seven Democrat nitwits in the gang of 14 did vote for Priscilla Owen. Now, the deal says they will filibuster in “extraordinary circumstances,” yet five of the seven here voted against her. It seems to me if she’s not worthy of sitting on a federal appeals court she’s not worthy. Isn’t that extraordinary? Except that they agreed to get these three confirmed. It just goes to show you the intellectual vacancy here. If the Democrats are being truthful that these people are so extreme and so horrible and, folks, it’s been four years. You’ve forgotten some of the things that have been said about Priscilla Owen, but some of these people in the Democratic Party in the Senate were running around and talking how this would be the end of the country if she got confirmed.
Some of the things about her have just been outrageously — well, just simply unfair. They’ve been libelous and slanderous in any other circumstance, and yet, you know, she ends up getting confirmed, and two of the seven — maybe the way to put it is two of the seven voted for her. I’m sure that the reason two of the seven did was to give her cover, to give themselves cover, to give the seven nitwits on the Democrat side of the 14 some cover, Landrieu and Byrd ended up voting for her. But it just shows how absurd I think all of this is. If they’re going to say she’s unfit, then they should all have hung together and say that she’s unfit. “But, Rush, they wanted to move the process along.” I know that’s what they want you to believe. I’m just trying to illustrate how absurd all this is, deal and everything else. There’s something else that concerns me even more.
I’m not going to mention any names here because I don’t know that I can mention them all. But as I’ve read around newspapers and websites and blogs and all that this morning I have become increasingly disturbed at how giddy some of our guys are over the fact that we’re getting a couple of votes here and then Bolton next. “It’s a major victory.” Some of our guys on the right, “Well, we’re really moving the ball forward, getting our vote on Owen and then Bolton is going to come up and then we’re going to get votes on the other two. Why, we’re making real progress here,” and I’m saying, “For God’s sake this stuff is supposed to be routine. It’s taken four years to get a vote on Priscilla Owen. How can anybody on our side say this is a victory?”
Chafee voted no. Linc Chafee voted no. Well, what did we expect? Lincoln Chafee voted against Priscilla Owen. Yip yip yip yip yahoo. The Republicans, the bar here seems to be moving so much lower. “Well, we’re making progress! Oh, this is so hot. Oh we’re moving the ball forward.” Whoa. These things are supposed to be routine. Four years? Four years to get a justice nomination confirmed? You know, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is more extreme than any of these nominees that Bush has brought up. I went through the list of things that she actually believes in that came out during her testimony, such as getting rid of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and replacing it with parents day. I wish I had that list in front of me. It is striking the things that this woman believes and yet she was confirmed 97-3, something like two or three months after she was nominated.
Now, at the time people said, “Well, Rush, you really can’t expect Republicans to come out against a woman, only the second woman nominated to be on the court. Why, you can’t expect that!” Why not? The Democrats are going after Janice Rogers Brown, and she’s a woman, and she’s a black woman. “Well, it’s a different standard, Rush. The Democrats go after anybody and the media isn’t going to criticize them. Let Republicans go after Ruth Bader Ginsburg and they’ll call them anti-Semites and they will call them troglodytes and they’ll call them anti-women and all sorts of things. They had no choice, Rush.”
Maybe they didn’t then, but the whole thing needs to be continually fought and changed because there’s so many double standards. I’ll tell you what, if a Democrat had nominated Janice Rogers Brown and any Republican had said what Harry Reid or any of the Democrats have been saying about her you know the charge would have been lambasted all over the place or plastered all over the place that Republicans are racist. So here’s what’s happening. If the liberals succeed in changing the environment, where victory is dumbed down, then, of course, it’s going to be harder and harder and harder to achieve victory.
If we’re going to say victory is four years to get a presidential nominee approved and confirmed, if that’s victory, if that’s moving the ball forward, I would say, folks, we’re dumbing down victory and we are lowering our own standards. It’s not just the left that I have problems with on this. There’s some people on the right here that I think are linguini-spined and I know why it is. Everybody wants to be considered the smartest person in the room. Everybody wants to be considered moderate, everybody wants to be considered reasonable, and a lot of people on our side have learned that the way to have your critics call you reasonable is not to align yourself with conservatives.
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RUSH: Rob in Atlanta, I’m glad you called, welcome to the program here.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. It’s Rob from Georgia here. Hey, I really think you’re looking at this thing totally the wrong way. I think that we’ve got here, what I predicted would happen is when the Democrats saw the nuclear option was about to happen, they found the best way they could possibly find to cave, and they caved.
RUSH: Wait.
CALLER: You have seven Democratic moderates who basically left their party leadership and they basically said, “We’re not willing to do this filibustering thing anymore, we’ve got to get reelected,” and they said, “We’ll stop doing it.” And we have seven conservatives that said, conservative moderates, that said, “Well, as long as you keep doing that and don’t filibuster we won’t make it illegal for you to do so in the Senate rules.” So we’ve gotten what we want, which is up-and-down votes, we still have the nuclear option on the table and I’ve heard Lindsey Graham and DeWine both say that, you know, this agreement to them means that the filibustering is only in extraordinary circumstances, and I think that this was a win where the Democrats are trying to spin it as a win for them, but it’s not.
RUSH: Okay. Rob, were you listening to the program at all yesterday because we dealt with all of these points —
CALLER: I listened as much as I could, but I just really disagree with your point on this. Like I said I’m a hundred percent behind you normally, and I want Bush’s judges as much as everyone but we can’t do anything about the fact that… Let’s look at this this way. Let’s see that these moderate Republicans were really all for the nuclear vote, you know, that we were going to do last night and they just decided to not do it. Well, if that’s true, I just think that they wouldn’t have voted for the nuclear option anyway and we would have had a much worse loss.
Now with the Democrats who have given one last olive branch to prove they don’t want to filibuster, now that if he actually do it I believe that DeWine and Lindsey Graham, at least those two, and that’s all we need, will pull the nuclear option and we will be able to say that we —
RUSH: I want to tell you there’s one thing you’re missing. There’s just one thing you’re missing, and that is the deal wouldn’t have been possible were it not for the seven Republicans who caved, and you’re missing what everybody is upset about here. If there were seven Democrats afraid of the nuclear option, then cream them on it. They have been behaving unconstitutionally for the last four years on these judicial filibusters. The judicial filibuster is still alive. It was not done away with. It’s still alive, and Harry Reid is out there crowing about it. We were undercut by seven Republicans. If your point’s right that there’s seven Democrats out there that couldn’t symptom pulling the trigger then we should have exercised this option and reasserted the constitutionality and procedure of the nomination and advice and consent process for senators.
You sound like these guys on my side that are all happy that we’re getting three of the seven, three of the ten confirmed. Seven were thrown overboard in this deal. Seven judges were thrown overboard — and this extraordinary circumstance business that you talk about has been left up to each individual Democrat to define. The Republicans don’t get to play because they don’t care about it, they’re not the ones objecting to anybody’s extraordinary circumstances. Democrats get to define it. So you say, “Well, Lindsey Graham and DeWine say, ‘Well, if they are exercise this, we’ll pull the nuclear option.'” You know, it’s hard to go back to where you were.
I know people fantasize, “Well, we still have it; we can still use it,” but there’s this old thing called momentum. The momentum was clearly on our side and it’s sort of been disbanded now. To the extent that you’re right about Lindsey Graham and Michael DeWine, I will say to you, had it not been for yesterday and the reaction of the American people in South Carolina and Ohio to those two guys you wouldn’t have heard them say it. I think they’re scared about their futures. It’s not because they came to this on their own.
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RUSH: I want to go back and refer to comments made by Rob in Atlanta here as our last caller because I’m seeing a lot of this on our own websites, you know, conservative blogs and websites. “Hey, Rush, this is a big deal. This is a big win! I mean, the Democrats are the ones that caved. They gave up the nominees,” and I maintain to you, folks, this is dumbing victory down. This kind of stuff never happened before where you have to make deals like this to get what ought to be routine, and that is people that come out of the committee vote. You know, that’s the proscribed process, and that used to be routine. Now, I can appreciate if some of you are trying to be optimistic here. I have full respect for that. But, look, when you say the deal is a win because the deal isn’t binding, that is, “Well, Rush, it’s no big deal because we can break the deal.”
Then why make it? If the Democrats are imploding, if the Democrats got seven guys that are afraid to vote on the constitutional option because they’re afraid of going against their party, if they’re afraid of this, why bail them out? Why make the deal? Why didn’t we, in which case all of the nominees would have received an up or down vote and would have been confirmed? I mean, it’s remarkable. Those of you who say what a great deal this is say it’s great because we can always vote to change the rule and we’ve gotta rely on at least two of our seven nitwits to do it, and now I guess the two nitwits that are most likely, based on what you’re hearing them say, are Lindsey Graham and Mike DeWine.
Well, this is a great way to define victory. We gotta depend on two of seven moderates to come our way, to break the deal. Why make the deal in the first place if it’s worthy of breaking? But in the process, I don’t hear anybody defending the deal itself, and in the deal itself there is an insistence that the president surrender some of his power to nominate judges to the Senate by consulting with them in advance which throws several nominees overboard right off the bat. And for this to be called a victory escapes me. I’m sorry, and you know me, I’m an eternal optimist. But for this to be called victory.
We gotta be dumbing victory down. Hey, the Democrats did what they did. Forget the fact it’s unconstitutional. Okay, they did what they did, but look, we forced them off of it. We forced seven of those Democrats to change sides, and we got three of our nominees. Yeah, we lost seven. And we now got the Democrats out there like Nan Aaron of some pro-abortion group saying by definition every Supreme Court nominee is an extraordinary circumstance. So I guess we’re going to have to rely on a couple of our own nitwits on the Republican side here to break the deal and go back for the constitutional option, in which case if the deal is worth breaking why make it? Does that make sense or am I a lone wolf on this all of a sudden here.