RUSH: Okay, ladies and gentlemen, lets get serious here about something for just a second, because there’s a news story involving Arlen Specter today that is just outrageous to me. But before we get to that, there’s some other things. Russ Feingold went on Meet the Press over the weekend and said, ‘We’re going to censure the president. We’re going to censure the president.’ I think the president ought to censure Feingold. I think it’s time to take the gloves off here. Congress cannot censure a president under the Constitution. That is not constitutional. So if Feingold in Congress censured George Bush, then he’ll do it right back. I am not kidding. He can issue censures, too. He won’t do it because he’d consider it beneath the office. But he ought to. He could issue an executive order censuring Congress or any member of Congress. Feingold’s opened the door. So if Feingold’s going to go through with this, Bush can do it himself.
Now, the Specter story. The headline here: ‘Specter to probe Supreme Court decisions.’ Get this. ‘Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) plans to review the Senate testimony of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel A. Alito to determine if their reversal of several long-standing opinions conflicts with promises they made to senators to win confirmation.’ What’s he going to do? He’s going to go back and review their testimony, and he’s going to see if they lied to him and the committee? And then, after that, what’s he going to do? What about this bit, we shouldn’t have litmus tests on judges? What about free will, what about the ability of jurists to change their mind on any given issue, when given evidence? I’m going to tell you something. Congress is outta control here. We keep hearing that Bush is out of control and usurping powers, spying on Americans, all that rotgut that’s not true. It is Congress who is out of control here. They talk about the president, but it’s not even close. Specter has no authority whatsoever to do this.
Why is it that when a liberal like Specter makes a direct threat against the court, which is what this is, because of the justices’ actual rulings, not his potential rulings, here is Specter thinking he doesn’t like some of these rulings, some of these precedents that have been overturned, so he is going to examine their testimony. Why is there no hue and cry about these threats against the independent judiciary? But let the Schiavo case come up and the left goes absolutely bonkers. Let any criticism of a liberal jurist come up, the left goes bonkers, ‘You’re intimidating the judiciary. You can’t do that.’ Then they start talking about the threats that might be made against judges and they blame it all — but the liberals can do this, I don’t care if they’re Republican liberals or Democrat liberals, they can run around and try to intimidate the judiciary all they want. The reason they do is because the judiciary has been set up by the left, it’s been infiltrated to be independent of election results. I think these people up on Capitol Hill are totally out of control. Congress is now threatening to censure the president, which is unconstitutional. They are trying to intimidate Alito and Roberts here. It’s interfering with the president’s unqualified power to fire his own employees like US attorneys. There was no crime, and yet they are issuing contempt citations today. They have done it.
They are interfering with the commander-in-chief’s power under the Constitution to conduct the war on terror, the war in Iraq. It is Congress that’s off the charts here. It’s Congress that is out of control, not the other way around. As further evidence to this, the House Judiciary Committee has approved a contempt citation against the White House chief of staff Josh Bolten and former presidential legal counsel Harriet Miers for refusing to come up and talk about the US attorneys and their firing. Now, Specter has called for an independent counsel look into Alberto Gonzales. The do-nothing good Congress. I don’t care what side of the aisle they’re on, they’re getting nothing done. They’re simply harassing. It’s a massive, massive attempt to consolidate power. These battles happen, by the way, in this country frequently. Constantly there have been tests of will and battles for power between the executive and legislative branch. That’s not new. But the idea here that it’s George W. Bush who is out of control, spying on Americans, doing all this torture. Frankly, folks, it’s the US Congress that is out of control and dangerously so, and engaging in activity that is not constitutional, censures, trying to usurp the authority to run the war. They don’t have it in the Constitution. Now this attempt by Specter to intimidate Roberts and Alito by publicly saying he’s going to review their testimony to see if they lied in order to win Senate confirmation.