RUSH: The Supreme Court will finish tomorrow, and they’ll hand down all their remaining decisions. The big one that came down today, two of them, they reduced the punitive award on Exxon for the Exxon Valdez oil spill, but they also overturned a Louisiana law saying that child rape, child rapists could be convicted and executed. They overturned this law. It came out just this morning. So it appears that the US Supreme Court can find anything it wants in the Eighth Amendment here, cruel, unusual punishment, what have you, run around and just tell the states, you can’t do what you want to do, you just can’t do it, we’re going to stop you. Why don’t we just have the Supreme Court shut down the Congress, the executive branch, state and local governments, and leave all the decisions to the Supreme Court? It has become so political. Frankly, I get sick and tired of waiting around for the court to proclaim what the final authority on any political issue in this country is going to be, and that’s exactly what it has become. I mean this morning I’m getting notes from people, ‘You think the gun decision will come today?’ as though the gun decision will be put to bed once and for all by virtue of the Supreme Court. This is the DC gun ban.
So we’ve turned over the deciding of political issues to the Supreme Court. We’ve even taken issues that are not political, like abortion, and made them political issues by granting the Supreme Court — the Supreme Court actually taking the authority on its own to hear such cases. The rape decision here is sort of like this. Kennedy, Justice Kennedy, and the other four liberals are saying, (paraphrasing) ‘Look, the idiots in Louisiana don’t know what they’re doing. There is no consensus that child rape should result in death for the rapist, and besides, execution for child rape seems disproportionate to us, so we find that it’s cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.’ Now, executing the child rapist, after all, full access to the justice system is not on its face cruel and unusual punishment. Who benefits from this ruling? Who benefits from the ruling that child rapists cannot be executed, overturning a state law, Louisiana law? I’ll tell you who benefits. It’s the same people who celebrate due process rights for terrorists. So Anthony Kennedy right now is a hero of terrorists and their lawyers and child rapists. You know, he flies off to Salzburg every summer, University of Salzburg in Austria, he teaches over there during the summer.
They have a McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento. I first met Justice Kennedy, by the way, out there, and he was nominated to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan while working at McGeorge, and they have an extension program in Salzburg and I’m sure he goes over there, and these European guys just applaud all this sophistication that’s coming out of the US Supreme Court, said, ‘You’re doing good things for America over there.’ And Thomas Sowell today, Investor’s Business Daily, just has a brilliant, brilliant piece: ‘So Wrong, So Often, For So Long, Yet It’s Europe We Want To Copy.’ Let me give you some highlights of this. ‘If anyone suggested that Tiger Woods should try to be more like other golfers, people would question the sanity of whoever made that suggestion. Why should Tiger Woods try to be more like Phil Mickelson? If Tiger turned around and tried to golf left-handed, like Mickelson, he probably wouldn’t be as good as Mickelson, much less as good as he is golfing the way he does right-handed. Yet there are those who think that the United States should follow policies more like those in Europe, often with no stronger reason than the fact that Europeans follow such policies. For some Americans, it is considered chic to be like Europeans. If Europeans have higher minimum wage laws and more welfare state benefits, then we should have higher minimum wage laws and more welfare state benefits, according to such people. If Europeans restrict pharmaceutical companies’ patents and profits, then we should do the same. Some justices of the US Supreme Court even seem to think that they should incorporate ideas from European laws in interpreting American laws.’ Stephen Breyer has made the case and so has Justice Kennedy on a couple of occasions.
‘Before we start imitating someone, we should first find out whether the results that they get are better than the results that we get. Across a very wide spectrum, the US has been doing better than Europe for a very long time. By comparison with most of the rest of the world, Europe is doing fine. But it is like Phil Mickelson, not Tiger Woods. Minimum wage laws have the same effects in Europe as they have had in other places around the world. They price many low-skilled and inexperienced workers out of a job.’ He goes on to give some employment data that we all know is true, and he cites that via these policies, these enlightened, sophisticated policies, they get a 35-hour work week, they’ve got 20% unemployment, nobody can be fired, and they cannot afford to defend themselves as a result. They’re spending everything they’ve got on these enlightened social programs that are depressing their own economy. Why do you think so many European countries all of a sudden are going conservative? From France, to Germany, to Italy, we’ve got a new conservative mayor in London. People have realized these enlightened, sophisticated policies born of the elite do not work. Sowell also — and I’ll read this to you in great detail as the — I gotta go to a break here pretty soon — says, why in the world do we want to imitate Europe? World War I, World War II, the slaughter of six million Jews. What is it about Europe that recommends itself to us? Mussolini, Stalin. What is it about Europe that recommends itself to us? And he makes some great points.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let me read more excerpts, just a few here from Dr. Sowell’s piece in the Investor’s Business Daily today in which he poses the question: Why in the hell should we copy Europe? They’re so wrong, they’re wrong often, they’ve been wrong for so long yet we’re supposed to copy them. ‘We need to understand America first, before we start imitating Europe. The American economy produces the largest output in the world — more than Japan, Germany and Great Britain combined. Measured by purchasing power, output per capita in the US is the highest of any large nation. There are some very small places such as Luxembourg or the Cayman Islands with higher purchasing power per capita. But as professor Benjamin M. Friedman of Harvard put it, places like Luxembourg are ‘technically countries but are more like large suburbs.’ Luxembourg’s total population is about the same as that of Long Beach, Calif. Wal-Mart has more employees than the total population of Luxembourg.’
Then you go to places like the Cayman Islands. They ‘are tax havens that attract the wealth of people who are not really Cayman Islanders. Among countries at all comparable to the US in size or population, none has achieved as high an output per capita. New Jersey produces more than Egypt. California produces more than Canada or Mexico. Desperate efforts to depict all the prosperity and progress in the US as being monopolized by ‘the rich’ have led to all kinds of statistical mumbo jumbo, such as comparing the changing ratios between statistical categories over time and ignoring the fact that most of the people in those categories move from one category to another over the years,’ meaning income quintiles, however you want to say it. The rich move out of the rich; the poor move out of the poor. Everybody is fluctuating at all times. He’s exactly right, and he’s got a pretty succinct definition here of American exceptionalism, and it’s under assault, and it’s under assault from where?
It’s under assault from the Europeans, socialist Western democracies. It’s under assault from the United Nations. It’s under assault from the Democrat Party in this country and the American left. What Sowell has just written here, the overwhelming superiority and production and size and per capita spending power and income dwarfs any nation in the rest of the world. It’s no wonder why we’re a target of the anti-capitalist coalitions that exist in many places in this country. One more thing about Europe. I have nothing, no beef against Europe here. Remember what this is all about. We have Supreme Court justices who think we need to look to foreign law in order to adjudicate US cases. Now, largely what’s happening is when they can’t find a reason for their own personal policy preferences in the law in cases here, they’ll go across the pond and they’ll consult the elitist Europeans and their legal charters and opinions. They will do everything they can to find somewhere more ‘enlightened’ than the US and our Constitution to find grounds for ruling the way they want to.
I don’t know if Kennedy did this in the rapist execution case in Louisiana, but if he can find someplace — you wouldn’t have to look very hard in Europe to find any place that is a country opposed to capital punishment. I haven’t read his opinion, so I don’t know it’s there, but we know that Breyer has talked about it, and we know that Kennedy has on occasion. We know that John Kerry (the haughty John Kerry, who served in Vietnam) wanted to turn over our national defense to a ‘global test’ of Europeans. We know that Clinton spent a lot of time over there sucking up to them. There are a lot of Democrats who really envy these European people: these sophisticates, the elites, the members of the clubs, ports and cigars in the war room after dinner in the club, this sort of thing, smarter than everybody else. They know they’re smarter — well, they think they are, and they look at the grand rabble out there and they are just offended, and they hold their nose.
And the Democrats and the elites in this country do the same thing. They look at people in Salt Lake City, look at people in Missouri, they look at people down South, ‘Ew! Ew! They’re not sophisticated!’ They want to hang around with these people in Europe, and it’s affecting a lot of our culture in terms of the Supreme Court and domestic politics, international politics as designed by left-leaning liberals. ‘In the course of the 20th century, supposedly sophisticated Europeans managed to create some of the most monstrous forms of government on earth…’ It was in Europe that communism was created, fascism was created, Nazism was created, in Europe, ‘in peacetime, and to start the two World Wars, the bloodiest in all human history. In each of these wars, both the winners and the losers ended up far worse off than they were before these wars were started.
‘After both World Wars, the US had to step in to save millions of people in Europe from starving amid the wreckage and rubble that their wars had created. These do not seem like people whose sophistication we should defer to. Between the two World Wars, European intellectuals — more so than ordinary people — completely misread the threat from Nazi Germany, and were urging disarmament in France and England, while Hitler was rapidly building up the most powerful military force on the continent, obviously aimed at neighboring countries. During the Cold War, many European intellectuals once again misread the threat of a totalitarian dictatorship — in this case, the Soviet Union. When they finally recognized the threat, many saw the question as whether it was ‘better to be red than dead.” I remember the question being asked when I was growing up!
‘They were no more prepared to stand up to the Soviet Union than they had been ready to stand up to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. ‘Worse yet, much of the European intelligentsia objected to America’s standing up to the Soviet Union. Many of them were appalled when Ronald Reagan met the threat of new Soviet missiles aimed at Western Europe by putting more American missiles in Western Europe, aimed at the Soviet Union. Reagan, in effect, called the Soviet Union and raised them, while many of the European sophisticates… said that his policies would lead to war. Instead, it led to the end of the Cold War. Are we now to blindly imitate those who have been so wrong, so often, over the past hundred years?’ It’s a great piece from Dr. Sowell on the ramifications throughout our culture.
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RUSH: One more thing about the Supreme Court decision on overturning the Louisiana law that says rapists of children should be executed. The Supreme Court overturned that, said you can’t execute them. I’m going to leave the legal analysis of this to the legal eagles and, when I see some that I marvel at and am impressed by, I’ll share it with you. But they’re trying to find… I know they’re using the Eighth Amendment here and they’re going to cruel and unusual punishment. Let me ask you about cruel and unusual. You have someone who engages in the rape of a child. By definition, we are talking the epitome of violence: the rape of a child. We also know full well the emotional scars that will be left on that child after having been raped by a violent, brutish adult. Now, let’s talk about cruel and unusual — and the court also used the word ‘disproportionate.’ Justice Kennedy wrote that execution is a ‘disproportionate’ punishment for the case of rape, even against a child.
That… (sigh) I’m not a legal scholar, but that kind of sends up a red flag. ‘Disproportionate?’ And then the ‘cruel and unusual.’ Let’s focus on this for just a second, shall we? How do you we execute most people in this country? Lethal injection, right? They don’t even know… We give them something that sedates them, and then they’re finally executed after they’re asleep — when it works. They got rid of Old Sparky in Florida. But seriously, what is more cruel: the violent, permanent scarring of a young girl in rape, or death by lethal injection? What is more cruel? This is what they tried to get into with all this today. One of the things that I want to point out to you is liberals are liberals first. What have we heard from liberals over the course of our lives? We have heard everything must be done ‘for the children.’ They have used the children in virtually every domestic, social argument they have made. From phony school lunch cuts, to education, increased spending, everything is about the children.
Now, all of a sudden — and, by the way, they have also, because of their attachment to the feminists (which are really just a bunch of libs themselves) we’ve also heard that rape is horrible. Rape is absolutely horrible, it’s intolerable — and we have accused the US military of being rapists, and we have tried to convict members of the US military on charges of rape in Iraq and a number of other things, and our soldiers who monitor the prisons say at Abu Ghraib. The left in this country has come down hard. All of a sudden now, we have a Louisiana law. Remember, this is four solid-to-the-wall liberals plus Anthony Kennedy who went with them on this. You’ve got Souter. You’ve got Breyer. You’ve got Ginsburg. You got John Paul Stevens and Kennedy here. So you’ve got four solid-to-the-wall liberals and Kennedy joining them, and what have they basically just said? ‘Screw the children! To heck with the children, here.’
This indicates here that in the liberal heart, what really matters first and foremost is liberalism, and it always seems that when liberals get involved in crime, it always seems to me that the sympathy is always for the criminal, be he a terrorist held in Guantanamo who has now been told he has constitutional rights according to the US Constitution, and he can access as a prisoner of war — an unlawful enemy combatant — he can have access to the US courts, big victory for criminals. And now the rapists of children. I mean, who’s celebrating this decision today? The same people who celebrate the decision on terrorists having access to the Supreme Court, a US court system and the civil libertarians and so forth. So many contradictions to this. And then besides all that, we just have the court deciding, ‘We’re going to decide these political issues. We’re going to decide these things.’ We don’t even need a Congress, anymore. We don’t even need a president. We’ll just take you all of our controversial issues, submit them to the lawyers of the Supreme Court decides, and that’s it because that’s what it has become.