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RUSH: ‘The Senate could still use budget rules to pass healthcare without 60 votes, the White House indicated Monday. President Barack Obama is hopeful that the Senate will pass a healthcare bill with 60 votes, but White House press secretary Robert Gibbs held out the possibility that budget reconciliation rules could still be used.’ The White House is trying to tell the Senate what the hell to do. That means Rahm Emanuel is running this show. They know they’re in trouble over there. By the way, I want to say something to you here so that you do not get alarmed. There’s big news that Harry Reid’s going to introduce the legislation next week. That was always going to happen, that’s nothing, and he’s going to get 60 votes, he needs 60 votes to get it to the floor, and he will. That was in the cards.

That doesn’t mean anything right now. That is a fait accompli. It’s going to be treated as some major achievement as overcoming some big obstacle, but it’s not. This is just to start the debate. The next time the 60 votes is required will matter, and that’s to stop the debate and thus go to the vote. That’s called cloture. The Senate requires the 60 votes, essentially, to pass anything. And where budget reconciliation comes into play is that there is one exception to the 60-vote cloture rule and that is a simple majority, 51, to pass a budget, because the budget is required by the Constitution. So that’s the exception, and that’s called reconciliation in the Senate. And the White House is now talking about using that for health care legislation, which they will do if they can’t get the 60, they’ll do it in a last-minute desperation act. (interruption) Of course they’re breaking their own rules but they — you know, Snerdley is saying it’s not an appropriations bill and therefore they’re breaking their own rules. Snerdley, this whole thing is unconstitutional. What do you mean, breaking their own rules?

It’s unconstitutional to mandate the American people buy anything. This is ridiculous, but it is what it is. Do you think people who will write in their bill that you can go to jail for not buying health insurance care about their rules? Do you think a bunch of people that are going to purge all Republicans from the federal civil service care about rules? We’ve gotta stop looking at these people within the normal confines of civility and democracy and all that stuff. They’re not small ‘d’ Democrats in any way, shape, manner or form. Purging Republicans from everywhere in the federal government, that’s what Marxists do. Ignore the rules of a particular body of legislation, the Senate, to get something done, no big deal. Did you think that anybody who would create what are essentially two slush funds, TARP and the stimulus, care about rules?

The TARP and stimulus money, let me explain, this is Chicago thug politics. This is how this works. In the normal ebb and flow of government, if you want money, you have to go to through the legislative process and have it appropriated for something, and you have to be honest about what it’s for. So TARP was to save the financial system from collapse and stimulus and was to create jobs. Guess what? Over half the TARP money is still there, and after the TARP bill was passed and the money was appropriated, guess what changed immediately by fiat? The rules under which it would be spent. It was originally to provide capital for lending, for the credit markets. And as soon as it was passed, Hank Paulson said we’re going to change it, we’re going to use this as bailout money, and it was supposed to buy toxic assets as well, but screw the toxic assets, we’ll leave ’em toxic, we’re going to use this for bailouts like General Motors and the banks and so forth. They dragged the banks in there and they demanded that they sign a document requiring them to take $25 billion each, minimum. Then the stimulus bill, only 14% of it has been spent, and it’s a trillion dollars when you factor in the $200-plus billions of pork money they had to buy off members of Congress with to get them to vote for the $787 billion of stimulus. It’s largely unspent.

So what was created was two slush funds. There are two piles of cash out there that everybody thinks is going to go to shovel-ready jobs and infrastructure and schools and putting people back to work and getting credit flowing again and buying up toxic assets. And that’s not what’s happening. How do you think they’re buying off members of Congress to pass health care? They got a stash of cash, folks. It’s Obama’s stash. Those people in Detroit, when asked where their money is coming from, ‘From Obama, his stash.’ It’s exactly right. They didn’t know it, but it’s exactly right. This is one giant slush fund that this government is using to pay off — if they need the AMA, if they need the AARP, if they need an individual congressman, if need to pay off a union — this is what they’re doing. It was appropriated under totally false pretenses after having created a crisis so that everybody would support the passage lickety-split before anybody knew what was going on.

I think largely health care is going to end up being much the same thing. This is how these people operate, this is how Chicago thug politics — and, you know, Clinton described it as that, Chicago thug politics. So not to beat a dead horse here, but two slush funds, unspent, TARP money — that’s why they can talk about — and they’re not going to do it, by the way, because it’s ridiculous, but they’re talking about using some of the unspent TARP money to reduce the deficit. So this unspent TARP money, a lot of unspent stimulus money at the slush fund.

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