RUSH: So what do we do? What do we do? I pride myself as one who will always have at least an answer — and, in many cases, I, your beloved host, will have THE answer. But on this, we have something that I certainly have not seen in my lifetime. I’m fairly confident in saying, we haven’t seen this ever. Our system is broken. It is severely broken. When a president can defy the law over and over and over again, without any of the other federal branches acting to stop it, it’s unprecedented.
Every time the president breaks a law, he’s violating not just the law, but separation of powers. Every time the president violates the law, he’s thumbing his nose at Congress. Now, admittedly, the House of Representatives (part of Congress) is run by Republicans, so I’m sure he enjoys that, and I’m sure in private — may not even be in private anymore — the Democrats are getting the biggest yuk in the world out of thumbing their nose at Boehner and the Republicans and doing all of this lawlessness, and nobody’s stopping ’em.
And then that idiot, Sheila Jackson Lee, stands up and says that their job is now to write executive orders for Obama to sign. Not pass legislation, but to write executive orders — and that got a standing ovation, by the way, when Obama basically said that’s what he’s gonna do. If Congress doesn’t do what he wants, he’s gonna do it himself, and the Democrats gave him a standing ovation. The Democrats in the House who he was basically telling, “Screw you!” said, “Fine, give us more.”
The party unity and the solidarity on the left is such that they don’t care. They got their big dog in the White House, and if he wants to do what they want to do, they don’t care. “Fine. Go to it, dude! We don’t need the credit. We don’t need to be involved. Just go do what we want to do and we’ll be happy. To hell with this separation of powers stuff!” I can remember in my lifetime some of the most interesting, vicious battles in our government were fought over separation of powers.
I’m just gonna tell you this” If we reverse this, if you put a Republican president behaving this way with a Democrat Congress, they wouldn’t be afraid of any skin color he might have. They wouldn’t be afraid of impeaching him. They would be on TV every day. They would cast this guy… I mean, if they could tar and feather Ken Starr as a sexual pervert, they’ll stop at nothing to criminalize their opponents.
There’s no way that Tom Foley, Jim Wright, “Mr. Sam” Rayburn, Carl Albert, any of these old speakers of the House would put up with anything like this, and they shouldn’t have. Separation of powers is crucial. Over here’s the legislative branch, over here is the judicial branch, and they’re not doing anything. They’re not doing diddly-squat. The Supreme Court’s silting over there watching everything they’re doing being mocked and made fun of and laughed at, and they’re just out giving speeches talking about how much worse it’s gonna get.
Scalia was in Hawaii the other day making a speech, and he said, “Hey, if you think that our government can’t intern political prisoners again like they did the Japanese in World War II, you better think again, because it is gonna happen again.” So we’ve got an associate justice of the Supreme Court predicting this, not necessarily about Obama. He was speaking about the direction the country is going in general.
“Hey, the idea that some administration’s gonna target political prisoners and intern them? Hell, yes, it’ll happen again. Don’t fool yourself into thinking it won’t.” The natural proclivity of people with power is to try to acquire more. That’s, again, where the rule of law comes into play. But, folks, this is massively broken. You know, we sit here and we say, “Well, who’s gonna stop it?”
It really is up to the other branches of government to stand up when their power is being usurped, when they are, in essence, being violated. But nobody in Congress is. The Democrats in Congress love it. The Republicans in Congress are paralyzed. The Republicans in Congress must think that the American people are perfectly fine with Obama breaking the law or doing anything — and if anybody criticizes him, why, they’re gonna be made to pay at the next election.
I sit here, and I wonder if this mess… We’re so broken. I wonder if winning another election fixes this. It has to help, but this is really dire circumstances because everybody is sitting there saying, “Well, why doesn’t somebody do something?” and nobody that I know thinks they can do anything, and you don’t see a popular uprising among the people. So it’s just day in and day out, with every transgression, ignored.
What if Obama decides, because of “income inequality,” that he wants to raise taxes on people that make $200,000 a year to 80%? “Come on, Rush, he’d never do that?” Why? Who is gonna stop him? He can order the IRS to tell businesses they’ll punish them if they say a word about him and his health care plan when they make staffing decisions. Everybody now knows the IRS was sicked on the Tea Party, and there hasn’t been any punishment whatsoever.
There hasn’t been any retribution for that. So if you think Obama… I’ll do a little Scalia on you. If you think Obama can’t just call the IRS and say, “Okay, look, it’s 80% on all income over 200 grand,” you’re wrong — and I guarantee you, the mayor of New York would applaud. The mayor of New York would applaud; the Democrats in Congress would applaud. Nobody on the left or on the Democrat side would have any problem with this at all.
I’m not even sure that you’d have any leftists in the media upset with this. I think it’s so bad that Obama could, if he wanted to, say, “You know what? I’m canceling freedom of the press and the First Amendment,” and they’d probably applaud that. You think that may be a bit of a stretch, but the overwhelming idolatry that the supporters of Obama have is that way. He does not have majority support of the American people for any of this, but the majority of the American people don’t appear to have any representation.
And not just Republicans in Congress, but anywhere, in the judicial branch, which the left increasingly owns, and elsewhere in the legislative branch. If he’s just gonna continue to usurp their power and they’re not going to do anything other than remain frozen in place and allow it to happen, what’s to stop him. Let me see if I could come up with something that would make you say, “No, no, no, no, Rush. Never, never.”
What if we get to 2016 and Obama says, “You know what? I like being president. I’m not leaving. I still have to implement Obamacare. I’ve still got to fix the deficit. I’ve gotta still fix my job situation and get this economy going. I’m not ready to leave yet. We’re gonna delay the 2016 presidential election for a couple years.” What happens then, if we get three more years of this kind of stuff? the exercise here is come up with something that he would do that somebody in official Washington — legislative branch, judicial branch — would stand up and say, “No, you’re not.”
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, folks, I’m gonna go out on a limb here. I fully expect the 2014 midterms to be a wave election like 2010. I think the people of this country are gonna sweep Democrats out of office every chance they get, every opportunity they get — and I think there’s plenty of evidence for it right now. You don’t have Henry Waxman and these people retiring unless they know.
I mean, they’re in the swan’s song portion of their lives anyway. Waxman, he doesn’t want to be a member of a minority in the House of Representatives where basically all they’re doing is writing executive orders for Obama with Sheila Jackson Lee. These people don’t want to be in the minority. It’s no fun. If a guy like Waxman’s gonna quit… Believe me, this is all he knows. He doesn’t play golf. He doesn’t play shuffleboard. He uses nasal spray, but that’s about it.
There’s nothing else. If he’s getting out, they’ve got polling data. But here’s the thing — and I’m not trying to jinx anything. I think this is setting up every bit as big as 2010, if not bigger. The Tea Party, the American people are livid by what’s going on how they are. I mean, nobody on our side is uninformed or unprepared or not aware of what’s going on. They’re beside themselves. They don’t know what to do.
They can’t believe that nobody’s standing up opposing this. They can’t believe the people whose power is being stolen are not standing up and trying to get it back. Judges, legislative branch, judicial branch. So they’re gonna do all they know how to do, and they’re gonna turn out and they’re gonna vote in November. Now, let’s just say I’m right. You hear Obama saying, “I cannot leave the country in the hands of these Republicans, if the Republicans win the Senate and hold on to the House with even bigger majority.”
I can just hear Obama in two years, “I cannot leave the country in the hands of these people. I just refuse to do it! These are racists, sexists, biggest, homophobes, whatever. They hate women. They want to deny you your right to kill your baby — abortion — and I can’t allow that to happen. They don’t want you to get your birth control pills. They don’t want you screwing… They don’t want you making love with people you don’t know.
“I can’t permit this.” I’m just saying, conjure up here a circumstance. It’s kind of like the minimum wage. “Let’s make it $35.” “Fine. How about $40?” “All right, now we’re talking.” “How about 50 bucks?” “No, wait. That’s too much.” I’m trying to get to the point where somebody would say, “Nah, he’ll never do that.” (interruption) You think that’s it? You don’t think he’d suspend the 2016 election? You don’t? (interruption) Okay. Fine.
Pensacola, Florida. Let’s go to the phones. Mike, it’s great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you very much, sir — and with all sincerity, let me tell you what an honor it is to speak with you.
RUSH: I appreciate that. I really do. Thank you.
CALLER: And this is difficult for me to say, because this is just not the way that I think, but I really believe that it is time for peaceful civil disobedience. We need some businesses that have courage like Hobby Lobby that will stand up and say, “We will not abide by your edict. You don’t have the authority to tell us to do this.”
RUSH: Yeah. See, it’s easy for you to say.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Please, don’t misunderstand. I’m not being critical. It’s easy for you to say, “Hey, Hobby Lobby, stand up and take ’em on for me! Hey, stand up!” It’s easy for people to ask other people to do their bidding. But as far as I’m concerned, Hobby Lobby did.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: They did, and look what’s happening. The Tea Party? Look what happened to the Tea Party. We’ve had a popular uprising, it’s called the Tea Party, and look what happened. They got crushed by the IRS.
CALLER: Yeah. It’s gonna have to be somebody that’s willing to go all the way to court with it and take the fight right back to Obama. He’s like the schoolyard bully, until enough people stand up to him and face him down. Our Republicans in Washington should be doing it. They should, every one of them, be on the Capitol steps en masse saying, “We will not stand for this.”
RUSH: Well —
CALLER: For some reason, they’re not.
RUSH: Well, you know, I have my devil’s advocate cap on. A couple of Republicans did that — actually, three. One was named Sarah Palin, one was named Ted Cruz, and the other one was named Mike Lee. And what happened to them?
CALLER: Well, I’ll tell you. The dirty little secret is — and it’s not a secret to you, I know. There’s too many Republicans who kind of like the idea of Obamacare. They really kind of like the idea maybe that power will be theirs one day, too.
RUSH: Well, there is that aspect, not so much liking Obamacare as liking the concept of a Big Government that they someday might be in charge of. Anyway, I appreciate the call, Mike. Thanks much.
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