RUSH: Well, I remember back during the Christmas Eve show, we came in here and did a Christmas Eve show, and I suggested on the Christmas Eve show that I like the idea of a national address by the president from the Oval Office on this crisis at the southern border involving drugs, illegal immigration, and the all-out assault on the United States of America. I said I like the idea of a national address.

I don’t know that the networks would give him the time. You know, they don’t have to, but a national address that’s written and promptered could explain what’s going on and why.

And guess what? It’s gonna happen! There’s gonna be a national address tonight! Just more evidence, that I, a guy in a golf shirt, by the way, with my own name on it today, in Palm Beach is exacting heavy influence on the machinations of the Oval Office.

Great to have you here, folks. 800-282-2882 if you want to join us on the program today. The email address, ElRushbo@eibnet.us.

There’s gonna be an official Democrat response. It will be a joint response. Chuck and Nancy are going to join together to do a coordinated universal response to President Trump. You know, I remember these responses usually happen after something like the State of the Union show.

And I remember one of the first times I almost got fired. I was working in Pittsburgh. It was 1973. And Nixon, Richard Nixon, President Nixon, did some kind of a national address, I don’t know what it was. And the Democrats started caterwauling demanding equal time, demanding a chance to reply.

Well, I was working as a disc jockey on an oldies station. I was doing the morning show, and the next day I started railing, “What do they think they get equal time for, who in the world demands that, who do they think they are?” And I almost got fired. I got an official letter delivered by courier from the management of the station saying that I do not speak editorially for the station and I will cease and desist from ever doing so again if I know what’s good for me.

So I followed instructions. I didn’t say another word, openly. I found ways to disguise my commentary that they didn’t pick up. I ended up getting fired for playing Under My Thumb too many times, Rolling Stones song, not for violating station restrictions on editorial content. And then the next thing that I recall — my favorite response — and there have been many, and it’s hard to single one out. It was during the august presidency of Ronaldus Magnus. At his apex, he was at the peak of popularity. He had just won his second landslide election, I think 49 states. And after a State of the Union, it came time for the Democrats to respond.

By this time they had been etched in stone and the out-of-power party was automatically granted time to respond. And the Democrats chose the then Speaker of the House, Fort Worthless Jim Wright, who was this shifty-eyed, high eyebrowed guy. He looked like he was eyeing everybody very warily. And I’ll never forget. This was all during the Iran-Contra scandal where the Democrats were trying to prevent Reagan from stopping the Soviet Union from establishing a communist client state in Nicaragua.

The Democrats were aiding the Soviet Union in establishing a Soviet base. And it was during that period of controversy, I’ll never forget, I don’t remember anything other than Jim Wright and that devilish — I shouldn’t say that, that sinister smile with the eyebrows that look like they were on a trampoline. And he was saying, “We only want to help the president. We only want to work with the president.” And I thought, “You lying. You just –” And I just had more fun with that.

Whenever there are proper presidents, the worst duty you can draw is to be assigned the response and what the out-of-power party generally does is pick somebody they think is an up-and-comer and let ’em do it on the theory that they might be up-and-coming and they might have a future and we’ll throw ’em out there and we’ll see how they’re reacted to. It’s always a very tough thing to do.

But this one, well, you could debate Trump’s popularity. I think it’s greater. I think it’s a little higher than the Drive-By Media would have you believe. But one thing is clear: Chuck and Nancy do not think anybody likes Trump. And it’s gonna be fascinating to me to see their attitude. Is it going to be arrogance? Is it gonna be condescending? Is it gonna be insulting of Trump like Gavin Newsom was in his inaugural address as the governor of California. All he did was take out after Trump. We got details of this coming up.

There’s lots of stuff I want to get to today including a debate has ensued over whether or not the president can actually invoke emergency powers to build a wall or to shut it down, and the consensus among legal minds that I respect is it’s a no-brainer. That there is act of Congress from 1976 that permits him to do just that. And it’s a pretty damn broad power. It’s the National Emergencies Act, 1976. You know what else it allows a president to do? Confiscate and shut down a business, if he thinks. This is a post-Watergate piece of legislation.

The National Emergencies Act 1976 allows the president the power, Congress gave him the power to use his powers in emergencies that he decides. The media did not give him this power. He did not give this power to himself. The Congress did in 1976, and it’s really strange when you consider that it’s post-Watergate, and the Democrats, I’m sure, thought that there was never gonna be another Republican president again. That Nixon had destroyed, in their minds, the Republican Party and so they’re passing laws that are expanding the powers of the executive branch like mad because they think they’re gonna be occupying it in perpetuity.

And now it’s one of these things that’s come back to bite them. So this is a debate that’s raging. And it doesn’t seem to me to be much of a question, legally, and precisely because of that the media and the Democrats are attempting to muddy the waters here and make it look like the law doesn’t exist and that Trump is a power mad, dictatorial, incompetent buffoon who’s putting the nation at great risk. But is what’s happening at the southern border an emergency? This is a question that I think is a microcosm of the overall question that we face regarding the country at large: Are we in a crisis?

And, if you’re like me, there’s no question about it, we are. And, to me, the election of 2016 remains a no-brainer. There was simply no way… There was no way, I and many of you think, that this country was gonna survive as founded if Hillary Clinton had been elected. And it was nothing more complicated than that. “If the Tasmanian Devil had gotten the Republican nomination, he would have gotten my support,” I say as an illustration, simply because it was unacceptable. Another two terms, eight years of Hillary Clinton furthering the Obama agenda?

We need to stop and think: What would the country be right now if Hillary had won? What things has Trump done that would not have happened? We would not have a roaring economy. We would not have a reinvigorated manufacturing sector. We would be full-party players to whatever climate change insanity. We would be bankrupt out the wazoo even more so than we are. American society and culture would have further disintegrated and there wouldn’t be anything stopping it.

If you look at this in kind of the same context that the movie It’s a Wonderful Life was made, George Bailey asked: What would life have been in Bedford Falls if he had never lived? It was a devastating vision, and the same thing here — and part of the reason for this crisis is precisely what’s happening on the southern border. How about there have been 235,000 arrests of illegal aliens by ICE in the last year alone? That number includes 4,000 arrests for homicide, 30,000 arrests for sex crimes, and over 100,000 arrests for assault!

How can anybody look at those numbers and say this isn’t a crisis? And the overall invasion aspect of the sheer numbers of people who are coming who have no desire to assimilate, have no desire to become part of a what is and has been a distinct American culture. Rather they come here and become pawns of a Democrat Party seeking to undermine that very culture. Although there is some surprising polling data. Something in the neighborhood of 30% of Hispanic voters approve of the job Trump is doing.

So some of the conventional wisdom is wrong about what happens to people who eventually come here. But the objective of the Democrats is very clear: To convert every one of them to a ward of the state, to keep them with meager incomes, to keep them uneducated, to keep them totally dependent. The overall impact of that on the culture, on our morality, on the whole concept of guardrails and right and wrong itself is a crisis, and it’s an even larger one if you consider the assaults on the country made by the Democrats and their madcap left.

By the way, speaking of that, it has become apparent to me that Pelosi and Schumer do not like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Have you noticed CNN… Chris Cillizza. Our old buddy Chris Cillizza, formally the Washington Post and now at CNN, has just written a devastating piece about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saying she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, saying she’s dead wrong about everything. She has no facts, she poses a great…

There’s no question that that piece is the product of Pelosi and Schumer working the media. ‘Cause I’m telling you (I predicted this) that the Democrat leadership is not hip to this young bunch of Millennials pouring in here and some of these other radicals. They’re not hip to that. I mean, they run that party, and they run the American left, and they’re not gonna some young up-y come in here and upset the applecart. It’s like anybody else that holds power; they’re not just gonna cede it. (C-e-d-e, for those of you in Rio Linda)

They’re not gonna cede it to a bunch of newcomers who don’t know what they’re doing. So while we very seldom see the Drive-By Media turn on Democrats, when we do see it, we have to realize it isn’t because of ideology. It isn’t because the media person has decided they don’t like the policies of these new arrivals. It’s because the leadership of the Democrat Party (to whom media is beholden) has decided that these young upstarts need to be shown the way of life, and that is to get hit by the Drive-By Media.

And it’s one of the best and clearest signs yet that Pelosi is not at all happy with Cortez or some of these others who are showing you.

But back to the border, look at the drug situation, Just the drug problem that an open border is causing should be enough to be considered a national emergency. Get this: More than 90% of the drugs coming into the country are coming across the southern border. Ninety percent of the illegal drugs. When the number of overdoses on heroin and meth and crystal meth have caused three times the number of American deaths than the number of Americans killed during the entire war in Vietnam, how can you say we don’t have a crisis?

Of course, do you know what the No. 1 cause of death last year was? For the first time, it wasn’t “the wheel,” meaning automobiles. I always like to say the largest cause of death in America is the wheel. “What do you mean, ‘the wheel’?” Well, you guys are saying you want to ban everything that kills people. Ban the automobile. Except now (chuckles), the global warming crowd says, “Yeah! I like that idea.” But the wheel largely has been responsible for the greatest numbers of deaths.

But it was superseded by something else: Abortion.

Abortion is now become the leading cause of death in the United States. You couple that with the birthrate replacement level not being enough to maintain our current population, and look at the southern border and the Democrats have said: “Great! Prosperous Americans are not reproducing. “We keep the border open and replace people who would otherwise have been born with a normal birthrate replacement level,” and the Democrats are salivating over their future. That’s another reason why it’s a crisis at the southern border.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I’ll tell you what I’d like. I’d like the Democrat response tonight to be an expressive dance by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, where she could combine her expressive dance and her rhetoric and tell everybody what a heathen and a bad guy Donald Trump is.