RUSH: Here’s Obama on a Chicago FM radio station in 2001. The interviewer says, ‘Joined by Barack Obama, Illinois state senator, 13th District, senior lecturer at a law school, University of Chicago.’ And in this bite, Obama discusses redistribution of wealth and how the Supreme Court’s never gotten into it.
OBAMA: If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples so that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay. But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.
RUSH: So this is eight years ago. Barack Obama’s chosen a justice who’s going to do anything but the law. She’s going to delve into the issues of redistribution of wealth. He’s simply putting one of his own on the Supreme Court. He’s putting an anti-constitutionalist on the Supreme Court to do his bidding there, pure and simple. The less she knows about the law, the less she is concerned about the law, the better, as far as Obama is concerned. Let’s see. We don’t have time for these other two before we go to the break, but in these next two, Obama complains that the Warren Court was not radical enough and it was in this interview in 2001, eight years ago, that he calls the Constitution a charter of negative liberties. And that is key to understanding the kind of people that Barack Obama wants to put on the court. This is the kind of thing that the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor presents, the kind of opportunity that her nomination presents to the Republican Party, to educate the American people about who Barack Obama really is, ’cause they don’t know, particularly those who voted for him.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I want to conclude this discussion here of the procedure we should take in dealing with the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the United States Supreme Court. And remember, now, my theory here is that she needs to be opposed on substance. She’s not qualified. If she takes the oath of office she’s gonna break it the minute she takes it because she doesn’t view the law the way the oath of office for Supreme Court justice is written, by her own admission, in her own words. All this empathy talk is simply code word for letting justices write laws from the bench. The purpose of opposing Sonia Sotomayor is not to stop her because it can’t be done. The purpose of opposing Sonia Sotomayor is to explain to the American people who Barack Obama is. We go back to his 2001 interview on Chicago radio and this is Obama discussing the Warren Court, the Earl Warren Supreme Court is not radical enough.
OBAMA: As radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution at least as its been interpreted and the Warren Court interpreted it in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted, and one of the tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer from that.
RUSH: So once again the court is to be used to redistribute wealth. Now, this is a gold mine for the Republican Party opposing Sonia Sotomayor because he has named her as a mirror image of him. The essential constraints, he looks at the Constitution as a constraint. Remember his statement, ‘Al-Qaeda is not constrained by a constitution,’ and he says that as a member of the political class. He says that as president. He looks at the Constitution as something that reels him in. So the Constitution either has to be changed or it has to be ignored. And the easiest way to change and ignore the Constitution is via the judicial system, and particularly at the highest level in the judicial system, the Supreme Court. The Constitution’s a charter of negative liberties, he says. It says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state governments must do on your behalf. But it most certainly does. It says it must protect you. It must come for the common defense and provide for the general welfare.
The Constitution proscribes government on a lot of things that are for the benefit of the American people. But what this means to Obama is, when he says that the Constitution doesn’t say what the federal government can do on your behalf, means it doesn’t say that it can tax the rich at a higher rate and give the money to the poor. It doesn’t say that he can redistribute — in fact, the Constitution does not have Marxism in it. The Constitution doesn’t have socialism in it. And as such, Obama is constrained. The civil rights movement did not get as far as it shoulda gotten because it was so focused on the court rather than community organizing. Well, okay. Now the community organizer’s in the Oval Office and the community organizer is going to see to it that the court does his bidding. Hello, Sonia Sotomayor. This isn’t worth opposing simply ’cause she’s guaranteed? There’s going to be other Supreme Court nominations. There are going to be future elections. Are we going to just throw in the towel on those, too? Are we just going to assume that opposing anything Obama does because he’s a minority is going to anger voters and we’re cooked? Final sound bite. Obama and the Constitution as reflecting America’s fundamental flaw.
OBAMA: I think we can say that the Constitution reflected an enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day and — and — and that the framers had that same blind spot. I — I don’t think the two views are contradictory to say that it was a remarkable political document that paved the way for where we are now and to say that it also reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day.
RUSH: He of course is talking about slavery. By the way, it is these three sound bites that have led me to conclude that we have here an angry man with a chip on his shoulder, not some cool, calm, collected guy, but a cold, calculating, angry man who did hear what Jeremiah Wright said for 20 years while sitting in the pews of that church in Chicago. He did hear what Bill Ayers said about America. America’s unjust; it was constituted as unjust, and that unjustness permeates to this day. So now it’s time to change all that, and we’re going to change all that by desecrating the Constitution, hence Sonia Sotomayor. The fact that she pays no attention to the law is perfect. The fact that she uses empathy, the fact that she is a racist and a bigot is perfect because, in Obama’s world, it’s permitted to be a racist and bigot if you’re a minority because you have been discriminated against since the founding of the country, and it’s about time that that was made right. That’s what all of this is about. That’s what all of his administration and his presidency is about, returning the nation’s wealth to its rightful owners.
This needs to be pointed out to the American people, and it can be pointed out in the scope of confirmation hearings on Sonia Sotomayor. Don’t have to go after her for being Hispanic. Nobody is suggesting that. Don’t go after her for being a woman. No fool is saying that.