RUSH: Bernie Madoff, 150 years. One-hundred-fifty years for Bernie Madoff means he’ll be out by next spring, probably. While Bernie Madoff gets 150 years, Waxman and Markey weren’t even cited 
in their scheme, their rip-off, this climate bill. Do you realize there was not even a bill? There was not even a copy of the bill in the well of the House, which is standard. It wasn’t even written. These people voted on this bill — not read it, it wasn’t written, they couldn’t have read it if anybody wanted to. I’m going to tell you, folks, what this was all about, and I must apologize for missing this. This was a huge miss on my part. I don’t often miss much but when I do I fess up to it. Everybody is wondering why these eight Republicans voted for it, and the light went off for me on Friday. I was watching the Fox News All Stars, and Nina Easton, Fortune magazine, made a point about this, and it just turned on the lights. Three or four of these Republicans are from New Jersey, three of them are from the Northeast, and everybody is wondering why in the hell did these eight Republicans vote for this thing, the cap-and-trade bill, when all they were doing was giving Democrats cover.
They allowed certain Democrats to vote ‘no’ for the sake of their own reelection. Pelosi woulda gotten those Democrats to vote ‘yes’ had the eight Republicans not voted for it. So what is this bill called? Cap and trade. Where do trades take place? We’re going to start trading what? We’re going to start trading carbon emissions. We’re going to start trading pollution credits. Well, where do trades get managed? Where do they take place? Who do you think is going to do the trading on this? Would anybody be surprised if it ends up that Goldman Sachs or Wall Street in general ends up — this is what I missed. This is what I missed. You’ve got these Northeastern Republicans — New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, it’s all the same — who are tied to Wall Street. It made all the sense in the world once I understood it, once I heard Nina Easton’s opinion on it. Cap and trade is all about — and the irony here, wait ’til Obama’s voters find out about this, wait ’til they find out that the primary reason for this bill — and it’s a horrible bill, as John Boehner calls it, it’s a pile of excrement. And it really is. It’s horrible. Even some guy in the Financial Times over the weekend who is a big Obama supporter, a columnist, said, you know, what’s crazy about this is that Congress is passing horrible bills, horrible legislation, and Obama doesn’t seem to care.
Now, Obama is getting everything he wants here. The idea that Obama is some sort of innocent bystander here who’s just at the helm leading things and he’s got all these stevedores and captains steering the ship and as long as it ends up getting where he’s wants it to go, doesn’t care how he gets there, that’s BS. This is Obama getting exactly what he wants. So the cap-and-trade bill is a big, big sop to Wall Street. Now, I find myself in an odd position because I’m a huge capitalist and I always have been as you well know. I’m a huge supporter and believer in the free market, but something seems rigged here. The whole piece of legislation is rotten, it is horrible, it is a disaster. In fact, there’s a story in Bloomberg today, it is going to increase our oil imports, where the objective is to decrease them. You know how it’s going to increase our oil exports? People who produce domestically are going to have to shut down and transfer the jobs overseas to avoid all the taxes. Meaning we’re going to have to import even more oil. The usual unintended consequences of the brainiac wizards of smart in the US House. This is supposedly gonna go nowhere in the Senate, but I wouldn’t bet on this, folks. This is conventional wisdom, and who are we hearing the conventional wisdom from? From the media. And the media is an absolute, total disgrace.
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RUSH: People want to know who the eight Republicans were who voted traitorously on cap and trade. Here you go: Mary Bono in California, Mike Castle in Delaware. Now, all of these Northeastern names — I’ve got a theory about why — it’s cap and trade. We trade what? We trade stocks, we trade bonds, wherever these trades happen, Wall Street, where is it? It’s in New York, it’s in the Northeast. These people at Wall Street make heavy contributions to a lot of people in the Northeast. I’m just guessing here, but it makes no sense since there was no bill to vote on. This is an outrage. This is something that everybody who voted for this thing needs to be sent packing because it wasn’t even written. There is a requirement that the bill being voted on be in the well of the House. It was not there because it hadn’t been written, much less read.
There’s no reason for these Republicans to give cover to Democrats unless there was some overriding concern. And that is, campaign contributions for reelection efforts from Wall Street people who are going to be — if this thing ever does happen, it will be a disaster. Folks, it will be a disaster. If it ever happens, Wall Street and the irony here is that Obama has tried to make you think he hates them, and he’s throwing them one thing after another, he’s throwing them bones left and right here. All this talk about capping pay, and we haven’t really seen that yet, have we? We’ve just heard it talked about. Do you realize what a big business trading carbon credits is going to be when virtually every one of us has carbon? We’re a carbon-based life form. We exhale what is now going to be traded, carbon dioxide. So here are the eight Republicans: Mary Bono in California, Mike Castle in Delaware, Mark Kirk in Illinois, Leonard Lance, Frank LoBiondo and Christopher Smith in New Jersey, John McHugh in New York, and David Reichert in Washington. Those are the eight Republicans. There were 30 some-odd Democrats that voted ‘no.’ And these eight Republicans made this happen.
I think anybody that voted for this thing you want to talk about Sanford and violating an oath and a trust, this is such a travesty. This whole bill, this nonexistent bill is so un-American everybody who voted for it from Pelosi on down needs to be jacked out of there in the next election. That’s how bad this is. Don’t sit there and get all comfy over the fact, ‘Well, Rush, it’s not going to go anywhere in the Senate.’ That’s what we’re being told and we don’t know that for sure. Dingy Harry wants to take it up in September. Now, Dingy Harry is one of these that said it doesn’t have a chance in the House, but that’s Dingy Harry saying it and Dingy Harry might be saying it just to get some of the Republicans in the Senate to sort of go easy. Here’s Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Washington, this morning on MSNBC answering a question, the question: ‘How does the administration plan to fight this, especially since it seems like it might be a squeaker in the Senate as well?’
MITCHELL: Well, more than a squeaker. They just don’t have the votes. In fact Harry Reid has said that he’s not going to even think about bringing it up to the Senate. This vote in the House, which is a huge tribute to Nancy Pelosi and to the president’s leadership, to, you know, Phil Schiliro and Rahm Emanuel and the others and clearly David Axelrod and the others in the White House.
RUSH: That’s what it’s all about. It’s a tribute to Pelosi, a tribute to a bunch of leftist, extreme leftist radicals from Obama to Pelosi to Rahm Emanuel to whoever the hell else, and that makes it a wonderful thing, whoa look what they did. Harry Reid, ‘It isn’t going to go anywhere in the Senate, not even going to bring it up there.’ So somebody wanted to go on record as being all for this in the House, but it’s just an abomination. This is one of the most outrageous things an elective body in a representative republic, a free country, has ever come up with.
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RUSH: Big Oil says they may have to import more fuel with cap and trade, and here’s a pretty good observation. Reid says he’s not going to take it up. Wait ’til they have a heat wave in Washington. Might be the perfect opportunity for them to take it up.
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RUSH: Bloomberg News has an interesting story today. This is in relationship to the cap-and-trade bill that the House of Representatives passed with eight Republican votes late Friday afternoon. ‘America’s biggest oil companies will probably cope with US carbon legislation by closing fuel plants, cutting capital spending, and increasing imports. Under the Waxman-Markey climate bill that may be voted on today’ well, this is from last Friday, ‘refiners would have to buy allowances for carbon dioxide spewed from their plants. This is the ‘trade’ aspect. This brings Wall Street into this, which I think explains these Republican votes. I said in the last hour, ‘I really find myself in a unique, weird position here.’ You know, I’m a profound believer, supporter, defender of the free market system : capitalism. But it is apparent to me, you look at what this bill is called, how it’s titled: ‘Cap and trade.’ Trade means Wall Street selling and buying, conducting the whole aspect of the trades — and when you start trading pollution credits, carbon credits, it’s a massive business.
Wall Street is going to make out like bandits on this. This is a sop to the very people that the Obama administration and Democrats want you to believe that they hate and despise. And I think when you look at these Republicans — and here again are the names of the eight Republicans that voted for this travesty. Mary Bono in California. Mike Castle in Delaware. Mark Kirk in Illinois. Leonard Lance, Frank LoBiondo, and Christopher Smith in New Jersey. John McHugh in New York and David Reichert in Washington. As has been well established, this is undeniable, not arguable: a politician’s first objective is to get reelected, and that takes money. And the people that give you money — look at the unions and Obama. Look at everybody who gave Obama money. He’s paying ’em back with policy legislation.
They happen to be, you know, the same bedfellows so it’s not that Obama is doing something against his wishes. But I guarantee you, some of these eight Republicans — and I can’t specifically name one or more specifically but I’m just telling you my suspicion. My suspicion is that being in the Northeast, some of them, they’ve got ties to Wall Street with donations, contributions, and so forth, and that talks. That talks. So here I am ripping Wall Street. One of the reasons why is they got the bailout money. They got the TARP money. I’ve got a story coming up here in the stack about General Electric. General Electric got TARP money. I mean, some of the entities that end up getting money… It’s the same thing as the stimulus bill. They told us we had to do this to save the country, to save the world financial system, and it was like every other piece of legislation. There was a bunch of crap thrown in there that had nothing to do with the intended purpose.
So the intended purpose was a disguise. The intended purpose was a feint. The intended purpose was to save the financial system. It wasn’t in that great a danger, as we know, because when it was voted down the first time by the Republicans, it didn’t pass another two weeks and we were still around, and the world financial system was still functioning. We were told we had to pass this thing now or else face the most dire financial consequences ever. So I think the intended purpose of TARP was a feint, a smokescreen for another… Just think of it as another massive earmark bill, and the stimulus was the same thing. So these standard operating procedure in the US House — the Congress at large, the Senate and the House — does not change, did not change regardless the crisis, regardless how had been they told us the crisis was. So this story from Bloomberg is interesting.
Because Big Oil is saying, ‘Well, look, we’re going to be taxed out of existence if this thing ever becomes law. How do we avoid this? ‘It’s very easy. We close fuel plants. We cut capital spending. We don’t create any carbon. We try to reduce our carbon footprint as greatly as we can and we just import things.’ So we further weaken ourselves, make ourselves more dependent on foreign oil when the stated purpose of this debacle — cap and trade — is to, in ten or 20 years, end our dependence on foreign oil. We are supposed to, in 20 years, become entirely energy independent. And it will be just the exact opposite. As is the case with so much liberal legislation — extreme, radical liberal legislation — whether the consequences are intended or not, the exact opposite of what is intended happens, be it the Great Society, the war on poverty, you name it.
‘…ConocoPhillips Chief Executive Officer Jim Mulva said would create a competitive imbalance. ‘It will lead to the opportunity for foreign sources to bring in transportation fuels at a lower cost, which will have an adverse impact to our industry, potential shutdown of refineries and investment and, ultimately, employment,’ Mulva said in a June 16 interview in Detroit. Houston-based ConocoPhillips has the second-largest US refining capacity. The same amount of gasoline that would have $1 in carbon costs imposed if it were domestic would have 10 cents less added if it were imported…’ Well, what do you think they’re going to do? And they’re being up-front and honest about it right now what they’re going to do and that is just start importing more — which, of course, does what? Increases our dependence.
Forty-four Democrats, 44 Democrats voted against more government. Forty-four Democrats in this bill. In other words, you could say that 44 Democrats disagreed with Colin Powell. I know we didn’t hear or see Colin Powell weigh in on cap and trade. We don’t see him weigh in on any issue. But we have to presume, as a supporter of Obama, and as a supporter of more government, that General Powell stood shoulder to shoulder with the eight Republicans in the House who voted for Nancy Pelosi’s cram-down bill that nobody read because it wasn’t even written. This is a disgrace this country might want to think long and hard about. This is a national scandal. This is irresponsibility to the core. The bill was not even written, much less read, and yet it was voted on. So what we have here is central planning mechanisms are being put in place for a command-and-control economy, and the whole process was totally lacking in transparency. It’s a perfect representation of the Obama presidency. You couldn’t find… By the way, legislation like this is supposed to be on the website for five days so all of us can read it, right? It wasn’t written! No wonder the Drive-Bys, the State-Run Media are so enamored of Colin Powell. He would remake the Republican Party just as Obama would remake America. And this would destroy it. We have to assume he agreed with all this; he voted for the guy; didn’t come out against it. We have to assume these eight Republicans are Colin Powell’s kind of Republicans, don’t we? To the audio sound bites. Here Henry Waxman last Friday night on the House floor. He had this exchange with Ellen Tauscher about John Boehner.
WAXMAN: The, uh, Republican leader was yielded the balance of the time which I think amounted to around four or five minutes. He’s talked for around 20.
TAUSCHER: It’s the custom of the House to hear the leader’s remarks.
HOUSE: (wild applause)
RUSH: Right on, right on, right on. The rules of the House are that the Republican leader gets to — the minority leader gets to — speak as long as he wants on something like this, and Boehner did good. He gave a 60-minute speech and went through the climate bill page by page. Waxman tried to interrupt, which is what you just heard. So Boehner shut up Waxman really well. Listen to this.
WAXMAN: …further Parliamentary inquiry.
HOUSE: (applause)
WAXMAN: Is there any outside limit to the amount of time a leader might take? Do we have historical records that might be broken tonight? Or is this an attempt to try to get some people to leave on a close vote?
TAUSCHER: The custom of the House is to listen to the leader’s comments.
BOEHNER: Reclaiming my time, the gentleman’s had his 30 years to put this bill together, and the House is going to spend a whopping five hours debating the most profound piece of legislation to come to this floor in a hundred years. And the chairman has the audacity to drop a 300-plus-page amendment in the hopper at 3:09 a.m. this morning. Don’t you think the American people expect us to understand what’s in this bill before we vote on it?
HOUSE: (applause)
RUSH: You wonder. You really wonder. How could they know what’s in it? It wasn’t written! And it couldn’t be two separate things because this 300-page amendment actually referred to the original bill in spots. ‘Section 1, paragraph 4, delete this and replace it…’ But nobody had seen what was being deleted and what was being replaced with. It’s just an abomination.