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RUSH: Yesterday in Washington, the Christian Science Monitor breakfast — (interruption) You know what’s coming? Senator Trent Lott, former Senator Trent Lott, Republican, Mississippi, was the guest, and he was speaking about immigration reform and told a story about immigration reform and the Republicans’ attempt to do it in 2007.

LOTT: My phones were jammed for a week or two. Rush Limbaugh gave out my phone number. We lost that vote in 2007 on a procedural vote. I thought we were gonna be able to win that. But over the weekend Rush Limbaugh labeled it amnesty, and labor got a hold of the Democrats and said, “No, we don’t want these workers coming in with these visas.” So Democrats were coming in and voting “no” because of labor. Republicans were coming in and voting “no” because of amnesty, from Rush Limbaugh. And I’m in the well of the Senate with Jon Kyl and Lindsey Graham, not two notorious liberals, but also Ted Kennedy, Dianne Feinstein and Harry Reid. The six of us are working the vote, and we lost. You know, that was one of the most mind-boggling things.


RUSH: Look at that, and it’s all being chalked up to me because I called it what it was. And here it is seven years later, and he’s at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast blaming your beloved host, blaming me, Rush Limbaugh. I didn’t give out his phone number. I don’t do that. I don’t give out people’s phone numbers. I’ve done it two or maybe three times to make a point to prove something. If anybody’s phone number was ever given out it would have been the switchboard number.

As a policy I don’t give phone numbers because I know what’s gonna happen when I do that, and I don’t do it. I’ve never been into that kind of thing. I’ve never given out numbers other than a couple times to demonstrate to the media what would happen if I did, a switchboard shutdown. But look at this (imitating Lott), “Yeah, I was in the well of the Senate, Jon Kyl, Lindsey Graham, Ted Kennedy, Dianne Feinstein, Harry — see, that group means it must have been a good bill. Why, look at all of us assembled here. We got two Republicans and me, and then we got Feinstein and Harry Reid and Ted Kennedy and Rush Limbaugh’s out there calling it amnesty.”

I’m gonna tell you, folks, it wasn’t me; it was you. You, without any prompting. I didn’t have to give out any phone numbers. I’ll never forget 2007. It was summertime and they were trying to sneak this in. If you want a history of this, let me briefly remind you, we’re coming up on the end of the Bush administration. They had been shooting for this since 2003-2004. They’d been trying to get some version of amnesty because, remember, the early stages of this, Karl Rove and the Republican establishment, thought that if they could security the Hispanic vote, they could eliminate the Democrat Party as a viable existing political machine.

They really thought that if they could get the credit for immigration reform, they would wipe out the Democrat Party. That was their objective and they wouldn’t admit that to me up front in so many words. But they tried and tried, and they finally, 2007, the House of Representatives, if you recall, had opposed Bush at every turn. I’ll never forget, this was a problem because I had people calling here asking me to explain, why don’t the Republicans do this? I said we got a problem here in that a lot of people House Republicans do not support the White House agenda, and it happens to be the president and the White House is their party, and this is not good for party loyalty, these members of the House opposing this.

It’s not common, but in 2007 there was a desire to relent and join Bush on this because we were nearing the end of his term and the presidential campaign for 2008 was about to gear up and so they made one last push for it in the summer of 2007. What Trent Lott’s talking about, it wasn’t me, all of you, I mean, people all over this country were barraging Washington, just melting the phone lines there. I didn’t give out his phone number.

I didn’t have to give out his phone number. People looked it up on their own they were so opposed to what was going on. But even the same thing is happening today. I’m gonna get a little bit ahead of myself here, but let me just wet your whistle a little bit on this immigration business, so-called government shutdown. I’m gonna say it again. This whole government shutdown thing is an excuse that the Republicans are hiding behind. They’re using the government shutdown and the disaster that will result for them if they do this as an explanation for why they can’t stop the president. “Oh, no, that would require defunding. That would require a shutdown. We would get creamed, oh, God.”

And so Obama will have smooth sailing.

Now, the conclusion, you go back, here’s Trent Lott, you may not know this, but earlier this week Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee in 2012 said that the Republicans need to swallow hard and just go all-in on comprehensive immigration reform and beat Obama to the punch. Not this piecemeal stuff like Obama’s doing, but just do ’em all. You know what the Republicans wanted to do in 2007. Mitt Romney earlier this week encouraging full-fledged pedal-to-the-metal comprehensive immigration reform. The obvious conclusion is that the Republicans favor it. We know the Chamber does, and that’s a source of donor money for them. They favor it. The Republican establishment does, and the government shutdown and the threat of damage in the polls and how the public — look at it this way, folks.

In 2010 the Democrats got shellacked in the midterm elections. Now, follow me on this. In 2010 the Democrats got shellacked. They lost 700 seats down the ballot. House, Senate, statehouse, governorship, down to local town and council, all those races, 700 seats. The Republicans would have won the presidency in 2012 if four million of their voters had not decided to stay home. In 2014, the Democrats get shellacked again. So in 2010 and 2014 the Democrats have lost over 1,300 seats, over a thousand seats at least. It’s a disaster what’s happened.

Mary Landrieu is gonna get shellacked by 24 points. You’ve got two Democrats coming up now, Schumer and Harkin, admitting that Obamacare was a big mistake. The Democrat Party is falling apart. That, to me, is the real secret of all this. The Democrat Party is imploding. Not to say that they’re not having success implementing their agenda, they have the White House, but in terms of just a political machine, they are imploding. And the Republicans are afraid of a poll if they are accused of shutting down the government?

None of this makes any sense. Unless you conclude that the Republicans actually favor the Republican establishment, actually favor, say, comprehensive immigration reform. We’ve got enough evidence here to suggest that they do. Even the situation of Ferguson, the situation in New York, that’s bad for the Democrats, and I can spell out a number of ways for you. Charlie Rangel’s admitting my God, the election of Obama didn’t matter, it might have made things worse.

Can you imagine the expectations were, election, first black president, now where they are? And how about this little contradiction. I was thinking about this last night. What do the Democrats believe in? Big Government. And what do you get with Big Government? You get power. And what do you get with power and Big Government? You get force. And so here come the cops, and what do the liberals hate? Why, they hate the cops using force. But yet on the other hand they’re all for the state. They’re all for Big Government. They want the government using whatever force it is to take our taxes.

They want the government using whatever force is required to make sure the Tea Party doesn’t get tax exempt status. They want the government to use power everywhere they can, and then when the cops come along as representatives of the state and basically behave in ways the left says they support, big state, big power — look, I’m telling you, folks, the Democrat Party could be put on the Republicans if the Republican Party had any sense of what was going on and any desire to wipe them out. They could be put on the ropes here.

Nobody favors what has happened. Obamacare, amnesty, you name it, any Obama policy, there is public approval in a majority sense for any of it. And the Republicans are afraid that if they stop Obama they’re gonna be accused of shutting down the government and they’re gonna be hated? In 2010, landslide loss, Democrats. In 2014, landslide loss, Democrats. We shut down the government last year and won in a landslide this year. Go figure.

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