MENENDEZ: It is our solemn duty to put aside our ideology, to turn off Rush Limbaugh and leave politics in the cloakroom. Our vote on this groundbreaking legislation, comparable to Social Security and Medicare –RUSH: Stop it, that’s all we need to hear from the guy, he’s just a buffoon, but here we are, they’re rolling, they’re on track now for their Christmas Eve at nine p.m. vote and still Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey has to tell the Republicans, stop listening to me, stop being ideological, which is all the Democrats are being here, pure 100% ideology. I got an e-mail note from a friend today, ‘Is it hopeless? Is it over? What do we do? I’d like to go out and raise some money but everybody is tapped out.’ I said raising money is not what’s necessary right now. We have had two rallies in Washington. It’s obvious that members of the Democrat Party in both the House and Senate don’t care one way or another about what the public opinion of this is. That’s been obvious for a long time. I still think, folks, what you ought to do is just pound these people with e-mails, phone calls, faxes, whatever, pound every damn one of them at their offices from now until hell freezes over, before, during, and after all of this, just keep pounding them. It’ll make you feel better, and who knows, it may have some effect at some point down the road.
But this is just outrageous what is all happening. What we are learning, there are unrepealable aspects of the bill, particularly a medical exchange plan that really sets the stage for the government takeover of health care. It cannot be repealed. A rule has been violated, the Constitution has been violated. There is so much of this that is illegal, and somebody’s going to have to bring the charge, and I expect that if it’s done, if somebody does challenge this, it’s going to have to come from some of these states that are being left out of all the goodies. In New York, Bloomberg is fit to be tied, Paterson is fit to be tied, and in Georgia, I mean they’re being left out, a lot of states are being left out of this. So a lot more detail on this as the program unfolds, but ideology, the reason Menendez goes to the floor of the Senate and says, ‘Do not listen to Rush Limbaugh,’ is because ideology is the only way we’re gonna beat this. Ideology is the only way people in mass numbers are going to be made to understand just what this is and what it’s about.
Now, we can go through individual aspects of the bill which we will do today but that’s been done ad infinitum, and it ends up sounding like mishmash, people hear it, it all runs together. The ideological approach: this is liberals, this is what liberalism is, liberalism means the loss of economic prosperity and individual freedom and so forth. That’s the message, Menendez knows it, and that’s why he is asking people to not listen to me. Dingy Harry invoked Rodney King on the Senate floor this morning.
REID: There’s a lot of tension in the Senate. I would hope that everyone would go back to their gentlemanly ways and I would hope that — I was trying to figure out how to say this, gentlemanly ways, I’ve said it to a number of people, Rodney King, let’s just all try to get along, that’s the way we need to do it, this is a very difficult time the next day or so, and let’s try to work through this.
RUSH: Which is a laugh. We’re dealing with some of the most hard-handed ideologues, mean-spirited extremists to come down the pike. And this is what they always do. When the going gets tough, can’t we all just get along? Can’t we just stop all this partisanship? I thought Obama was going to handle that. Mitch McConnell agreed with him.
MCCONNELL: Let me just add to my good friend the majority leader, he and I have an excellent relationship, we speak a number of times in the course of every day and have no animosity whatsoever, and we are working on an agreement that will give certainty to the way to end this session and hopefully the two of us together can be recommending something that makes sense for both sides in the not-to-distant future.
RUSH: All right, there’s the Republican leader in the Senate. (interruption) What, Mr. Snerdley? What? Well, I played that not just to infuriate you, I played it to inform you. Let me go back to this e-mail I got. In fact, I ought to print out the reply. I’m trying to remember the reply. The e-mail I got was somebody who’s really been invested financially in trying to stop this, has been raising a lot of money and was asking me if all is lost, and I’ll find the reply to the e-mail after the break and share it with you. Now, let’s go ahead and stick with this, let’s go to sound bites four, five, and six. This is yesterday on this program. This is me.
RUSH ARCHIVE: Now, Snerdley just said to me, ‘It violates the rules.’ Violate the rules? They’ve just stood the Constitution upside down. You think they give a rat’s rear end about violating a Senate rule on when reconciliation can and can’t be used?
RUSH: Here’s Senator Jim DeMint, Republican, South Carolina, last night on the Senate floor.
DEMINT: There’s one provision that I found particularly troubling, and it’s under Section C titled, ‘Limitation on changes to this subsection.’ And I quote: ‘It shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment, or conference report that would repeal or otherwise change this subsection.’ This is not legislation, it’s not law. This is a rule change. It’s a pretty big deal. We will be passing a new law and at the same time creating a Senate rule that makes it out of order to amend or even repeal the law.
RUSH: And this is not how Senate rules are made. Now, the language is tough, but this is how dictators operate. This is how people who know that nobody wants what they’re offering operate. People who have power and who do not and who are very well aware that they’re running against the wishes and against the grain of the people they supposedly govern make it impossible for those people to do anything about it, in an illegal way. This is not how you change the rules of the Senate. DeMint continued.
DEMINT: I’m not even sure that it’s constitutional, but if it is, it most certainly is a Senate rule. I don’t see why the majority part wouldn’t put this in every bill. If you like your law, you most certainly would want it to have force for future Senates. I mean we want to bind future Congresses. This goes to the fundamental purpose of Senate rules, to prevent a tyrannical majority from trampling the rights of the minority or of future Congresses.
RUSH: Okay, that’s Jim DeMint on the floor of the Senate last night. Now, why are they making this provision unrepealable? What we’re talking about here is the Independent Medicare Advisory Council making it impossible or difficult for future Congresses to legislate in that area, to change this. Bill Kristol points out: ‘Because the heart of the bill is the attempt to get control of our health care permanently in the hands of federal bureaucrats, who would allegedly know better than doctors and patients what’s good for them, and who would cut access to care and the quality of care so there’s more money left over for various big government liberal social programs.’ This is just outrageous what is happening.
I was telling Snerdley this morning, usually on our last day of the last show of the year, we’re not dealing with this kind of stuff, the Congress has gone home, nobody’s messing around with liberty or freedom, they’re not passing new laws, and we yuk it up and we have some jollies, and it just doesn’t seem a whole jolly time here given what is at stake, but nevertheless we’re going to try to combine both elements in the program today. But Jim DeMint is upset, but of course this doesn’t get carried much outside the Senate floor by the State-Controlled Media, so aside from people like you in this audience and readers of various conservative blogs and so forth the vast majority of the American people have no clue about this yet.
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RUSH: It’s very simple, folks. When Barack Obama and the Democrats win, America loses. Big time. Now, here’s the e-mail that I received: ‘Dear Rush. I still think with sufficient public outrage we could stop the vote in the House, but it’s proving incredibly hard to raise the money we need to reach and mobilize the people who are not in your audience. Everybody’s tapped out and resigned. Do you still think we’ll prevail?’ Here’s what I wrote back — and it was a stream-of-consciousness reply. I said, ‘Dear Such-and-Such. I said yesterday that no amount of public outrage would matter, and I believe that. We’ve never seen this before. We’ve never been involved in anything like this before. The main reason public outrage won’t work is not the public’s fault. It’s a combination of mainly a dictatorial frame of mind the Democrats all have now, and the Republican Party just refuses to get emotionally engaged here, or outraged by it.
‘Their responses are barely above a flatline — and I could point you to Mitch McConnell’s very gentlemanly remark and reply to Harry Reid who asked if we can all just be like Rodney King and ‘just get along.’ In the midst of the destruction of the US health care system, we’re obsessed with being polite, and I know why. It’s because we don’t want to anger the moderates. The moderates are afraid that if we start criticizing Democrats or Obama, that they’ll run away to the Democrats — when they’re fleeing Democrats in droves now! Now, there have been two attempts to rally people at the Capitol in opposition to this. And the reason was that e-mails, phone calls, and faxes were not having any impact. It was theorized that bodies on the ground, boots on the ground, people in the faces of members of the House and Senate was what it would take to make a difference. But those two rallies failed because they essentially didn’t happen.
‘Who knew about ’em? The mainstream media didn’t report them. Nancy Pelosi made sure that the vast majority of people that showed up at these rallies never got anywhere near the Capitol. The Democrats knew that all these protesters were being asked and cajoled to show up so they were able to tell themselves it wasn’t genuine — and the numbers reported were not all that repressive. I mean, the peasants didn’t show up with any pitchforks. And so the Democrats, they listen to all this and they hear all this hubbub and they listen to all this opposition and they know they’re getting it. But they didn’t see a whole lot of it in Washington because it wasn’t permitted to get close to them. Do not misunderstand me. The people that showed up did a great thing.
‘I’m just saying that the game was rigged before they even got there. I told this person that sent me the e-mail, ‘I’m going to urge people today to continue to flood members’ offices especially their local ones when they go home for the Christmas break.’ But we’re dealing here, essentially, with people who have a dictatorial frame of mind. The public opinion is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter. The election to them is still a year away. If this were next September or October and all this was happening, you’d have an entirely different dynamic going on. The inside-the-Beltway commentariat still doesn’t see this as anything other than just another day at the political office. I was watching the Fox News All Stars last night during the roundtable discussion. You had Steve Hayes from the Weekly Standard, Charles Krauthammer and Mara Liasson.
Hayes and Krauthammer were involved in the guts and the gory details and the ideology, and they were spelling out exactly how atrocious all this deal-making was, all this whoring, all the bribery, all the prostitution that was going on, all the buying of votes, all the buying off states, all the buying of governors and so forth. They are scoring big time points. There’s Mara Liasson, who I like. I like her. I’ve met her a couple times, but she’s typical of the inside-the-Beltway media crowd. There’s nothing special about this, other than it’s a huge piece of legislation for Obama. But there’s nothing going on here that doesn’t always happen. This is what legislation is. Senators buy votes. They trade votes. It was perfectly understandable to her that legislation had nothing to do with constituents. It was perfectly understandable to her that legislation had nothing to do with the substance of it. Legislation was all about process and the people studying this and reporting on this and the State-Controlled Media, that’s their obsession: The process of it.
‘Will Obama win? Can Obama secure a victory? Can Obama reform health care?’ They haven’t dug into the guts of this, and they ignore people who have. This will destroy the country, as you and I know it. This will destroy the greatest health care system in the world, as you and I are aware. This will forever change the relationship that you and I have with our doctors because the government’s going to be a very powerful middleman. There are death panels back in this bill. This is what Harry Reid says cannot be repealed. We are going to ration care. We’re gonna make sure that only the approved people get the kind of care that might prolong life. It’s all in there. None of this matters! It’s all about the process. It’s all about the political victory. ‘Can Obama bring it home?’ Meanwhile, the country is undergoing one of the most major transformations since its founding.
I went and looked up a number of things that the Founding Fathers found outrageous and that were the tipping point for them, the things that caused them to rebel and found this country — and they were nothing compared to what is happening in this piece of legislation alone. I know people think money, fundraising so important, and it always is. But if you have to raise money and spend right now, if you have to raise and spend money to raise temperatures on this — after all this time and all this effort, it seems unnecessary — it seems like money would not be necessary. If you look at all the polling data, don’t need to make more people aware. There’s not one poll that shows a majority anywhere in favor of this. I’ve always thought pounding the individual provisions in the bill is okay but it’s the wrong way to go, because it all becomes a blur.
I hit this ideologically at all times, and what Harry Reid has done in limiting CEO salaries of insurance company execs, limiting shareholder profits and operating expenses — if you’re just joining us and you missed that yesterday — David Axelrod assuring the left that are upset that they’re going to be forced to buy insurance from a private sector insurance company, ‘Don’t worry about it, he said. ‘We have run in there and we’ve limited CEO salaries in this legislation.’ Oh, really? They didn’t take TARP money. What gives you the right to do that? They’re just doing it. They are going to limit shareholder profits and police operating expenses. Eventually that will drive them out of business, which is the ultimate aim here. Now, there’s no other definition for this than pure fascism, which is ideological, and it needs to be called as such. Harry Reid has written language saying many of the provisions in the bill cannot be repealed.
This whole thing is un-American. It is unconstitutional, and it’s not time to be polite with this. It’s not time to be gentlemanly and let the Democrats have their sway on this. There would have been people with pitchforks at the Capitol if elected officials had felt and expressed the same degree of outrage and anger that their constituents feel and are expressing. In the end, however, I still think there’s a chance for defectors somewhere along the line, and I think at some point they’re going to have to resort to a mechanism whereby they get 51 votes instead of 60. Because I think at some point in the Senate they’re not going to be able to get 60, and the House is a whole ‘nother ballgame. But the fight is not over even if it does pass. Our guys ought to be leading the protests, carrying the pitchforks. Instead they’re saying things like they’re concerned, they’re disappointed, surprised. That doesn’t cut it because that doesn’t provide leadership and leadership is necessary. People need an outlet and a vessel for their anger in their own party.
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RUSH: Not one Democrat Senator with integrity or courage, not one. It would only take one Democrat Senator out of 60 to object to all this, this horrendous piece of legislation, and it would die, just one Democrat Senator out of 60 to show some integrity, show some courage. And nobody anywhere thinks it will happen. It’s not even being discussed. Now, what does that tell you about Democrats? And yet it is always the Republicans who are portrayed as closed-minded, walking in lockstep. What a laugh. We now see what walking in lockstep is really all about and we see what actually is important, and it’s not the country.
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RUSH: This takes me into yet another fear that I have about all this. There are a lot of things that worry me about the transformation of the country with the health care, the relationship between us and our doctors and the relationship between us and our government. But there’s also another aspect of this, and that is the relationship between us and us, between citizens. We will from now on be rivals. We will be competitors for federal money for health care for our children, permission from federal powers that be for each medical visit and procedure. This is gonna destroy, folks, the traditional American live and let live attitude toward everybody because it will inevitably become me against you. When services are fewer, when costs go higher and it’s your kid, you’re gonna become competitive with your neighbor when you have to go in and negotiate with some federal bureaucrat to see that it’s your kid that gets treated, and that’s where we’re headed.
This massive new entitlement is going to obliterate tolerance. This whole notion of live and let live, the way to summarize that is tolerance, and there isn’t going to be any more of that. Every American is going to be looking at neighbors with jealousy, resentment, and anger at whatever medical care he or she receives because not everybody’s gonna get the same. That’s the way socialism works. It never ends up that way. There is never equality of outcome; there is never sameness even though that’s the objective; there are going to be differences, and it’s going to lead to big, big problems. Every American is gonna end up being extremely judgmental about the behavior of fellow citizens that would in any way be considered risky because the attitude will be you’re taking money from my family’s future medical care.