RUSH: Now, there’s an interesting post today at Red State. I want to spend some time on this because I find it fascinating. Red State: ‘So, expecting to pick up a number of seats by ‘newbies,’ what do GOP leaders in Washington want to ensure?’ They are making a move for Republican insiders to provide staff for all of these candidates who are going to win for the first time. This is according to Roll Call. ‘Eric Cantor’s staff added, ‘There’s a lot of important work to get done right out of the gate, so it’s important that newly elected Republicans have access to experienced, competent staff so that they can hit the ground running.’
‘According to Roll Call, ‘[a] Republican aide confirmed leadership’s interest in having staff that works well with Boehner to move the agenda forward.’ And even better, the lobbyists and strategists are in on the act, as well — one lobbyist saying, ‘[y]ou want to be sure that the newbies, when they hit town, do not necessarily bring their campaign staff to run their Congressional offices, because in some cases they are totally ill-equipped.” Do you understand what this means? You got all of these freshmen that are going to emerge victorious, the Republican leadership are saying, ‘Fine and dandy that you’ve won, but don’t bring your staff here. We’ll staff you because your staff doesn’t know the ways and the workings and the intricacies, how things get done here in the House of Representatives.’ And this little bit of a red flag goes up. The dirty little secret here is, if I may be so bold, the Republican Party has nothing to do with the Tea Party. The Republican Party did not inspire the Tea Party. The Republican Party kept its distance from the Tea Party at first. The Republican Party has not inspired any of the ideas in the Tea Party. I’m talking about Republican leadership. It’s not universal. There are some leaders that saw it early on and got involved with it, but the basic premise here is that it is the Tea Party that is causing the Republican Party to benefit.
I think Peggy Noonan got it right the other day when she said it this way: The Tea Party has saved the Republican Party. And so now the Tea Party people, who have run successful campaigns and are going to win are now being told, ‘By the way, all of that, forget it, when you get here, let us staff you.’ And what needs to happen is new blood needs to finally get involved in Washington. These people are gonna win and need to bring their own staff. Trent Lott has said that the Republicans need to get their hooks into these Tea Party yokels ASAP, as soon as possible. The Roll Call headline: ‘GOP Wants Insiders to Staff Outsiders — Leaders Recruiting Top Aides for New Members.’ Now it’s Roll Call, and we’ll allow here for a little bit of editorial leeway because I’m sure that creating a rift in the Republican Party is something the people at Roll Call would like to do. But it doesn’t necessarily surprise me that there’s an element or grain of truth in this.
The Democrats, because they have been the target of the Tea Party, they have come to terms with what the Tea Party is, they know who they are, they know what they’re facing with the Tea Party, they know what a force it is. The Democrat Party knows full well just exactly who they’re dealing with in the Tea Party, and that’s why they’re doing everything they can to destroy the Tea Party. That’s why the Democrats, every organization, the media, congressional House, Senate, state, whatever organization the Democrats have, everybody is targeting the Tea Party and their candidates and they have been because they understand what the Tea Party is all about. They’ve had no choice and had to deal with it. My good friend Andy McCarthy makes a good point here. The Republican Party has been riding the wave. They haven’t really had to understand the Tea Party. Except for the handful of establishment types the Tea Party took out, the Republican Party has been pretty silent, sitting around just watching and benefiting.
So the Democrats know full well the Republicans been riding the wave, they’ve been sitting around and benefiting from the work of the grassroots people in the Tea Party. But they’re not threatened by it, at least openly. I think privately they are. We’re talking about the ruling class inside the Beltway. These are outsiders. They are threatened by it. They are trying to massage it so that these newbies arrive in town and immediately adopt current staff. The whole staff argument is interesting as it relates to term limits. The supporters of term limits say you’ve gotta get these career politicians out of there after a certain amount of time. A counterargument to that has been, well, yeah, but if you don’t get rid of the staff you’re really not doing much. The staff is perpetual, it doesn’t change, and the staff is as involved — the staff is who reads the legislation. The staff is who writes it, for crying out loud. Members of Congress, particularly in the Senate hardly do any work at all. The staff behind the scenes does it all. The staff writes questions for senators to ask candidates and nominees during confirmation hearings.
So the Republican leadership wants to have their own people inside these offices, the new offices so that what’s going on there can be reported to the leadership, what the new conservative members are up to. Oh, no, Snerdley, do not doubt me on this. That’s why this is a big story. Everybody in the professional political establishment, everybody for one reason or another has trepidation about the arrival of Tea Party people. Let’s put it this way. This analogy is admittedly flawed. But if your company was going to have a bunch of new hires that were essentially homeless, and the homeless were gonna invade your office, you’d be saying, ‘What are we going to do? We can’t let these people run the show.’ So you would want to do whatever you could to protect yourself from what you think these stupid homeless are going to do. In a professional sense, these outsiders are not political professionals and what they bring to town has gotta be at least spied on, checked, understood, or stopped. ‘Rush, are you trying to dispirit people?’ No. Never am I trying to dispirit anybody. The exact opposite. You want to know what we’re up against, I’m telling you what we’re up against. The election is step one. Ruling class is ruling class.
I think it’s a highly interesting piece, very interesting piece here, and the Republicans… there are going to be massive changes. If the Republicans get 60 seats in the House of Representatives, I mean that’s a big, big change, and nobody likes big, big change, and some Republicans are not prepared to deal with it. I think the Tea Party could very well sneak up on Republicans as it snuck up on the Democrats a long time ago. The circumstances that are resulting in this massive electoral victory are not business as usual, but the business-as-usual crowd wants to keep it as business as usual. D-Day for the Democrats is November 2nd. There’s also a D-Day for certain members of the Republican leadership, and that’s November 3rd. I don’t think they understand. The objective of the Tea Party is not just to win these elections. When they get to town, they’re serious about what they think needs to be done and what they’re going to try to do to get it done. It’s going to be fascinating to watch.
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RUSH: From the Roll Call article, a ‘[a] Republican aide confirmed leadership’s interest in having staff that works well with Boehner to move the agenda forward’ with the newbies who are arriving. Now, Snerdley just took a call. The caller will not go on the air. The caller says that he is… It’s a he or she? (interruption) Don’t know. Snerdley’s on the phone screening calls. The staffer said that he or she… (interruption) It’s a male. He is being lined up for a Tea Party winner this week. An existing staffer in the House is being lined up for a Tea Party winner this week. The staffer is afraid to go on the air, his voice will be recognized, but he confirmed to Snerdley every detail that we are discussing. He also said he couldn’t believe that we are actually doing this, that we are actually discussing this on the air.
Why did he say…? (interruption) He couldn’t believe that we were talking about it and thus exposing it? (interruption) Oh, so it’s something that needs to be exposed. Oh, so the staffer is not crazy about this? (interruption) Oh. Ohhhh. Well, now, again, staffer won’t go on the air, and we can’t confirm it’s really a staffer. This is somebody calling and saying — and, remember, we have to do a caveat here. Anybody can call a radio talk show and say anything. Anybody can call a radio talk show and claim to be anybody and say anything. So with that caveat, we mention this. Now, he has provided Snerdley with ways to verify his identity. So he clearly wants this story to be confirmed as true, and he’s saying the Tea Party newbies had better be on the lookout because the objective is gonna be to get them to be staffed up with existing staff members willing to promote the agenda as it exists now.
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RUSH: John in Detroit, you’re next on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Dittos, Rush, from Detroit.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I wanted to address the established Republican leadership in the Senate trying to staff our new Republican newbies and start to mold them. Do you remember the Gang of 14 with John McCain?
RUSH: Oh, yeah.
CALLER: Well, we need our own Gang of 14 featuring those newbies, you know, and act as our Tea Party voting bloc. You know, they need to stick together with their principles that got them there, and not be afraid to push the current Republican leadership around. And I think if they do that and act as a voting bloc force, they’ll make a lot of people happy, and then we can move our own agenda.
RUSH: Well, that’s what the Blue Dogs tried to do on the Democrat side.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: You know, it’s a little bit of a risky strategy because the way of the House is the way of the House on both sides, and new arrivals… Have you ever asked yourself…? Let me go at this a different way. Let’s go back to 1994 and the freshman class. Have any of you ever taken time to ask why that freshman class left so soon? You realize that there aren’t that many members of the freshman class of 1994 still there? Why did they leave? I mean, the ’94 freshman class was made up of what you would have to say were the forerunners of Tea Partiers. I met a bunch of them. They’d come to my TV show. These were not inside the Beltway people. I would ask ’em: ‘Well, what are you going to do about X?’ ‘Well, we just gonna change it.’ It was simple as pie. ‘We’re just gonna change it.’
But they found it very difficult to change things, and so they left. A lot of people just went back to their gigs. They served their two or three terms then left. Very few of them are still there. Some are but very few of them. Some of them abided by term limits, too. One of the things is that politics is a business like any other, and there are procedures for rising to the top. In that business, just like there is in your business. I mean, you want to become president of the company you gotta do what the board of directors, what the company expects. There’s a game you have to play; there’s a role that you have to fulfill. It’s not always that mavericks climb all the way to top, and these procedures at times can seduce everybody, or anybody. So it will be very, veeery interesting to watch how the newbies, the victors on Tuesday, end up assimilating in the House, starting in January when they’re sworn in.
Of course they’ll go to their freshman orientation, and that will happen sometime in late October, early November. I went to the freshman orientation in 1994. That’s where I was made an honorary member of that freshman class. It was at Camden Yards. And the media was there in full force, and I remember standing up telling those freshmen exactly what I’m saying today. I don’t change. I had female infobabes at the New York Times come up to me and ask, ‘Do you really think of the press this way?’ ‘Yeah, I do. I think you’re biased in favor of the Democrats, I think you resent the fact these people won and you’re gonna give ’em hell and you’re gonna treat ’em like interlopers.’ ‘You really think that?’ ‘Yeah, I do. I know that’s exactly that’s how you’re gonna operate. That’s why I told ’em to be on the lookout for you.’
I forget, it might have been Kit Seelye at the New York Times asked me. I forget who. Don’t quote me. I don’t know who it was. But there was a bunch of them. A female reporter for the Washington Post was sitting at my table. They came down and sat down on the floor on one knee next to me with their notepads asking me these questions. At the freshman orientation, what happens? The orientation means the leaders, people that run the show, come and tell you how it happens. They come and tell you how the House works. They come and tell you what you gotta do. ‘Here’s how you go and this is where you’re gonna get your staff’ and this sort of thing, and the newbie is by definition newbie.
Doesn’t know diddly-squat. Comes in with a lot of rosy ideals and so forth, and then meets the reality of the way the place works. That’s why I say that the election is one thing, but starting on November 3rd that’s a whole different phase of this, and it will be interesting to watch how the assimilation takes place. By the way, this is not… I don’t want you to misunderstand me here. I’m not being critical per se of the leadership and how it operates. This is what leadership does. They’re the leaders for a reason. They’ve been elected leaders by the members of the House. They’re going to be running for their own reelections as Speaker, whip, what have you. And they’re a going to do whatever they have to do to win those elections and if they win and they have the power, then guess what?
They run the place. Pelosi runs the place. You see how far the Blue Dogs got. The Blue Dogs, the whole reason they were there was to give Pelosi the majority. Rahm Emanuel ran around the country and made sure that conservative Democrats ran in conservative districts across the country, beating Republicans, so that they’d have a (D) by their name, give Pelosi the majority and then she ran the shop. And the Blue Dogs, whether they hung together or not, had not much to say about it — and Pelosi ended up hating them, if you recall. And yet they were Democrats. It’s the way of the world. I’m just letting you know that it’s going to happen again. As we keep a sharp eye.