RUSH: I’m realizing some of you might not a-heard it if the local EIB affiliates cut away to cover the president who also appeared shortly after this program began. And one of the themes my opening comments was reacting to everywhere I’m seeing in the media that Obama finally backed down. “Obama caved. Yes, he did! We talked him back down. He no longer… He can’t tell the Catholic Church what to do. Obama got the message. Obama, he’s slinking away in shame.” I said, “No, he’s not,” and no, he did not cave in any way, shape, manner, or form. “Obama offers a compromise proposal said to be respectful of religious concerns.” Now, look at this. The right to religious liberty in this context is unequivocal in our country and in the Constitution.
Since when does a president have the power to threaten to issue a rule gutting religious liberty and then claims the power to make compromises on that issue? 
He doesn’t have the power to do anything that he did today. He doesn’t have the power to dictate that anybody, anywhere, provide taxpayer-funded abortion or abortion services, or contraception. He doesn’t have the power. And particularly with the separation of church and state and the Bill of Rights. The government just can’t get in religion in any way, shape, manner, or form. But when it’s religion and it’s the Catholic Church and it’s Obama telling them, “Hey, we know you don’t like abortion, but guess what? You’re gonna have to start paying for ’em! Ha-ha-ha-ha.”
He can’t do that. Then he comes along and offers a compromise. “Okay, we’ll shift my demand that this be done to the insurance companies,” and everybody says, “Good, we beat him back!” No, you didn’t. Nobody beat Obama back on this. He’s just now telling another group he has no legal authority over what they’re gonna have to do. He can’t any more tell the Catholic Church what they have to do than he can tell insurance companies what they have to do. Not by fiat. The president does not have the kind of power Obama is wielding. But he’ll get a with it as long as nobody tries to stop him. Recess appointments when there aren’t any recesses?
Fine, he’ll do it! If the Senate is not gonna stop him, if he’s gonna make recess appointments when we’re not even in recess and the Senate accepts it? Why stop, if you’re him? Just because it’s unconstitutional doesn’t mean that that alone is going to disallow him from doing it. People rob banks even though it’s against the law. And if we stop trying to catch bank robbers, a lot more people would be robbing banks. If we stop trying to catch murderers, a lot more people would commit murder. By the same token, the law doesn’t stop people from doing things. It’s the enforcement that does.
So if the Senate’s not gonna enforce its own rules and stand up for itself, Obama’s gonna keep getting away with this. So the Catholic Church did stand up. They said, “You can’t make us do this. This is outrageous.” Obama says, “Okay, fine, fine. I’ll move on. I’ll make the insurance companies do it.” At the end of the day, he’s still mandating that a business or an industry over which he has no legal authority whatsoever must now, at his direction, make available free conception and abortion-related services. He doesn’t have this authority. He didn’t have the authority to make the initial demand; he doesn’t have the authority to make the “compromise.”
And this is how we lose our liberty and how we lose the Constitution. The suggestion that Obama has the power to alter that which he doesn’t have the power to do in the first place, is unacceptable. This is I guess another way of illustrating this is — and this is exactly what happened today, by the way. Obama does something that’s so abhorrent to people that they stand up and say, “You can’t do that.” Making Catholic Church pay for, fund, make available abortion services, contraception services. He doesn’t authority to do that. But the moment he backs down in their minds and shifts the responsibility insurance companies, people say, “Okay, fine. Good.”
He doesn’t have the authority to do either. He got away with it. He just switched the victim in this case. So just like the woman who got angry (in my estimation at the wrong thing) in Wyoming when they wouldn’t let her on the airplane, people today who think President Obama got beat back are missing the point. He wins big. He has just codified now the notion that taxpayers, via insurance companies or whatever, can be forced to provide whatever he demands be provided. And that whoever pays for it, at whatever price he suggests or demands, will become the law of the land. This is not the United States of America. This is not the US Constitution.
And if people think they have won when Obama backs off from making the church do it, when he had no authority to do that in the first place? If you think that you’ve won because you’ve shifted this now to the insurance companies? You haven’t won anything. He’s still exercising the same unconstitutional power. He’s still making edicts he has no authority and no power to do. That’s why in the opening monologue I was railing against this notion that there’s been a giant cave here. There’s no compromise. There’s no negotiation. Obama is not empowered to interfere with religious liberty, pure and simple, but he’s gotten away with it here in spades. And this illustrates by the way…
This is a little microcosm: This illustrates the danger of Obamacare at large. Everything can be called a matter of preventative care. The way he’s selling this, the way they’ve done this, Obama and the White House love to say, “This mandate’s about preventative care.” This is from their fact sheet that they just released on this today. “Under the new policy to be announced today, women will have free preventive care that includes contraceptive services no matter where she works.” So we’re not even talking about abortion now. We’re not even talking about the killing of a baby. We’re talking about “preventive care.” So under that rubric, Obama’s a savior! Obama is a hero!
“He is preventing illness. What he’s doing is good. What he’s doing is filled with love and compassion and goodness,” they want us to believe. And so he can tell us how to live every aspect of our lives to “prevent” us from getting sick. Whatever he can redefine as “preventive medical care,” he can make us do. If that involves what you can and can’t eat, where you can and can’t breathe, where you can and can’t so-called pollute the air? The authority that he’s gonna end up with after this, if it’s fully implemented, is genuinely frightening and shocking scary. “Preventive care” the new definition is: Keeping women from being “punished” with babies.
Because as we heard today from Gwendolynne Moore: Pregnancy leads to the destruction of families. And so Obama’s coming in to save the day, saving families, saving women’s health, preventive care by making abortion available, contraception available, paid for by whoever he makes pay for it, provided by whoever he demands provide it. So there was no cave. There was no beating Obama back. There was no winning the day in any way, shape, manner, or form.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I just remembered during the break what our first caller had to be referring to in the opening monologue that some of you might have missed if the local station cut away to listen to Obama, to carry Obama. I went through litany of things the Democrat Party is famous for telling us we can’t do, freedoms that they tell us we don’t have, things that we can’t do. Like you can’t throw a beach ball or a Frisbee or football on the beach in LA County ’cause one person mighta got hit in the head! So now we can’t do it.
They tell us we’re the party of “no,” and they’re the ones proscribing all of these activities that used to be common, everyday freedoms. So what we’ve done, I told Koko, “Look, I can’t go back and repeat hours. I could do it, but we want to keep moving forward.” So Koko has posted, already, the first hour at RushLimbaugh.com for those of you who missed it ’cause your station carried Obama. It’s now up, you can read it, see it. The transcription is there, and the audio from the opening hour, as well as those of you in the media who want to be able to misquote it. It’s there for you as well.
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Okay, Lee in New York City, thank you for waiting. You’re next on Open Line Friday. Hello.
CALLER: How are you, Rush? It’s an honor to speak to you.
RUSH: Thank you very much, sir, I appreciate that.
CALLER: As you were saying, you’re spot on with your analysis there. This administration has been doing this from the very beginning. It’s almost like dealing with your child where you set a curfew when your child wants to go out. You set a time, and the child tells you two hours later than what your curfew time is, and then you back off and give him the extra hour you never planned on giving them. This is the same as Obama and his administration. They always ask for way more than what they’re intentionally looking for, knowing that when they back off, they’re still going to reach the middle ground goal that they were remember originated wanting to attain.
RUSH: Standard negotiating tactic. The thing is, this bunch doesn’t stop. They’re pushing this envelope you’re talking about every day. There’s no breathing room! We don’t have time to catch our breath. Every day. They are expanding the scope of Obama’s own personal power every day.
CALLER: And that’s the purpose of it, too. No one can get together and complain about a certain topic because every day it’s a new one.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: Every day, every week. Just like when they make their controversial announcements, always on a Friday afternoon when everybody’s on their way home and going away for the weekend and nobody hears about what mandate or what thing he did on a Friday that he knew he wouldn’t be able to get. But since he did it on a Friday afternoon, nobody hears it.
RUSH: Well, that’s true. I’ll tell you what the challenge is now. The requirement now is to wake up average, ordinary citizens who don’t pay attention to this kind of stuff this far out from elections. It’s time to call people’s attention to the daily erosion of simple, never-before-even-considered-challengeable liberties and freedoms. We’re losing them each and every day — and it’s not by accident. It’s not by some bumbling guy who’s in over his head. It’s happening by design. And, furthermore, this guy has told us he intends to do all this. All we have to do is have the courage to believe what he says. He says he doesn’t like the country and wants transform it? He’s doing it.
RUSH: Folks, to sum up here: From the top of the program here to the conclusion, the major focus today was Obama supposedly caving on the Catholic Church providing abortion services and contraception. The problem with all of this mandate stuff was never birth control. The problem with it was never really abortion. It is the loss of individual liberty and freedom. It’s government control, asserted unconstitutionally by the president. It continues. Be vigilant.