RUSH: Did you hear about this? When I saw this I was a little surprised, and I have to catch myself now because I shouldn’t be, because this makes perfect sense. Andrew Cuomo, son of Mario “The Pious,” the late Mario “The Pious,” Democrat Party royalty, state of New York, governor. He was the best “what if” presidential candidate the Democrats have ever had. Well, running a close race there with Hillary. Except her time is still up, she might still make a run at it, but he never did. Mario Cuomo never did.
But in addition to being Democrat Party royalty — and, by the way, they made it abundantly clear that they were devout Catholics, except when it comes to abortion. But, you know, that was not wanting to impose religious views on anybody. Right. No, that’s how Mario “The Pious” — people asked him, “Well, wait a minute, you’re a devout Catholic, and you say that, privately, personally, you’re opposed to abortion, but that you don’t think you can impose your religious values. But you impose other religious values, and you impose your values on taxes on other people, and you impose your values on Big Government on people. Where do you draw your line on abortion? Why do you feel it’s not right to impose –” And, by the way, I always said to Governor Cuomo, “What is this imposition? You’re not imposing anything, why can’t you be honest about it?”
At the time there was controversy, there were several bishops that thought Governor Cuomo should be booted out of the church because of this high wire act that he had going. Anyway, he’s got his children, he’s got Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, and Chris Cuomo, who is an anchor — sorry — a narrative reader on CNN in the morning. And yesterday morning on CNN, Andrew Cuomo did a 25-minute interview with Alabama Supreme Court justice Roy Moore. And of course Chris Cuomo — it’s Chris Cuomo, not Andrew — Chris Cuomo was just livid over what they’re doing in Alabama.
Alabama, they are trying, legally, to prohibit gay marriage being legal there. And judges are defying the law, which is not new, by the way. But they’re outraged about it in this case, because the federal judges and the appellate courts are telling local judges, “Screw you. Whatever you think doesn’t fly. We have more power. We’re overruling you.” And the state of Alabama is not being permitted to peacefully implement its own laws. So it was made to order.
Here you have a young son of Mario “The Pious,” devout Catholic. Here you have personified a pro-life activist right-wing hayseed hick, NASCAR loving, probably’s got a still in the backyard judge, who wants to argue with one of the cognoscenti of the New York-Washington media elites about gay marriage, about abortion, and all of these other things. Gay marriage was actually the issue that was front and center. This argument centered around the origin of rights. Chris Cuomo made no mistake where he thinks rights come from.
He could not be more wrong. He said that our rights do not come from God, as the judge asserted, and he thinks that the judge is a backwards hillbilly hayseed, hick who doesn’t understand the law, because, as Chris Cuomo says, our laws come from man, our rights come from man, and where he got confused is that rights are not laws. But Chris Cuomo’s not alone. The concept of rights, we lost that I don’t know how long ago. In a strict definition of the word sense we lost that argument. If you want it in America, you think you have a right to it. If you really want to have fun, grab your average low-information American and start talking about the origin of rights, what they are, and where they come from, and you will be so depressed that you’ll wonder how we’ve made it this far.
The judge was patient despite Chris Cuomo. I mean, it got kind of loud. Some people thought it was rude. It was certainly contentious. Twenty-five-minute interview, Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore on Thursday, CNN’s New Day co-host Chris Cuomo discussing the judge’s refusal to adhere to a federal judge’s ruling on same-sex marriages.
“Cuomo and Moore disagreed on whether or not the federal court decision was binding to the point that it required the state of Alabama to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. But they also continued the argument to the point of where certain rights originate, to which Cuomo argued they came from man and law, and not from God.”
Judge Moore said, “I believe thatÂ’s a matter of law because our rights contained in the Bill of Rights do not come from the Constitution, they come from God.”
Well, that set Cuomo off. As it would any liberal. You mention God, you mention rights, and the liberal is gonna be set off and set out of control in outrage and anger, predictably so. Cuomo replied, “Our laws do not come from God, your honor, and you know that. They come from man.”
Judge Moore said, “Let me ask you one question. Let me ask you one question, Chris. Is the Declaration of Independence law?”
Cuomo said, “You would call it organic law as a basis for future laws off of it?”
Judge Moore said, “I would call it the organic law because the United States code calls it organic law. It is organic law because the law of this country calls it the organic law of the country means where our rights come from. And if they come from there, men canÂ’t take it away.”
That’s the point.
Cuomo said again, “Our rights do not come from God. ThatÂ’s your faith. ThatÂ’s my faith,” just like his dad. Oh yeah, but I can’t impose my faith here on my job of narrating the news to people. “ThatÂ’s your faith. ThatÂ’s my faith, but not our country. Our laws come from the collective agreement and compromise.”
Judge Moore said, “ItÂ’s not a matter of faith, sir. ItÂ’s a matter of organic law, which states, ‘We hold these truths to be held equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ And the only role of government is stated in the next sentence is to secure those rights for us. The government starts taking those rights away from us, then itÂ’s not securing and it is defiling the whole purpose of government.”
Now, the judge is absolutely right and Chris Cuomo could not be more wrong. Natural law, organic law, what have you, rights, you don’t have a right to be free because some politician tells you you do. You don’t have a right to be free because a president or a government decrees it. Only in communist or tyrannical regimes is that a question, and it’s only a question because your natural right, your natural yearning, your independence, your freedom, has been taken away from you, which was the judge’s point. The only thing a government can do is take rights away from you.
But the thing is, if they can take it away from you, it isn’t a right. If they can take it away from you, it is a law. They can’t take away your right to be free. They could put you in jail, but they can’t take away your right to it. And this discussion of what is a right versus what is a law, Chris Cuomo literally has no idea what he’s talking about. But he thinks he’s one of the few people on earth who understands it, one of the few people in the government, the country, who understands it.
Every law that’s written could be said to infringe on human rights, because every law that’s written limits behavior. Now, we get together and we decide that certain limits on behavior are called for based on having an orderly society or what have you. But if it’s all done in a democratic fashion you live with it and deal with it. If you don’t like it, you try to change it. If you’re living in tyranny, you have no way of dealing with it. Your right still exists, but it’s being denied you. And they deny you your right by passing a law or a decree claiming you’re not free. You have to do what I tell you to do.
I mean, do some people have the right to live in tyranny and others have the right to be free? Chris Cuomo must think so. If rights come from government, then people that live in communist countries don’t have the right to be free. They have the right to live in tyranny ’cause their governments have done it. Their governments have written the laws that say, “You can’t be free, you’re not free, you can’t say what you want, you can’t think what you want. If we hear about it and we don’t like it, you’re gonna go to the gulag.” Well, to him, those are rights.
Many Americans think they have a right to house on the beach. Somebody has one, I should. They have a right to a livable wage. They have a right to a nice car. They have a right to health care. No, you don’t. Health care is not a right. “Well, by God, I got a right to a lawyer.” No, you don’t have a right to a lawyer. The United States Constitution has claimed as a matter of law that everybody is entitled to legal representation if they are accused and can’t afford it. That’s not a right that you’re born with.
This is one of the ways, by the way, the left succeeded in getting so many people to support national government-run health care, the belief that it’s a right. And what is the right? “I have a right to be healthy, and I have a right to get well if I get sick.” No, you don’t. There is no such right anywhere. There’s nobody that can grant that right. You’re not born with it. Besides, it can be taken away. If it can be taken away, it’s not a right. “I have a right to whatever I want.” No, you don’t. You have to earn it.
The sad thing is, most people watching the show yesterday on CNN I would assume think the judge is so full of it that they ended up laughing themselves silly. But it is, it’s right there in the Declaration: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, natural law. We’re born with this. They are the right to life, the right to liberty, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness. That the natural state of the human being is yearning to be free and wanting to be happy. Is that not true, by the way? In this country you’d have to get people to really stop and think about it, ’cause they accept all this, take it for granted, because it’s all they’ve known.
But everybody’s pursuing happiness, however they define it. I mean, nobody actively wants to be miserable, except there are some psychological cases of people who are miserably happy, or happily miserable, whatever the phrase is. But even there, it’s people determining what it is that makes them happy. There’s no government that grants that. There’s no government that grants freedom. They can take it away, though. And that’s what they do. It’s one of the fundamental disagreements and dividing points between the left and right, by the way. All-powerful government grants you everything. You are nothing but a tissue mass. Without government giving you life and telling you what you can and can’t do and what you’re worth and not worth. People believe that.
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RUSH: For any of you who encounter people who are confused about this business of rights and laws, ask ’em if they know what the Bill of Rights are, the Bill of Rights is, ask them if they know what that is. “Well, yeah, the Bill of Rights, of course I do, it’s what I’m entitled to.” No, no, no. “The Bill of Rights, yeah, that’s my stuff.” No, no, no.
The Bill of Rights is the first 10 amendments to the United States Constitution. And those first 10 amendments to the United States Constitution have one thing in common: They tell the government what it cannot do to the citizens. The Bill of Rights, not the bill of laws, not the bill of suggestions, not the bill of hopes, the Bill of Rights details what human beings have rights to, and every one of them limits what the government can do to people.
The first 10 amendments: Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, freedom against unreasonable search and seizure, the list goes on. Freedom to not incriminate yourself at trial in the commission of a crime. They’ve got to prove it. The government — state, federal, local — has to prove it, otherwise you walk. The first 10 amendments tell people in the government what they cannot and may not and should not ever do. And those first 10 amendments are why liberals, not just, but those 10 amendments are one of the primary reasons the left wing hates the Constitution.
There is a constitutional scholar, if you can call him that. He’s not a scholar in my mind. He’s a distorter. His name is Cass Sunstein. He’s the husband of Samantha Power, who’s up there at the United Nations. He is so offended by the Bill of Rights, he’s so troubled by the Bill of Rights, so bothered by it, that he renamed them. He called the Bill of Rights the charter of negative liberties. When I first heard that, I said, “How in the world is liberty negative?” But I soon found out I was not looking at it the same way Cass Sunstein and practically every other leftist looks at it.
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RUSH: No, no. My point is that Chris Cuomo — and I would venture to say his brother, Andrew, and his father Mario, do not understand the Constitution, is my point. Look at the freedom of speech. Do they really think that Americans have freedom of speech because some men granted that right way back long ago? They must. They must believe that. So in that case they’d have to like the founders, except maybe free speech now is going too far because they want to limit speech. If it offends people, if it hurts people’s feelings, if it’s too critical of Muslims, they want to limit speech. Well, if they can limit it, it isn’t a right, folks. That’s the bottom line.
The Founding Fathers, these people were so brilliant. It’s all there in the Declaration, if you just look at that one sentence. All men are created equal. Created, God, endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. You can’t take ’em away, is what unalienable means. Right to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. Believing that, they then next write the Constitution, First Amendment, free speech, freedom of religion, whatever. They believe that right to free speech comes from God.
They were codifying it for the first time in human history that the right to say what you want is not something granted by some other man to a group of people. It comes from God, and it is that which set the stage for setting this country apart and helping define what American exceptionalism is. Do you believe the right to worship as you wish is because your government permits it, or because the Founding Fathers wrote it? Do you think you have a right to believe any religion you want? If you do, then you cannot possibly go along with the idea that some human being granted you that right.
It isn’t a law. It is a right. That’s why the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments, limit what government can do. Because the Founders knew the only thing government’s gonna do is take away rights, limit them, get in the way. And the first 10 amendments were specific in what the government cannot do. You get to the Second Amendment, liberals of course twist themselves into pretzels.
But this charter of negative liberties — and, by the way, I beg the indulgence of those of you who have been here a long time and have heard this countless times. There are new people tuning in here today. And this little tete-a-tete that Chris Cuomo had yesterday, I guarantee you most watching CNN probably thought the judge is an absolute backwards hillbilly, hayseed hick and that Chris Cuomo is the sophisticated erudite all-knowing. And it’s the other way around.
How in the world do you look at the Bill of Rights, which were written to not assign, but to acknowledge human liberty and freedom and value. How do you look at that and see it as a negative, as Cass Sunstein and his fellow left-wing constitutional scholars do? I admit when I first came across it, I was baffled. How in the world can something as beautiful, as meaningful, as unique, as brilliant as the Bill of Rights be seen as a negative? Well, if you happen to believe that the government is all-powerful, the government is the center of the universe, the government determines everything, then the Bill of Rights you would hate. You would look at the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments as some of the biggest things in your way, if you believe in big government.
If you believe government has the answer to everything, for everybody, then the Constitution is a problem. That’s why these people call it a charter of negative liberties, and I’m telling you, this is why Obama is animated and does the things he does. He does not like the limits the Constitution places on him. He doesn’t like the limitations in the Bill of Rights on him as president. Kings and leaders should not be bound by such infantile things. The people don’t know what’s best for them. They don’t know what kind of dangers can happen when they open their mouths too much. They don’t know the dangers can happen if they pick up a gun. They do not know enough to be allowed to practice religion freely.
So the first 10 amendments is a charter — the whole Constitution, actually, but the first 10 amendments becomes a charter of negative liberties because, from the standpoint of liberals, it’s negative ’cause it tells Democrats and liberals what they can’t do to people. That’s why they hate it, and that’s why they are forever trying to erase them, obscure them, water them down, ’cause they don’t like the limitations on them. They don’t like the limitations on the size of government, the power of government, the reach of government.
They want to have more power than your freedom. They want more power over you than your liberty, which you have been granted by God, by virtue of the fact that it is part of the way you are created. It is in your DNA, however you want to specify this, however way it makes sense to you. If you don’t believe in God, you got a problem in understanding this, but for those of you who believe in God, the God of creation — and, by the way, there can be evolution at the same time. I don’t want to get sidetracked with you nabobs on that.
I’m just anticipating you little liberals out there shouting at your radio, “What about evolution? What about evolution? Scott Walker! Scott Walker!” Just cram it for a second. I know you people are out there, and I know how you’re just throwing things at the radio right now, but screw it, you don’t know what you’re talking about. The point is, the United States is indeed special, it is indeed blessed. The United States is indeed unique. The United States is indeed one-of-a-kind. The United States of America is indeed exceptional precisely because its founding documents and Founding Fathers were astute enough and brilliant enough to acknowledge the rights inherent to being a human being and that no government — which is just a group of men, just another group of people — shall have the right to take these rights away, shall have the power.
No group of men will have the power to take away your freedom. We the founders are writing it so, because we understand from where these rights come. It was brilliant. And from the beginning of the existence of the Constitution, it’s been argued over, because obviously big statist liberals, big-government liberals and dictators and tyrants and so forth, this is a problem for them. That’s why the United States is a target. People have been trying to chip away, defeat the United States forever because when we say it’s an outpost for freedom, it’s a shining city on the hill, it’s a beacon or whatever, it is. It’s the only place. That’s why everybody wants to come here.
Dictators the world over do not sleep peacefully knowing there is a United States because there is every day living testimony to their fraud. The United States is living testimony and living example to the failure of socialism, communism, tyranny, no matter how good the intentions of the leaders. And so it must be snuffed out.
Now, you get a guy like Obama, who was taught the kind of drivel and bilge he was taught, like other people of his generation growing up. There’s nothing special here. There’s nothing exceptional here. It’s a racist, sexist, bigoted country, and it’s about time that we get even with all of these past 230 years of injustice. And that’s what the Obama administration’s all about. That’s why what happened with the Supreme Court in the first case in Obamacare was so disappointing because Obamacare is clearly, to a layman reading the document, unconstitutional.
The government cannot make us buy something. Until now. But to get around that, the Supreme Court went along with the idea that they’re not really making us buy anything. They’re taxing us if we don’t buy something. Six of one, half dozen of the other. Semantic argument. The bottom line is, according to the Constitution, they don’t have anywhere near the power to have the United States government administer probably over half of what it’s involved in.
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RUSH: I got an e-mail from somebody who thinks he’s caught me. “Hey, Rush, what about homosexuals and the right to work? Are you telling me that the right to work is something…? ‘Cause they weren’t allowed to work until government came along.” No, no. You’re missing the point, sir. The Constitution doesn’t address homosexuals. The right to work is a concoction born of the creation of unions.
You do not have a right to a job.
Nobody does.
Now, if somebody tells you, “You can’t work at a certain place because you’re homosexual,” sorry, that’s the government writing a law. That’s not a government creating a right. So when the government comes along and says, “Gays must be hired,” that’s not a right. That is a law, and it is to correct a violation of an existing right, which is entailed in freedom. But nobody has a right to a job. Nobody has a right to an income. Nobody has a right to health.
You have a right to live.
You have a right to life.
Unless you are aborted.
Try to figure that out within all of this. You have a right to live, but nobody has to give you a job. Nobody has to give you a “livable wage.” Those are not rights. They may be things society mutually agrees are good, and which society’s legal representatives would debate and pass a law and the president would sign it, and it would become law. You’d have many people disagreeing with it, claiming government doesn’t have the power to set a living wage (and shouldn’t) because, who has that kind of power and who gets to define it and all that.
But those are arguments that societies have, free societies have. And when you lose, in a free society, you live to fight another day. If you lose. It’s the same thing in court. The legal system is not about, when you get right down to it — and this is gonna blow you up again. I could make the claim that the legal system is not about justice, that the legal system even vaguely would not be about fairness. The way the legal system work, justice is everybody gets their day in court. But beyond that, there are no guarantees.
There are too many variables, and that’s why the burden of proof is on the accusers and those who issue charges. They have to prove it in our system. Now, I know there’s corruption, and I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the structure here. You have a right to a fair trial. It doesn’t mean that you’re gonna be found innocent. This stuff is… Some people think it’s way complicated. It isn’t, if you have an underpinning or ability to look at things with logic and reason.
There’s no right to an income. There’s no right to a certain income. There’s no right to a job. If there were a right to a job, you’d create your own. Nobody could stop you — unless you’re breaking the law do get it, and then you’d get away with it ’til you got caught. Nobody has to give you a job. If you think somebody has to give you a job, you want the government to have the power to force somebody to give you a job. That’s not it. We’re not talking rights there.