But the reasoning that the U.S. Supreme Court used provides, I think, the reason why all of these lawyers are lining up to get ready for the aftermath of this election, and it is the equal-protection-under-the-law clause, and it has to do… The best way to illustrate it would be “equal protection under the law.” Let’s say in Florida, just to pick a state, you have numerous ways of voting. In some places we still have punch cards, some places paper ballots and absentees, early balloting is whatever, then we’ve got touch screens — and if the race is close, just as an example, in Florida again, what the Bush vs. Gore decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court in December of 2000 opens up is the possibility for a losing candidate to sue and ask for a recount and invalidate the election on the basis that since not everybody used the same ballot, that they were not afforded equal protection under the law.
Some people have a tougher time with touch screen, for example, than with punch cards and those people had a tougher time with touch screens, were not given equal protection under the law because we have different kinds of ballots in this state. This is one of the reasons all the lawyers are lining up, and I’ll have more on this. I’ve gotta take a break here pretty soon, but check out this AP story from Ron Fournier today: “Senator Kerry has a simple strategy if the presidential race is in doubt on November 3rd, the day after the election, and that strategy is: do not repeat Al Gore’s mistakes. Unlike the former vice-president, who lost a recount fight and the 2000 election, Kerry will be quick to declare victory on election night and begin defending it. He also will be prepared to name a national security team before knowing whether he’s secured the presidency. ‘The first thing we will do is make sure everybody has an opportunity to vote and every vote is counted,’ said Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter. ‘We will be ready to hit the ground running and begin a fresh start in this country, given that so many critical issues are before us.’
“Six so-called ‘SWAT teams’ of lawyers and political operatives will be situated around the country with fuelled-up jets awaiting Kerry’s orders to speed to a battleground state. The teams have been told to be ready to fly on the evening of the election to begin mounting legal and political fights. No team will be more than an hour from a battleground.” So it looks to me like that no matter what happens on election night, Kerry is going to declare victory and then begin legal maneuvering in order to get there, and this (program observer interruption). What, Mr. Snerdley, what? Well, Doug Hattaway is pretty much this (program observer interruption). I didn’t hear that. Where did he say this? Doug Hattaway. Doug this (program observer interruption). Well, it’s a strategy. Doug Hattaway, who was a former Clintonista, now with the Kerry campaign, said on Fox that’s what they’re going to do, just declare victory. Even if it’s 53-47 Bush, they’re going to declare victory and claim there’s fraud, because there will be close elections somewhere. All they need is one state or one precinct where there are close elections and go and prove fraud and tie everything up, and this all stems from Bush v. Gore. You watch, folks. They’re going to use this equal-protection clause and say that that means ballots have to be uniformly the same, and where does that stop, across the country, just in one state, throughout precincts or what have you.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
All right, I’ll never forget this. George Will has a column about this today, about the Supreme Court decision, Bush v. Gore, in December — I guess December 12th, yeah — December 12th, 2000, which ended the fiasco in Florida. I remember spending a lot of time. The legal advisor here at our legal division, F. Lee Levin was extremely concerned about this and sent me a bunch of things to share with you on it, and Levin had some pieces published in National Review Online as a result of this, and there were many people on the conservative side, “We liked the outcome but we were worried about how they got there.” And basically what they did, the Supreme Court came to the conclusion that the selective hand counts in Florida violated the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws.
You can’t go hand counting some ballots while you don’t hand count them all, and that’s the basis under which they stopped the recounting and the runaway Florida Supreme Court. “It’s unclear why — with the different vote tabulation systems from county to county, with different levels of accuracy — this line of reasoning wouldn’t render Florida’s entire electoral system unconstitutional, or, for that matter, the nation’s electoral system unconstitutional. In fact, all of life can be considered a violation of the equal-protection clause, which is why the clause has traditionally been the Swiss army knife of liberal jurisprudence fit for achieving any result, however arbitrary.” That’s a quote from NRO, and we have a number of people who have been writing about this ever since.
With all these lawyers gathered around now and the Kerry S.W.A.T. teams to be deployed with fueled private jets, no more than an hour away from battleground state locations where there might be fraud, I think it’s worth our time here to explore on what basis these lawyers might act. Let me quote from George Will. “Consider the use of different voting systems — electronic touch screens, punch cards — in different jurisdictions of a particular state. All systems are fallible, different systems have different error rates. Does that mean that ‘equal protection’ is denied when different systems are used? And what if the distribution of the different systems within the state means that errors have a ‘disparate impact’ on minorities?
Which you know somebody is going to claim whether it’s true or not. “Consider provisional ballots. Millions of provisional ballots gonna be cast this year. In 2000, more than 101,000 provisionals were cast in LA County, which has 3% of the nation’s electorate. They are cast by people who, for example, say they’re registered but whose names are not on the voter rolls, or they are cast by people who can’t prove who they are or where they live or even that they are citizens. Or by people who go to vote in the wrong place.” That’s who fills out provisionals and they’re being mobilized to do this by the Democrat Party, I might add. That’s what this early voting is all about, to try to get as…
You know what a provisional ballot is? Somebody who shows up, they can’t find the evidence that person exists, they go ahead and let ’em vote, and they track it down later. Well, this is a recipe for disaster in a close race if the provisional ballots get thrown out because they can’t track anybody down. All you got to do is say, “There’s suppression of the vote going on!” and that’s what all these lawyers are geared up to do. It’s just one thing that they’re geared up to do, but the question arises: Should there be some responsibility along with the right to vote? Should the electoral system be twisted in knots and paralyzed and exposed to 
vast fraud just to accommodate people too stupid to show up at the proper polling place? Are we now going to have elections that are governed by people who have no clue who they are, where they live, if they’re even registered, or who they’re voting for or why? Provisional ballots are sequestered. They’re validated after the polls close. How long after depends on the sort of scrutiny they require, or on what scrutiny this or that court might say is permitted. Is there an equal protection violation if all of the states’ provisional ballots are not judged by a statewide standard, or even if different states have different standards. So legions of lawyers are poised to litigate all this and more. Imagine courts tickling out all the implications of Bush vs. Gore until enough conclusions are reached to allocate some 270 electoral votes, which might take till May.
Now, how do we get to this point? Well, (Will:) “When Al Gore dragged Florida’s courts into the election process, the U.S. Supreme Court did not make the prudent decision to refuse to be dragged in to what Justice Frankfurter called the ‘political thicket.’ If the court had allowed Florida’s intrastate power struggle to proceed, here is what probably would have happened…” It’s not probable. This is what would have happened, and I went through this three or four times afterwards, because we still have people out there thinking that Bush stole the election, and that it was all Gore’s, and the Supreme Court just went in and willy-nilly picked Bush because they like him over Gore and that’s not what happened, and had the U.S. Supreme Court stayed out of it, this is what would have happened:
“Florida’s runaway Supreme Court of would have done what it seems determined to do: it would have continued to rewrite the state’s election laws and vote counting rules until they produced a Gore victory. Then, the Republican-controlled legislature in Florida would have done what the U.S. Constitution empowers state legislatures to do,” and that’s choose electors, and they had already done that. The Florida legislature had already certified Bush as the winner of Florida’s electors. They had already done that, did it twice, and they sent the results up to Congress, where these electoral votes get counted. Now, (Will:) “No one can know what then would have happened. Congress, which counts the electoral votes, could have intervened. The Republican controlled House would have endorsed the Florida legislature’s Bush electors, the 50-50 Senate with Gore casting the tie-break vote, probably would have backed the Gore electors, and in this anarchy the Bush electors certified by Florida’s secretary of state would have elected him.”
That’s what would have happened had the U.S. Supreme Court stayed out of this and let the battle take place according to the Constitution and with all this intramural fighting going on in Florida. Nobody trusted the Constitution. Nobody trusted this, and also, when you have a sitting supreme court [in Florida] rewriting election law every other day, coming up with new ways to count ballots, this is why the U.S. Supreme Court moved in and said: “Wait a minute. Equal protection is being violated here. You can’t have hand counts here, machine counts there. You’re disenfranchising…” Well, not disenfranchising, but “this is absurd.” They felt that they had to step in. But regardless, now that the decision is there and the equal protection precedent is established in Bush vs. Gore, that is what gives Kerry lawyers their opportunity to go and protest any election anywhere where it’s marginally close.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
I want to take you back to this very program on December 5th of 2000. I did an archival search on my website because I knew that I had warned everyone about this, even before the U.S. Supreme Court decision, and, lo and behold, on Tuesday, December 5th of 2000, after Gore went to state court — Gore opened the door on all of this. I remember saying, over and over again, “1960, Richard Nixon and Kennedy. Nixon had just as much cause to go to court to litigate that outcome as anybody ever has, but refused to for this very reason. He did not want to subject the country to this, did not want to open the door to elections being decided by judges, and so he ate it, and he came back to, you know, fight another day.”
Gore went ahead to court. Gore went to court. He went to state court first, targeted Democrat counties in search of a few hundred extra votes, and in doing so broke 200 years of tradition and history which now his buddy Kerry is more than happy to use to try to litigate his way into office. Here’s what I said December 5th of 2000, which was a Tuesday. “I’ve gone all day without really mentioning what’s happening up in Atlanta, the 11th circuit court of appeals today. There’s also the equal protection case being argued up there today. Basically that is the Bush campaign, and I should point out that a lot of conservatives are very nervous that this case has even been brought because they think it’s an invitation to Democrats down the road to do the same thing, and there’s a point to be made for that.
“But the equal-protection clause has been invoked here on the manual recounts because the Bush campaign is saying, ‘Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Wait a minute! You can’t count only ballots in three selected Democrat counties in Florida and then base an entire state’s election on that because you’re granting far more weight to those ballots in those three counties than you are to ballots in the rest of the state. Equal protection therefore says that you’re not giving as much weight to the other ballots in the other counties because you’re not recounting them,’ and so the Bush campaign is arguing that these manual recounts ought not be occurring at all on the basis of the equal-protection clause.”
That argument prevailed all the way through the U.S. Supreme Court. Well, I’m going to tell you this equal-protection clause is just… I mean, it’s a sewer just waiting for a bunch of trial lawyers to head down everywhere around this country where there is a close election. I’m just passing this on to you because I’ve got a lot of email from people who, you know, after I talked about all the, whatever it is, 6,000 or 60,000 lawyers that Kerry has dispatched around the country or will have, “Well, what are they going to do?” Well, this is in part what they’re gonna use. I have no idea what else they might have up their strategerical sleeve, but this is the best guess as to what they have in mind.
You’ve got a U.S. Supreme Court precedent here now on this whole equal protection business, and it’s funny. There’s a piece by our old buddy Robert Kuttner today. He writes in the Boston Globe. He also founded the American Prospect website, coeditor, and his piece today is entitled “The Art of Stealing Elections,” and just a couple of interesting things here. He says, “The right stumbled on a gambit in 2000 which could become standard operating procedure in close elections. If the election end up in the courts, all courts eventually lead to the Supreme Court, which, as we learned, can overrule state courts and pick the president.”
So he’s worried that whatever shenanigans the Kerry team has planned, Bush still trumps because it goes back to his Supreme Court. But wait. There’s an even better quote in this guy’s piece. Robert Kuttner, also, later in this column writes: “There was a time when Democrats were the party that occasionally stole elections,” and he cites: “Lyndon Johnson very likely stole his 1948 victory in the Texas Democratic primary, which launched his Senate career. President Kennedy actually joked about the notorious vote rigging in Chicago, which quite possibly tipped Illinois to him in 1960. He would have won the Electoral College very narrowly without Illinois. It was Richard Nixon, that scoundrel’s scoundrel, who resisted the temptation to mount a court challenge to the Illinois result because he felt the country couldn’t take it. Imagine longing for the days when we had Republican leadership as principled as Nixon’s.”
So this is crazy! It’s the Kerry team planning to litigate everything. This guy Kuttner is worried that even if they do, the U.S. Supreme Court will trump whatever Kerry does, and why couldn’t we go back to a good old guy like Nixon. This is how discombobulated the left is. They hate Nixon. They hate Nixon as much as they hate Bush and for this guy to write something praiseworthy about Nixon folks, he had to take something to dull his pain in order to be able to write this and then submit it to the editor, I will guarantee you. He said, “If the courts took away the people’s right to choose the president, and George Bush in effect stole two elections in a row, this would surely produce a constitutional crisis and a crisis of legitimacy. ‘Call me partisan,’ Kuttner writes, ‘but the best insurance against this outcome would be a Kerry win big enough so that even Karl Rove would not dare to mount this maneuver. A razor-thin race virtually invites it. And if Bush wins handily, our democracy will have other problems.'”
So these guys are in a state of panic. I’ve tried to tell you what a state of panic they’re in. There’s nothing that will stop these guys, including the law, ladies and gentlemen. Now, the antidote to this is a big Bush win, but even a big Bush win is not going to stop lawyers from litigating in certain places when there’s a close election, when there’s a close outcome, just to tie things up. Because even if there is a big Bush win, then the effort will begin to delegitimize his victory by saying it was the result of fraud and they’ll go to lawyers who then start surveying districts to find out if there was fraudulent registration, double counting of the votes. It’s gonna be a nightmare.
Now, is there a scenario where none of this happens? I don’t know. I really don’t know. You know, I sit here and there’s a part of me that exists in a picture-perfect world where a win is a win and a loss is a loss, and you move on from that. Knowing how desperate the Democrats are, knowing how animated they are by the lies that they have told themselves and that they believe over the aftermath and the outcome of Florida 2000, I’m just not sure we have seen a rage and a hatred and an irrational fear animate these people for essentially the last nine months in an intensified way. Of course, it’s existed since the Florida 2000 election. But the steps to which they’ve gone. They’ve corrupted CBS News. Kerry himself has corrupted his own campaign in terms of its legitimacy and honesty. It doesn’t matter. They have stood behind people as spokesmen who under normal circumstances they wouldn’t even sneeze at. They have adopted virtually any scruffian off the street that adopts their policies, and if this guy says the right thing, they’ve made a hero out of him. Doesn’t matter who he is and doesn’t matter what baggage he brings to the table.
It means that they are just desperate as they can be, and at the same time, I have not seen in my lifetime the efforts to suppress the truth that have been mounted by the Kerry campaign. First the Swift Boat Vets came along and their book, and the Kerry campaign tried to intimidate bookstores into not selling the book and the publisher into recalling the book. Then the Kerry campaign tried to stop the airing of TV commercials by the swiftvets by threatening to sue television stations that ran the ads, and now we’ve got Sinclair Broadcasting who is being threatened day in and day out by the Kerry campaign if they run the documentary Stolen Valor. Meanwhile, Michael Moore can run around and play his documentary to anybody anywhere at any time; but I’ve never seen — you talk about people that have a supposedly sacred view of the First Amendment and free speech? Look who it is that’s trying to trample certain people saying certain things, and I’m here to tell you that there must be something about this Stolen Valor that scares the hell of the Kerry campaign. It must be it’s got the truth in it. There’s no other reason why something like this would be so suppressed.
If it’s true, and if it’s got things in it that Kerry can’t defend, and no matter what he says and do he can’t refute or reject, then of course they didn’t want it to air. But the steps they are taking are in direct violation of the Constitution, and they are attempting to intimidate with the force of lawyers and the law any opponent of Kerry’s that comes along to prevent their access to the First Amendment, in a political season, in a political year. The First Amendment is specifically written about political speech, and no law should be made to abridge it. So there must be something in all this swiftvet stuff. There must be something to all this that’s true that really bothers Kerry and his people because they’re stopping at nothing to defame the people who are involved, to intimidate others who would exhibit, publish or broadcast whatever it is the swiftvets and other veterans have to say about this.
You’ve got ABC News fresh off the Mark Halperin memo of the Friday debate in St. Louis, going over to Vietnam to interview communist Vietcong soldiers, a country that has placed John Kerry in their war heroes museum. Interviewing Vietcong soldiers in a closed society with a government minder standing right by them to get “the ultimate truth” of what happened with Kerry’s Silver Star. I mean, all the stops are being pulled out here, and there’s just one thing, folks, that is going to swat all this down to size — and that’s a huge Bush turnout. A huge Bush turnout is the solution, and I don’t know if it’s going to work, but it’s the single best weapon in the arsenal here, because Kerry’s base is — I don’t care what they say, or what they’re trying to tell you — his base is not fired up for him, and that’s another reason why they’re having to do all this stuff. Because they can’t trust their own voters to get out and vote for Kerry, and we’ve got even more news today.
Boy, was I full of See, I Told You Sos yesterday. We got more news today about his losing and dwindling support in both the Jewish community and the African-American communities. In fact, there’s a story from Knight-Ridder, Barry Sanders father — big fan of this program, Barry Sanders is the former running back of the Detroit Lions; just was inducted in the pro football Hall of Fame this year, and his dad goes on a… It’s a story about black stereotypes and how some blacks are sick and tired of being thought of as always Democrats and always this and always that simply because of the color of their skin.
Barry Sanders says, “I’m a big believer in welfare reform. I like what Limbaugh says about welfare reform.” Yeah, and they interviewed a cabdriver someplace. I forget, Barry Sanders’ dad lives in Oklahoma City, cabdriver, black cabdriver said same thing. So there’s erosion in the usual strong points, the “old reliables” in the Democrat side: the Jewish community and the black community. These are things that, if we know this just from reading the news every day, you can imagine what the Kerry people know based on their own polling, and, you know, the Reverend Jackson, we got audio sound bites. He’s out there trying to drum up support just three weeks after accusing the Kerry campaign of being ineffective, and Karl Rove and the Republican campaign being much smarter and much better and more effective — and that was a ploy when he called the Kerry campaign shakeup “a vanilla shake.” It was just a selfish attempt by the Reverend Jackson to get himself imported in the Kerry campaign. Now that he’s been imported he’s out there singing the praises, and they’re planning on going to black churches and trying to rev up black support because they’re in trouble out there. But, lo and behold, here come the lawyers! So I just wanted to spend some time here in our first busy broadcast hour to explain as best I can what all this with the legal stuff is about — and I know what you’re thinking.
You’re saying, “You know, it’s not going to matter what the votes are. Rush, if you’re right, what the voters are is irrelevant. If Kerry loses in a landslide he’s still going to sue? He’s going to claim victory?” That’s what they’re saying they’re going to do. He didn’t say in a landslide but the first thing they’re going to do is declare victory. I’ll be watching election night to see how soon he does. Can he claim victory if he’s down three or four points? What’s to stop him? Got the lawyers out there. Go out and prove fraud. We’ve got their directive, their 66-page manual. Go out there and charge intimidation at the polls before it even happens. What’s to stop ’em? Just want you to have a heads-up.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
The legal wing of the Limbaugh Institute, F. Lee Levin sends in a note: “Here’s what can happen according to the Constitution if the Kerry team goes nuts, starts suing everywhere around the country litigating all these election results on the basis of equal protection.” Levin writes to me, “The scenario is that Congress can take back the process if it’s a close election, and if the judiciary gets involved. Congress, according to the Constitution, determines what Electoral College votes to count. Ultimately there’s a process in place for the House to choose the president and the Senate to choose the vice president. If enough members of both bodies object to judicial intervention, Congress has the ultimate say. Not saying this should happen but it’s certainly a legal possibility if things get out of control. Congress can simply assert itself, according to the Constitution.”
Now, another bit of evidence here of just how whacked out, stoked up, and deranged Kerry supporters are. I have a story. This is from WPVITV.com in Philadelphia, and it was from a TV newscast of theirs last night. The big story on action news is a politically motivated film furor Tuesday night in Jenkintown. Jenkintown is a Republican area of Philadelphia. “Supporters of George Bush and John Kerry went nose to nose and neither side had any intention of backing down. Nerves are fraying at the edges, and there are still two weeks before Election Day. The emotion of this politically charged presidential election got the best of some people. People who came out to see the anti-Kerry film, ‘Stolen Honor’ were already upset that management of the Baederwood Theater cancelled the showing after threats of civil disturbances. Ultimately the anger reached a higher level when Bush supporters clashed with Kerry supporters,” then there’s a transcript here of what some of the supporters said back and forth to one another. 
They were going to show this documentary, Stolen Honor, in a movie theater and the Kerry crowd showed up and promised the theater owner, the manager, all kinds of civil disobedience if they went ahead and did it. So they canceled it, and the Bush supporters who were going to watch the thing got a little bit upset, and there was quite a lot of tension at this theater. So the intimidation tactics have already begun, and once again here you have it. I’ll tell you, folks, I cannot honestly remember a time when this kind of blatant suppression was going on: Kerry’s lawyers trying to remove Unfit for Command from book stores; his lawyers threatening TV stations if they run swift boat veteran ads; his lawyers filing FEC and FCC complaints against Sinclair.
This is just pure thuggery — and somebody help me out. Did the Bush administration or anybody on the Bush team try to get Michael Moore’s movie suppressed? No. There wasn’t any of this. So you can’t say, “It’s a two-way street,” and, “It’s happening on both sides.” It’s not. There’s something about the left. They are growing more and more uncomfortable with the thought of being able to prevail and win in the arena of political ideas. It’s almost like they know they’ll lose if they’re confined to the arena of political ideas, and so what they’re trying to do is prevent ideas getting into the arena since they’ll lose the debate on them. That’s what’s happening here.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
There’s a lot of intangibles here, too, folks, if the Democrats do embark on this course. What will people in this country think? Not everybody in this country is a Democrat by a long shot, ladies and gentlemen. It’s not the old days. Just because I mention this, don’t assume they get away with all this. I’m just trying to give you a heads-up so that you are prepared for it, so you’re not surprised by any of it. But a large turnout trumps all this, because Kerry does not and has not led, ever, in this race.
END TRANSCRIPT
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