RUSH: Here’s what happened last night on the immigration bill, as written up by the AP and then I will give you the correct analysis of this. ‘A fragile compromise that would legalize millions of unlawful immigrants risks coming unraveled after the Senate voted early Thursday to place a five-year limit on a program meant to provide American employers with 200,000 temporary foreign workers annually. The 49-48 vote came two weeks after the Senate, also by a one-vote margin, rejected the same amendment by Senator Dorgan. The North Dakota Democrat says immigrants take many jobs Americans could fill.’ Now, why did they bring this back? Why in the world did they bring the Dorgan amendment back? This is Dingy Harry’s decision to do this. Now, I told you yesterday and I’ve been telling you all week, it looks like Dingy Harry wants to kill the bill. We started speculating why would Dingy Harry want to kill the bill? I’m going to tell you what I think is going on here, but I don’t want it to change your attitude. As far as we’re concerned, the bill is not dead yet. I’m just analyzing this for you up to now. If he allowed a second vote on the Dorgan amendment, that is a sign that he doesn’t want the bill to pass. One of the reasons could be it’s blame the Republicans time, since the Republicans are the ones that have torn themselves up over this for a month. Politically can they pull it off? I don’t know, because this was a Democrat amendment.
Byron Dorgan is a Democrat, Helmet Head from North Dakota. So if the Democrats are going to say, ‘Well, we think the bill is not going to pass anyway.’ As people learn the details of this, more and more people aren’t liking it, and even though it’s a Ted Kennedy White House bill, Dingy Harry would love nothing more than to shelve the blame on all this to the Republicans. If he can get away with it, it would be smart politics, and of course bad, bad result for the White House in a political sense, but good for all of us. Now, I have a friend who talked with a reporter from a Hispanic publication, and this reporter spoke with Rahm Emanuel off the record after the election, asking him why immigration wasn’t one of his priorities. Rahm Emanuel said, ‘After the elections back in November, we don’t want to do immigration, let the White House do that. It’s just as difficult an issue for our coalition as it is for the Republicans. We’re avoiding it. We’re refusing even to discuss it. Let the Republicans duke it out.’ Now, even though Kennedy brought the bill forward, it has caused myriad political problems for the Republicans. Actually, many good things have happened. It has, for the first time, doomed McCain. We can thank the White House for that.
I don’t think they intended to doom McCain, but President Bush and his steadfast support of the bill has doomed McCain. It’s starting to show up in polls. It also split the Republican Party, which some people think is a bad thing. I don’t. I think that it’s going to create a vacuum that a genuine conservative could move in and fill. So that’s why I say you can always find something good in everything that happens that mostly you think is bad. Also yesterday, in the House they had a judiciary hearing, and the black caucus members visibly broke with their Latino colleagues yesterday. Sheila Jackson Lee, Maxine Waters berated representatives from the restaurant industry and agriculture and even from Google because apparently the black caucus members got an earful from constituents back home over the recess. Their constituents are saying they are taking jobs that we want, these illegals. Typical quotes that came out of this hearing yesterday. ‘What have any of you done to hire Americans first, to avoid worker displacement?’ This is what the black caucus was asking representatives in the restaurant industry and agriculture and so forth. ‘My son goes to Morehouse College, have you gone there recruiting or are you just looking for illegals? Have you tried to employ urban black workers for agriculture jobs? What percentage of your employees are black Americans?’ These are some of the questions. There was a pretty tight-knit coalition between the black caucus and the Latino caucus but the split yesterday in the House over this.
So the efforts of Dingy Harry, if this is what he’s actually doing to blame this on the Republicans because they have been the ones that have torn themselves up over it, he’s going to have a lot of help from the Drive-Bys because the Drive-Bys will spread Dingy Harry’s spin on this. But we’re going to be out there to counter that spin because this is a Democrat bill, and that’s what has everybody so upset. Why is the president joining with presidents again on a bill that is going to destroy the Republican Party? Now, they had a test vote today for cloture to stop the amendments, because the longer this goes on and the more amendments, the more fragile the ‘coalition,’ as they refer to it, becomes. The more details people learn, the harder it’s going to be. So Dingy Harry brings back the Dorgan amendment for a second time, after it failed. You bring something back and this time it passes? That’s a sure sign that he wants this bill killed. So they had their cloture vote, and they failed to stop debate on it. They didn’t get 60 votes; they got 33. They’re saying it’s on life support now. They’re going to come back for another vote later in the day at some point, maybe tonight.
Now, all of this that I have told you sounds pretty right to me, as I said it, as most things I say do sound to me right. One caveat that I want to mention to all of you, and that’s this: We have to pretend that it’s not dead, because it isn’t dead yet. We have to pretend in order to keep the emotion up, because we have to make sure this thing gets killed, and it isn’t dead yet. The president, the White House, have split the party. The good news is he’s doomed McCain out there, and the splitting of the party opens up a vacuum for a conservative. And, by the way, breaking with Bush is commonplace now, so the idea that Republicans are breaking away from Bush, the Drive-Bys, the Democrats say, ‘Oh, this is setting us up really well, Republicans falling apart.’ Just the exact opposite. It could help in 2008. So, I know a lot of you people are mad at President Bush on this, but we need to thank him because he’s taken McCain out of this, apparently, at least for now.
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RUSH: Let’s move on to immigration news here, ladies and gentlemen. ‘Presidential politics and partisan resentments reached a boil in the Senate Wednesday night, as a heated exchange between Sens. Barack Obama and Lindsey Graham[nesty] erupted on the chamber floor and continued in a nearby corridor.’ Vice President Lindsey Grahamnesty was ‘disappointed’ that Barack Obama was trying to amend the immigration bill. He thought it would undermine McCain’s work. After all, the Republicans are walking the plank and blowing off their base on this. Lindsey Grahamnesty was a little bit upset that Barack Obama had offered this amendment. It doesn’t matter what the Amendment was. The amendment failed. By the way, Mrs. Clinton offered an amendment, too. I don’t know what the amendment was, but it failed. I’m sitting here asking myself, ‘Here’s the inevitable Democrat presidential nominee, the smartest woman in the world who is going to have all this power. She’s is going to have this ability to make and shape the Democrat Party in her own image, however she wants it to look and act, and she couldn’t get her amendment passed on the immigration bill?’
Hmm. I got to thinking, ‘Would that ever happen to Bill Clinton on something he really cared about? Would he allow this kind of embarrassment?’ Now, you haven’t heard about this because the be Drive-Bys are not talking much about Hillary’s failed amendment, and the only reason they’re talking about Barack’s failed amendment is because Lindsey Grahamnesty literally shouted him down on the floor of the Senate and followed him out of the chamber and starting berating the guy outside the Senate floor, and Obama didn’t quite know what to make of this. They have since put it all back together and smoked a peace pipe over this. ‘Obama [was] stunned and demanded time to respond. The notion that his amendment would gut the bill ‘is simply disingenuous’ he said. ‘It’s engaging in the sort of histrionics that is entirely inappropriate for this debate.’ … In separate interviews later, [Vice President Grahamnesty] said, ‘I wanted to go outside’ to impress upon Obama the danger he was causing for a bill he supposedly supported. ‘I said, ‘I’m very disappointed in you,” he said, adding: ‘I like the fellow.” Well, they always say that. They said it was just a little misunderstanding. It’s all been put back together, ‘too much coffee and people being on the floor too long,’ Obama said, led to the eruption here between Barack Obama and Senator Grahamnesty.
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RUSH: Mark, you’re up first in this hour. Great to have you with us, sir.
CALLER: Well, Mr. Limbaugh, what an honor and a thrill, I appreciate it, but I’ve got to see the three words that I thought I would probably never say to you: ‘We are irrelevant.’ It seems to me that we as the conservative movement in this country that you have led extremely well, we’re dead. No one’s listening to us. You yourself have said that the senators aren’t paying attention to us anymore. You yourself have said that —
RUSH: I said they ‘said’ that. There was a Washington Post story out that said the senators went home and they didn’t find as much anger and disagreement as they thought they would.
CALLER: Yes, and we know that was a lie.
RUSH: Well, of course it’s a lie, and they ran a poll that was fraudulent, too, and there are other that polls indicate… Look, this bill’s on life support.
CALLER: I understand that, Rush, and I’m glad it is, but like you said in the first hour, we can’t let up. We have to —
RUSH: That’s right.
CALLER: — be stronger. But I’m wanting you, our Grand Pooh-Bah, to lead in a stronger voice. I think that we need to call these people out by name, the Republicans in name only, that are voting for this bill that would literally kill the Republican Party and our conservative movement moreso in this country. This bill is garbage, it’s trash, and we as conservatives basically are sitting on the sidelines three hours a day —
RUSH: No, we’re not —
CALLER: — listening to you, listening to —
RUSH: Whoa, whoa! Hold it a second.
CALLER: — Sean Hannity. We’re not doing anything!
RUSH: Why do you think that the bill is on life support?
CALLER: We’ve been calling. We’ve been faxing.
RUSH: Okay, what the…?
CALLER: But we need to do more.
RUSH: Well, you just said —
CALLER: But we need to do more. We should be in the damn streets, Rush!
RUSH: No! We don’t do that. We have more effective ways of protesting. If we were in the street, it wouldn’t matter. There are not enough of us that are going to do that. That’s not how we make noise. We’re not a bunch of malcontent troublemakers that blow up bank buildings. We don’t do it. We don’t throw paint on people. That’s not what we do. This is working. But you’re right, we can’t stop. We can’t give up on it but you must have missed the first hour of that program. Tsk, tsk, if that’s the case, because I’m telling you: if this bill is beaten back, it is a great thing for the conservative movement. It will send shock waves through both parties, and it will create a vacuum. The White House has split the Republican Party on this. There’s no question about it, but there’s a good thing, two good things that have happened as a result of splitting the party. The White House inadvertently has also really, really, really damaged McCain in this. The second thing is, they’re creating a vacuum. I agree. If the bill passes — if it gets through the Senate, gets through the House, the president signs it — yep, it’s a disaster, but even that is going to create a vacuum that will be filled by conservatism in the Republican Party.
So you have to look at every instance and look at the side that really frustrates you and looks like all is lost, you gotta look at it because you will find good there, and there is good in this. If the bill is killed, they’re going to have to go back to the drawing board and come back with something better. Look, when Harriet Miers’ nomination was effectively beat back, we got Justice Alito. We got a got a one. This time, if this thing is beaten back — and it’s being beaten back on substantive reasons — when they go back and rewrite it, if they have any hope of the new one passing, it’s going to have to deal with border security first and nothing else. Until that is done, we have to stanch the flow, and then you can start talking about what you want to do with the people that are here. But this bill is so bad on the substance that the people that wrote it didn’t ever want us to see it, but it has been seen and it has been analyzed and people know about it. If this is beaten back, it’s going to be a huge, huge thing for conservatism, because conservatism will have been the reason it was beaten back. Now, I know there’s some rifts in the conservative movement over this.
You know, some of the elite conservatives have ties to the business community and so forth. Everybody’s got their pet peeves in this, but the vast majority of the conservative movement is dead-set against this thing. You gotta be a little bit more positive about this. We’re not going to take the streets. Nobody that I know of is going to urge people to take to the streets. It’s not how we operate. They don’t want to be looked at and thought of as a bunch of malcontents that show up — and even when we do protest, they don’t cover it, and certainly downplay the numbers. So just sit back. Sit back. This is not going anywhere. Nobody’s sitting around doing nothing, and you are not ‘irrelevant.’ I don’t know how can sit there and think you are irrelevant when what is happening to this bill is happening. They couldn’t even come up with 40 votes, needing 60, to stop debate on this thing. They couldn’t get cloture. If they’d have gotten the 60 votes, then we’d have been cooked. That basically means the bill is ready to go. But they have so few votes. Dingy Harry intends this thing to go down the tubes, I think, for his own political reasons. He wants the Republican Party split. He wants the Republican Party taking the criticism on it.
They think that there’s a big political winner here for them, because they think the country wants the bill and that the country loves Democrats but those rascally Republicans with those screaming nativists and yahoos on the right, and they think they’re going to be able to make all kinds of political hay on that, and they have misjudged this because even people in their own party, and even black caucus in the House has split on this. So you’re not irrelevant. Nobody working on this is irrelevant. Do you realize what a fait accompli this was when we started this? They negotiated this bill in secret; nobody knew what was in it. La Raza was in there with the Democrats during the negotiations, and they got veto power over elements in the bill. The Republicans went along. I just think the Republicans in the Senate got snookered. I don’t think there’s anything more complicated to it than that. There are some Republicans that think this is going to be the only way we can get these Hispanics. They actually believe that Prop 187 turned the state of California over to the Democrats. What has turned the state of California over to Democrats is uncontrolled illegal immigration. All those illegals came in and they’re Democrats. They end up voting, some of them do. Prop 187 didn’t lose the state. What Prop 187 did, when the federal judge had overturned it, is he caused Republicans and others to say, ‘To hell with this,’ and they fled the state, further affecting the demographics. The Republicans actually believe that Prop 187 is what lost California. Republican Party lost California all by itself.
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RUSH: This is from the Minneapolis Pioneer Press. ‘A female worker’s immigration status doesn’t bar her from a filing a sexual harassment lawsuit, a federal judge in Minneapolis has ruled. Maria Torres, a cook at the Perkins Restaurant and Bakery in St. Paul’s Midway neighborhood, accused her boss of making sexually suggestive remarks, touching her and showing up unannounced at her house. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Torres filed a harassment and retaliation lawsuit, alleging Perkins started investigating her immigration status only after she complained. Attorneys for Perkins tried to have the case dismissed, arguing her suspected status as an undocumented worker barred her and the EEOC from suing. … U.S. District Judge John Tunheim refused to throw out the suit, finding that ‘a ruling that undocumented workers could not pursue civil rights claims on their own behalf would likely chill these important actions.’ So, you see, it doesn’t matter if you are here in violation of the law. If you are here breaking the law, you still can go to court, take advantage of all of our nutso liberal political correctness out there. Of course, the business that hired her is also breaking the law, but neither is being prosecuted for that, so it gets more surreal each day.