RUSH: Yeah, it wasn’t that long ago I remember saying when we were talking about the deep state and the anonymous sources from the intelligence community that were showing up every day, multiple times a day, New York Times, CNN, NBC, saying the Russians colluded with Trump to screw Hillary, affect the outcome of the election. I called it a silent coup, and I remember some people reacting, “Rush, I realize what you’re saying here, but do you really want to say it that way, Rush, do you really, really?” Yeah, I do, and I think the silent coup is also occurring in the judicial branch of our country.
Greetings, friends, great to have you. Rush Limbaugh behind the Golden EIB Microphone, three excellent broadcast hours coming up. The telephone number if you want to be on the program is 800-282-2882, and if you want to send an email, it is ElRushbo@eibnet.us. That, by the way, it’s not new now. It’s a couple months old, but it is a new email address, and if you send to the old address we’re not gonna see it. Those emails go to the ether. They don’t even get sent back to you, so make sure you note: ElRushbo@eibnet.us.
So, in a nutshell, here’s what happened. The first Trump executive order on a temporary ban on immigrants and refugees from seven Middle Eastern countries, seven countries previously identified by Barack Obama as hotbeds of jihadists, hotbeds of Islamic terror, Obama had already identified these seven nations.
So Trump’s executive order, the first one that banned Syrian immigrants in perpetuity and for 90 days in the other seven countries, you remember the judge in Seattle, the so-called Judge Robart said (paraphrasing), “No, no, no, no, no. I’m gonna put a TRO on this because I know that Donald Trump actually wants to ban Muslims. And that’s a violation of the First Amendment, and that’s not who we are, and that’s not what our values are,” and blah, blah.
And another judge signed on and it went to the Ninth Circus, the Ninth Circus agreed. And so the executive order, substance of it, was never, ever, ruled on the first version. And I remember at the time reading to you the federal statute that totally enables the president of the United States, no matter who he is, to do exactly what Trump did and more.
The Congress ceded all power to the president to determine who can and cannot get in here during times he and he alone determines are dangerous for a length of time that he and he alone determines, and he does this by proclamation. Meaning, he doesn’t have to have anyone else sign on it. He can just say so and that’s the way it is.
Well, there’s a new facet of law that is taking place now, and this is where I believe the silent coup in the judiciary is taking place. And you’ll note that every liberal commentator on television and in broadcast media, with the exception of Alan Dershowitz, is happy and gleeful and they’re just as happy as they can be that Trump is being thwarted.
Now a judge appointed to the federal bench by Barack Obama in 2012 issued a temporary restraining order to Trump’s replacement executive order that accomplished the same thing as the first, but they tightened it down and made it TRO-proof or veto-proof in their own minds. And in terms of the way the order is constructed, it is. There’s literally no legal bound, there’s no legal reason to reject the order, and the judge in Hawaii didn’t even try.
Now, I want to mention also Barack Obama has been in a Hawaii the past few days, including yesterday, in which he left for Tahiti. He’s on a month-long tour of Tahiti staying in Marlon Brando’s resort out there. He’s traveling alone. He’s not traveling with Michelle (My Belle) and the daughters. They may join him later; nobody knows. But he’s flitting around out there as a solo act.
So he’s in Hawaii. Now, if I were like liberals, I would start speculating that there’s been all kinds of collusion between Obama and the judge, because Obama appointed the judge, Obama’s running the resistance to Trump. See how easy that is? I could just say that and make it up. I don’t know if Obama met with the judge. My guess is the judge would not have to meet with Obama to know what Obama would want because Obama chose the guy on that basis.
So, anyway, the judge in Hawaii said (paraphrasing), “Look, I don’t care what this executive order says. I know who Donald Trump really is, because I listened to Donald Trump during the campaign, and I heard Donald Trump say he wants to ban Muslims from this country. And then I heard Stephen Miller, Stephen Miller one of Trump’s aides was also on TV saying they want to ban Muslims.” This was during the campaign. And so the judge said, “I can’t ignore that. So what I’m gonna assume here is that Trump is writing an executive order to try to fool me.” These are not the judge’s words, but this is the thought process.
In other words, Trump is lying. Trump is trying to sneak a full-fledged ban of Muslims in the United States in this thing, and I know that, the judge is saying, ’cause I heard Trump say so back during the campaign. Now, Alan Dershowitz, noted law professor and attorney from Harvard, says that this has a name, the doctrine of first impression. And he says that this will probably go to the Supreme Court to be decided, and it boils down to this: Can judges revert to comments and words uttered by a president while he was a candidate and infer a secret conspiratorial intent in an executive order where none is so stated?
In other words, the executive order does not say it’s a Muslim ban. It does not purport to be a Muslim ban. It does not wish it was a Muslim ban, because if you wanted to ban Muslims you’d have to say more than seven countries have people that can’t come in here. Because Muslims are all over the world. If you’re gonna have a Muslim ban, you’d have to find everywhere they live and ban any refugees or immigrants from those countries, and that’s not what this is. This is seven nations, again all previously identified by Barack Hussein Obama.
So this judge, call it judicial activism, all this really is is a silent coup. This is the liberal left-wing hackery, the judicial branch attempting to resist and stop Trump for the express political purpose of stopping Trump. The judge writes his ruling, couching it in legal terms to make it look like he’s thought about this in great, great detail and that he has struggled mightily with the law on this and regretfully has come to the conclusion that the president would likely lose in a lawsuit over this because it’s a ban of people of a religion, and the Constitution forbids that.
And so we’ve got another TRO, we have another ruling that does not rule on the constitutionality of the order because it can’t. If they rule on the order alone, there’s no way that this thing is stopped. And so the left is doing what it always does, infusing its personal political preferences that are now guided by hate, pure, raw, undiluted hate for Trump and all that he represents and stands for.
The judge also said that this would have a very, very bad effect on Hawaii. Yes, my friends, the state of Hawaii. This would be very, very bad. You know why? Because Muslims are so wonderful and great, and they mean so much to the Hawaiian economy, and they mean so much to Hawaiian progress — they mean so much to Hawaiian education — that it just unconscionable. Hawaii couldn’t exist as it is with this kind of restriction on immigration of Muslims.
You know what? Maybe the executive order needs to be rewritten, and instead of all of these potential jihadists that we’re trying to find and prevent from getting into the country — once we identify them — send them to Hawaii.
If they’re that important to the state of Hawaii, send them there. (interruption) I know it would… (sigh) I’m trying to make a point here that this is… It’s simply over the top. What does this judge think jihadists are? I mean, if you come from Iraq, if you come from Syria, if you come from Yemen, what are you? The odds are you’re going to be a Muslim. Does this judge not…? You know what amazes me? And it always has. To the American left, after 9/11… This is something that I noticed within two weeks after 9/11.
After 9/11 — when the 19 hijackers were without question proud Islamic terrorists, proud Islamic jihadists — the American left in this country immediately began an apology posture toward people of Islamic jihad. We convened forums on, “Why do they hate us? Why did we make them do this? What do we do that makes them hate us so much? Why is it that they don’t like us? What have we done that made them want to bomb the World Trade Center?” and so forth and on. And ever since then, the American left seems to be focused on protecting not the victims of Islamic Jihad, but rather the perpetrators.
The left finds itself on the side of the Islamic jihadists and defending them at every turn, and it has perplexed me… Well, on the surface it perplexes me. Because I understand liberals, I know exactly why they’re doing what they’re doing. But the fact that it seems to have escaped notice by so many people? Now, there’s a story here from Fox News, and I had this printed out yesterday and I did not get to it. So it’s in the Stack of Stuff over here that I call the Holdover Stack.
At the end of every program I go through everything I didn’t get to, and if I think it’s got value for the next day or another day, I put it in the Holdover Stack, and then I go through the Holdover Stack about 15 minutes before show time just to see what’s there. Lo and behold, I ran across this from Fox News that I had yesterday: “A U.S. visa program designed to temporarily admit religious workers from other countries may be letting jihadists into the country, security experts and religious leaders warn.
“The R visa program is for non-immigrant clerics and religious workers and allows successful applicants to stay in the U.S. for up to five years. They are then allowed to apply for a permanent residency under their R-1 status.” Now, wait just a minute. How long have we been told by the media and the rest of the Democrat Party that there can be no religious tests in admitting people to the U.S., and this judge in Hawaii … and now the so-called judge in Seattle, Robart… This judge in Seattle and the judge in Hawaii say, “This is a religious test, and we don’t do religious tests!
“We don’t ban people of religions. It’s unconstitutional, First Amendment, establishment clause,” yada yada yada. Yet here we have a visa program designed to temporarily admit religious workers from other countries, and it may be letting jihadists into the country, according to secure experts and religious leaders. So how long have we been told by the media and the Democrats are now these judges, these hacks, that there can be no religious test in admitting people into the U.S.? And now it turns out there is even a religious visa.
And it’s been used for years, and this article goes on to state that the program started back in 1990. So we’ve got the judge in Hawaii, “We can’t have a religious test. It violates the establishment clause of the…” This is how these people talk. “The establishment clause is that part of the First Amendment that says no state will establish a religion. There can’t be a national religion that everybody has to adhere to. There’s freedom of religion.” It’s been expanded so we can’t ban people from any religion, any country. Can’t have a religious test.
We have religious tests all the time. There’s another religious test that we do with refugees. Refugees show up claiming asylum every day, and we ask them why, and many of them say, “Because there’s a religious war going on in my country and I’m from a war-torn nation and I have no future there.” “What country?” “San Cordoba.” “What is the nature of the religious conflict in San Cordoba?” The applicant describes it. So we have to run it down, we have to find out if this guy is a member of an aggrieved religious in San Cordoba. The idea that there’s no religious test is absurd.
We’ve always had one, and now we find out that there is even a religious visa that has been there for years. Here’s some numbers: “Between 2012 and 2016, the U.S. issued 23,029 R-1 visas — averaging 4,605 per year — as well as 7,637 R-2 visas…” Do you know what the R-2 visa is? That’s spouses and children of religious clerics and others. So how long have we been told here that there are no religious tests? The media, the Democrat Party, says that there can be no test, and we’ve got a religious visa for the clerics and the subsidiary visa for their spouses and their children.
The story yesterday was “Jihadis Using Religious Visa to Enter U.S.,” and yet we’ve got these know-it-all judges on whom the responsibility will never descend. If there’s a terrorist attack in the next couple of weeks, these judges aren’t gonna get blamed for any of it. We’ve got this judge saying, “Well, I heard Trump say he wants to ban Muslims during the campaign! So I don’t care what his executive order says; I know that Trump is a pig, and I hate Trump, and I know that Trump’s a scumbag and so therefore I’m here to thwart Trump because I hate him!”
That’s what this ruling essentially is, and it is a silent coup.
You know, Trump says, “Well, fine. I’ll take this all the way to the Supreme Court.”
I’m sorry, I don’t know that that’s the way to deal with it, although I don’t know what is.
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RUSH: Now, the R visa program here that is talked about in this Fox News story from yesterday… Ready for this? More than 30% of these religious visas have been found to be fraudulent. That means 30% of the visas granted. We’re talking about, again, between 2012 and 2016. There were 23,000 of them. So 30% of those are fraudulent. That’s basically, what, 7,000, 6,500? No wonder the jihadists are using the R visa program, the religious visa program. I mean, if they’ll hide behind women and children in mosques, why wouldn’t they try to defraud our visa program?
I mean, they’re jihadists and they want to wipe us out. The article also notes that the Holy Land Foundation, another group that supported terrorism, have used religious visas to get into the country as well. So in 1990, we were very compassionate. We set up a visa program to allow Muslim clerics to come into the country to further enrich the melting pot aspect of in the United States of America so that we could all feel good about ourselves and who we are. And we find out now that that program has been corrupted and is being defrauded by jihadists, militant Islamic terrorists.
Who, by the way, also are “clerics.” They’re known as imams.
So you stack all this up against this judge in Hawaii, and the judge in Seattle pretty much said the same thing, “Well, I heard Donald Trump say on the campaign that he wants to ban all Muslims. Why, why, that’s not who we are! Why, that’s not our values.” It’s not up to a judge to determine this! (interruption) I don’t care if I’m attacked for attacking a judge. I’ve been attacked for attacking. What’s worse than that? What makes these people immune from criticism? Why are they the only branch that we can’t criticize? Anyway, you stop and think: Any candidate, any president with anything he said during the campaign can be held to counter a lawful order he comes up with?
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Hey, I got an idea. The judge is Derrick Watson from Hawaii. “In granting the temporary restraining order in response to a lawsuit by the state of Hawaii, U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson found on Wednesday that ‘a reasonable, objective observer … would conclude that the executive order was issued with a purpose to disfavor a particular religion.'” And he says because he heard Trump say he wants to ban Muslims during the campaign, and he heard Trump aides like Stephen Miller say the same thing. And they said the second executive order is just a basically watered-down version of the first.
So the judge is basically saying, “You guys can’t fool me. You are a bunch of hateful bigots, you hate Muslims, you want to keep ’em out of country, and I’m not gonna let you get away with it because we need Muslims in Hawaii. I’m not gonna rule on your order, I’m not gonna touch it because I know that you people are pigs.” No, he didn’t say that, I’m giving you the liberal mind-set.
I have an idea. If a judge can disqualify a constitutional order, constitutional by statute, doesn’t even require any interpretation, the statute exists that gives any president thorough, thorough, lawful power to do this, if a judge can say, “Sorry, you can’t do it because I heard you say something during the campaign,” what about this judge? What if this judge, say, he was put on the bench in 2012, so what of the last five years that this guy’s ever said anything negative about Trump that anybody could find?
What if Judge Derrick Watson has been critical of Trump off the bench? You know, wherever he goes in Hawaii, whatever he does, what if somebody overheard him say that he doesn’t like Trump or was critical of Trump, could we take his words and say, “You know what? Your ruling is unjust and your ruling is tainted because we have discovered that you have an animus against Trump in the first place because we heard you say so.” I don’t know that he has. Don’t misunderstand. I’m just asking a goose-for-the-gander type question.
Or are judges insulated? Can judges say and do anything and yet their rulings are unassailable? ‘Cause you’re not supposed to assail a judge’s ruling. Although a lot of people are. I mean, in any number of ways to boot. I mean, Muslim ban, you’d have to ban every country they live in. This doesn’t do that, jihadists, Islamic jihadists are Muslim. Much as the left might not like it being stated as such, they are.
Another point that Professor Dershowitz made, he said by the reasoning of this judge, the exact same order, if it were issued by Obama, would be constitutional. Because the judge doesn’t remember Obama ever be critical of Muslims. Obama wouldn’t even refer to militant Islamic terrorism.
So here’s the point, and Dershowitz is right about this. If the exact executive order that this judge found necessary to stop because of Trump, the exact same thing he wouldn’t stop if Obama had uttered it — well, we know that to be the case politically. Obviously he is an Obama appointee.
But what about the law on this? Dershowitz is absolutely right about this, that if Obama had issued this order, then fine. Since Trump issued it, we’re gonna stop it. This is what Trump is up against. This is why I keep referring to this as a silent coup.
Reuters is all happy about it: “Trump Vows to Appeal Against Travel Ban Ruling to Supreme Court.”
The AP is even happier: “Trump Suffers Second Defeat as Revised Travel Ban on Hold.” And the headline is what this is all about: “Defeating Trump at every turn.” They say: “This time, the ruling came from a judge in Hawaii who rejected the government’s claims that the travel ban is about national security, not discrimination.”
This judge is presuming that Trump’s a bigot, and the only reason he’s doing this is ’cause he hates Muslims, he’s bigoted, and he’s biased, and he wants to discriminate against Muslims. In other words, the judge is calling Trump a liar. The judge is calling Trump and everybody else who assembled this executive order liars. That what they are secretly doing is discriminating against Muslims.
The judge is also pretending to be an armchair psychiatrist. You know the old saw, they’re supposed to look at the law and not what they imagine to be the motivation behind the law. In other words, really good judges are not supposed to do what Judge Derrick Watson in Hawaii is doing, and that’s when he said that Hawaii would suffer financially if the executive order constricted the flow of students and tourists to the state and that Hawaii was likely to succeed on a claim that the ban violates First Amendment protections against religious discrimination.
Well, you know, even on that, the Supreme Court has ruled numerous times that aliens outside the country receive no constitutional protection. In other words, they’re not citizens. They do not qualify for so-called constitutional rights. In fact, foreigners do not have the right to emigrate or even visit our country. It’s a privilege. It isn’t a right. But it’s gotten so bastardized that there’s a leftist immigration center lawyer out there who today is making the point that illegal immigrants are really not violating the law. Illegal immigrants are not criminals, he says. They’re civil violators.
Now, you have to ask yourself a question at some point: Why does the left, why does the Democrat Party have such a vested interest in all of these poor, uneducated, unable to speak English, why is the left so hell-bent on getting as many of those people into this country as they can? What is the benefit? And why do they seem to be totally uninterested in the national security risks involved here? Why are these noncitizens, aliens from foreign countries and now largely Muslim and Hispanic, why are they apparently the chosen ones for the Democrat Party? I mean the question answers itself.
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RUSH: Ron in Houston. Ron, great to have you on the program. How are you doing, sir?
CALLER: I’m doing good, Rush. Thanks for taking my call.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: Quickly, Rush, I’m very concerned and, of course, as usual, we need you to be our guiding light.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: But I’m very concerned by the fact that, okay, we got the Senate, we got the House, we don’t have some hack politician president, and yet we are unable to implement a simple policy designed to provide basic protection to this country. And I’m concerned. I mean, we’re told that we have the greatest cabinet that we’ve ever had, we have all of this power, and I’m concerned that if we are not able to stop this rogue judiciary branch at this point in time, no matter what else we do with the economy or employment or anything else, the next time we get a non-conservative government controlling this nation, we’re lost. We need to stop the judiciary.
RUSH: Well, what is going on is — and I’m not trying to say I told you so. I’m trying to remind you that what’s happening here is as frustrating as all get out. I acknowledge that I’m ticked off too. But all we’ve done up to now is win one election. And this is Donald Trump versus the establishment. The establishment is circling the wagons, and the establishment is the government. This is Donald Trump against the government.
And the judiciary, look at the vast majority in the last 20 years have been appointed — well, let’s say the last 15 years, have been appointed by liberal Democrats. The judges are Democrat hacks. They’re Democrat activists that wear robes. They’re disguised. Media is Democrat hacks disguised as journalists. The Washington population, the population of that town and everybody in it that works for government or lobbying agencies is part of the establishment. And Donald Trump’s up against all of this.
There are members of the establishment in the Republican House of Representatives, in the Republican Senate, not to mention all the Democrats in the House and Senate. Most of the lobbyists are liberal hacks in Washington, DC. Because most of the lobbyists are oriented toward Washington spending money and never stopping and they get their share of it as it is spent. And they collect both ways. They get to siphon what government spends, and the clients they’re lobbying on behalf of pay them a commission for success.
And it’s a giant, it’s a massive collection of institutions and people that includes all three branches of government, but more importantly it includes what now people are calling the deep state. And that is not just intelligence people. The deep state’s made up of political appointees that are career bureaucrats who’ve never been elected, who you do not know, who you cannot get rid of. And they are there because they are Democrat political hacks and activists. And it is this that Donald Trump is up against.
And just because they lost the presidency does not mean they’re gonna give up. Just because they lost the presidency doesn’t mean they’re gonna say, “You know what? We’ve lost touch with the American people. We need to change and become more like Trump and the Republicans.” Exact opposite of that. These are people governed against the will of the American people in order to get where they are. And it is their sole reason for existence. It’s their identity. It’s where they derive their self-worth and their power. And they’re not just gonna give it up. And this is what we are opposing. It is a massive, massive collection of power. And it’s making itself known and felt whenever necessary to stop Trump.