RUSH: This was from yesterday’s Stack that I didn’t get. I know I’ve seen this before yesterday. I have to have seen this over the weekend. There is a donor — a big donor to the Republican Party — who is going to sue the Republican Party for fraud because of their broken promises. His premise is they promised him they’d get rid of Obamacare. They promised — in their fundraising — tax reform.
They assured their donors that it would be among the first things they did was to repeal and replace Obamacare, and they haven’t done diddly-squat, and this guy is going to sue under the premise that he has been defrauded. And it raises an interesting question: When does all of this political (I don’t know) broken-promise stuff…? When does it become fraud? Why are politicians excepted from this obvious form of fraud? If anybody else in business promises you something when you give them money and they don’t get anywhere close to delivering it, you’ve got ’em.
If people started suing politicians for not meeting promised performance, can you imagine? Again, ask: Who benefits here? The attorneys. (laughing) Can you imagine? Oh, gee. The attorneys? There’d be no end to the fraud cases. People would try to make a move to make them retroactive. “If a political candidate asks you for a donation with a promise that he or she will do some specific act if elected and then fails to do so, should you be able to sue for fraud? If a contractor offers to build a new deck on your home within a specific time period and then fails to do, you can sue for nonperformance.
“Excuses that his competitors were not co-operating, or that all of his workers did not show up, or he wanted to take a vacation, would probably not persuade the judge. It is well understood that many salespeople and political candidates engage in puffery about what their product does or what they are going to do. But when does puffery go so far as to become fraud?
“If you were a donor to the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee and made your contribution on the explicit promise by [Paul] Ryan and others in the leadership that they would comply with the Budget Act” or that they will repeal and replace Obamacare, or that they will engage in tax reform, should you have a chance to get the your money back if they don’t do it?
If the Republican leadership…? Say if a suit were filed, if the leadership argued that the failure to fulfill their promise was not fraud, then what would they say it is? “No, we didn’t defraud you. We fully intended to do this but we couldn’t because” what? The Senate wouldn’t cooperate, or the president doesn’t know what he’s doing and he couldn’t lead us through the legislature? What would they offer as an excuse? Would they be able to get away with blaming others for lack of action? Would they be able to be able to blame incompetence on the part of the people they needed to get this done?
Would they claim, “Hey, look, nobody ever expected me to be able to do this by myself! You can’t sue me for fraud. I tried! I couldn’t get the votes, but I tried.” It’s an interesting premise, because somebody is trying. This story doesn’t mention the name, but there is a donor who is suing, and I can’t… If this story mentions it, I can’t find it, and I don’t want to waste a whole lot of time looking for it here. I know in the first one I saw it was about the guy suing, and it is an interesting premise.
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RUSH: By the way, the retired attorney suing the GOP is a guy named Bob Heghmann. He’s from Virginia Beach. He’s a donor. These things have traditionally not been actionable. But in this day and age, who knows? I mean, the way the left has polluted the judiciary and with the trial lawyers being predominantly left-wing Democrats — I mean, you talk about a get-rich-quick opportunity for the lawyers, don’t rule it out. Just saying. In the normal course of events these are the kinds of things that have not been actionable in the past. But it still is a fascinating premise to discuss.