Rush Limbaugh: Do You Want to Go To War with Senate GOP as Your Army?

CALLER: I want to commend you on your interview with the vice president for not caving in to him. I feel exactly the way you do. I feel so disappointed in this nomination. I feel like we've been let down over and over and over again by the Republicans. I, like you, would put up a fight. I'd put the most conservative judge out there, who had even picketed abortion clinics if I could find one and make the Democrats show their colors and be done with it, once and for all.

RUSH: I think you speak for a lot of people, Sylvia. I think a lot of people wanted this fight. A lot of people want this fight. They want the Democrats to filibuster. They want to pound the final nail in that coffin home.

CALLER: Absolutely. I'm so disappointed. I feel like, "Well, yeah, they're all the same, doesn't really matter if you're Republican or Democrat, anymore."

RUSH: Hold it a minute. Wait a second. I want to ask you something else. You said Republicans always let you down. Where else, other than this nomination, do you feel let down?

CALLER: Well, letting seven Democrats get rid of the nuclear option. That was another opportunity to nail them. They just walked away from it. It's over and over. It seems like they don't seem to care about their base.

RUSH: What it boils down to is this: You get the impression that Republicans are more concerned of what liberals think of them than what you as a voter thinks of them?

CALLER: Absolutely. Absolutely -- and we fought hard to get the majority in both the House and the Senate, to reelect President Bush, and these are the same people that would sell them out for a nickel that he's pandering to. I feel completely betrayed. This woman may be great.

RUSH: Hang on here just a second. I'm going to play devil's advocate here for the sake of the discussion.

RUSH: I want to take you back to what I said at the top of the program. I don't know this woman.

RUSH: So what that tells me is that it's difficult to know that she's the best person we could find for the job, since we don't know about her. If you want to pick the best person for the job --

RUSH: I know. That's a knee-jerk reaction, too, I sort of had. "Well, if Harry Reid likes her, if Schumer is not that troubled, uh-oh," but they don't know her, either. They've worked with her. Reid has, because Reid has interfaced with her when the White House reached out to the Democrats in the Senate to ostensibly let them participate in the selection process, that gave us Judge Roberts. So Reid knows her and likes her and has gotten along with her, and, yeah. That's, instinctively, it's problematic. But just playing devil's advocate, the objective here from the get-go if we are to believe the president -- and I do on this -- the objective has been to turn the court in a different direction and change the makeup of the court and make it more originalist. That's the objective. The objective is to get that done. The objective at the White House may not be to defeat these people in a fight. Their objective may be to actually get that done. Now, they could be looking. They could be looking at the names I mentioned to Vice President Cheney, Edith Jones, Michael Luttig, and there are plenty of others, and they might have made the calculation we're going to lose some Republicans over these people, because we do have some wimp Republicans in the Senate. We have some linguini-spined Republicans in the Senate, and what if we nominate one of these guys and lose them and we don't get this guy confirmed? What's better?

To get somebody on the court the president knows is going to do what he wants done there, and if it has to be a stealth nominee, like Judge Roberts was a stealth nominee for all intents and purposes, two years on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, not a lot of written opinions, ergo, no "paper trail." It could well be that this White House -- and, again, just devil's advocate here -- knows full well what they're dealing with is 55 Republican votes in the Senate, and by the time you take away people like Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, and maybe Lincoln Chafee, and who knows what some of these others are going to do, maybe you got fewer than 51 votes for your nominee, and losing in this fight is something unacceptable. You don't want to nominate one of these people that actually lose, so maybe you win by actually getting somebody on the court you know is going to be what you want even though nobody else knows the person, and you roll the dice and run the risk of angering your base of supporters who want the fight and are not going to get it. But their objective may be to actually win the fight in a way that makes it impossible for the Democrats to even mount much of one. Look, folks, I have no inside knowledge of this whatsoever - you must understand -- and I'm not posing this to try to change. I got a bunch of e-mails, "Rush, no matter how you spin this. You are not going to make me like this choice." I'm not trying to spin anything. I'm sharing with you simply the way I'm thinking about this, because when I hear people say, "We want the fight." I did, too. I would love for these guys to filibuster, I would love to just nail the final coffin shut on these people. But we do know that we've got some Republicans up there in the Senate that literally can't be counted on, depending on certain things. So it's possible this is a way to meet the objective in a way the White House thinks may be the only way they think is possible.

RUSH: I have a very soul-of-wit way to sum up my last point with a previous caller, and that is this. For all of you -- and I'm one of you -- that want to go to war and want this fight, and you want to nail the libs. If you want to go to war, do you want the Senate Republicans to be your army? That may well be the question that the White House asks itself. All right, if we go to war, do we want these people on the Senate, on our side, to be our army? Are these the warriors that we're going to hit the battlefield with? He's a Ed in Woodmere, New York. I'm glad you waited, sir. Welcome to the program.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Giga dittos from a very long-time listener. I love talking to you now.

CALLER: I'm afraid that I don't want anybody now going to war with me. It seems like George Bush has caved in on just about everything. I don't see him trying to fight for conservatism since the day he's been elected, virtually, and I don't quite --

CALLER: Right, and campaign finance reform, and the budget, and then he said he wouldn't raise taxes, and he immediately raised tariffs instead. I just don't see where -- he advocates a conservative position, and then folds on it as soon as he gets the slightest bit of pressure. I think he's advocating conservatism just to placate the base and acting as a moderate because he is a moderate.

RUSH: Okay, well, that's what you think. I'm not in a position here to try to argue you out of that today. I mean, I can find a lot of agreement with you when you look at the size of the federal budget and how it has grown, that's not conservative, and it really troubles me greatly. Fiscal conservatism has been tossed out the window. It seems like we believe in this energized president in managing a large bureaucracy. But who knows. I mean, you might have some policy makers up there, strategists, thinking this is the best way to beat the libs is to take all their weapons away from them so that they don't really have an agenda, which they don't. So again, I'm not trying to spin you on that. These are just the things that go through my mind when I ponder all these items that you brought up. Charleston, South Carolina, Joe, you're next. Welcome to the program.

CALLER: Hey, I like where you're coming from as far as your standpoint. The liberals probably, like I was telling Mr. Snerdley, the liberals are sitting back waiting to hear where you're leading this. You're playing the neutral card right now. I applaud you on that. Had you come out and said this candidate is the one, you know, Bush hasn't failed us yet on his agenda as far as the court of nominees and stuff like that, but I like your strategy.

RUSH: Well, I appreciate it, although I'm neutral in the sense -- I'm glad you picked up on that, but I'm neutral in the sense that there's just too much I don't know, but some of what I don't know bothers me, is the point. There are plenty of people out there who I do know that I would have loved, as choices for this seat on the Supreme Court. There's also something, folks, something else out there that troubles me about this, and you might hear some other people bring this up, but one of the problems here is that we seem to be operating on this quota basis -- and this is only if Harriet Miers is not an originalist and is not someone that will look at the Constitution à la Justice Thomas and Justice Scalia. We don't that know, but the Democrats keep talking this is the "O'Connor seat." The O'Connor seat is a swing seat. What is that? That's a quota. We're quota-izing the Supreme Court. It's okay to have four conservatives and four libs, as long as we have a moderate swing vote that will vote with the libs most of the time, and this seat was crucial to a lot of people because this was a chance to take what was, quote, unquote, the "swing vote," and make it a conservative vote. So even if you're spoiling for the fight and you don't like that aspect of it, there's something else that's fundamental here as well, and I hope that that's not what's going on. There's no way I can know, but I hope that the White House is not looking at this, "Okay, we needed a woman."

I don't know why. We don't need a woman. We need the best. We need the best we can find. If that is a woman, cool. Don't misunderstand. But if there's some guy out there that trumps everybody else, fine, name him and let's to town. But then again you go back to, okay, you want to go to war with the Senate Republicans as your army. (interruption) What, Mr. Snerdley? (interruption) Mmm-hmm. Oh, don't give me that, Mr. Snerdley. Don't give me this, "Women are over half the population; there's only one on there." I reject whole-heartedly that only women can be sensitive to women's issues. I reject whole-heartedly that only blacks can represent blacks; only women can represent women; only whites can represent whites. No, this is Balkanization. I resent and reject the whole notion of a quota of anything on the Supreme Court. The only quota that there ought to be on the Supreme Court is the best jurists you can find that look at the Constitution for what it is, go find the original intent, do not look to bend it, shape it, flake it, form it, to accommodate modern depravity, and get all caught up in civil rights and human rights and all that. Judge Roberts answered those questions perfectly. He's not there to engage in social architecture. He's there to decide the law. He's there to decide cases. Remember, we played that answer over and over. In 44 seconds, in one answer, John Roberts nailed the whole premise that the left has for the Supreme Court, in 44 seconds of an answer.

But, see, if you're going to say, "Well, he's got to appoint a woman because this is a female seat. There's only one woman on there." Well, at what point do the blacks get another seat? Okay, Hispanics have to get one. That's what I mean. We start quotaizing this, and by definition there's a problem with quota programs everywhere. The Supreme Court or in your company, you start finding the best of a quota rather than the best person to do the job, then you're automatically sabotaging the structural strength of whatever organization you're applying these quotas to. But the idea here that we have to hold onto some quota and maintain this O'Connor seat -- and the only reason I bring this up, why else are the libs happy? You know, Harry Reid just came out and made his second statement, you would think this guy wants to marry Harriet Miers. He's just happier than he can ever be. Now, one thing this tells me, two things, and keep this in mind, folks, Dingy Harry knows full well he's driving you nuts when he talks about how much he loves this nominee. So don't go too crazy with this, because Dingy Harry doesn't know her, either. Dingy Harry has no more idea what she's going to do on the Supreme Court than you or I do, probably less of an idea than you or I. He's probably got much less of an idea that President Bush does, what she's going to do on the court, but he knows when he comes out with this glowing praise that he's really irritating you, so don't let that work. I know how Dingy Harry looks at the court. "The O'Connor seat is a swing vote seat! We must maintain that swing vote seat," blah, blah. So the libs do not lose control of the court, and when you hear him praising Harriet Miers, I'm left to ask myself, is that what he likes here? Because I know it doesn't matter to him whether he likes somebody personally or not, and by the way, I want to hold out a little possibility for you.

Suppose this woman turns out to be a devout Christian, and suppose she turns out to be an evangelical Christian, and suppose that she, just as an example, is a literalist of the Bible. Well, I will tell you when the Democrats turn this up -- and these are just hypotheticals -- but if that's true and if the Democrats turn it up, you will forget, and Dingy Harry will forget this day that he ever talked about. "Well, that was before we found a bit more out about this woman and, yes, I did have pleasant experiences working with her but we simply cannot have somebody with this mind-set on the Supreme Court because they're not mainstream." Anything can happen yet here, folks. If you don't think that they're investigating this woman to the Nth degree? Don't buy this business, Harry Reid saying, it's over. He hasn't said that, but his attitude is, "Hey, I love this nominee." He said it twice today. But it's not yet. He was not this effusive in his praise of Judge Roberts but he did say he liked him and he still voted against him. So there's still a lot of to come with this, and it will be fascinating to watch, particularly whatever there is out there to learn about Harriet Miers.

all this nomination does is play into the hands of the leftists and liberals who have been making the charge against the bush administration that it is a country club of stoogism and cronyism... what makes me mad about this nomination as a whole is that bush, when re-elected, made a speech declaring that he now had a mandate of the people and that he was going to spend his new found political capital wherever he needed to...

let's take a look at this new found capital of his and reconcile it with the decisions he has made recently... the first and foremost in my mind is the new entitlement of the prescription drug coverage plan for senior citizens, which has by many estimates ballooned to nearly 600 billion dollars or so... is this a conservative ideal or a placation towards voting seniors for future votes for republicans...? Another disappointment to his base...

the reform of social security... this issue is dead in the water... he hasn't talked about it in months... his trips around the country to sell the idea have stalled onto deaf ears and with the democrats caterwauling this reform into the next, great apocalyptic horror since Godzilla vs. Rodan, i have to wonder why the president caved in on this piece of political capital as well...

next up is the war on terror... this hasn't been sold as it properly should have been... that we are fighting this war in over 102 countries and catching these sub-human dirt bags left and right... gleaning intelligence that has helped us in ways that cannot be recounted because of their covert nature... now, bush can go on the offensive with something like this and tell the american people that with this much cooperation around the world that the war on terror is working and it is worth fighting... as far as iraq is concerned, just saying "stay the course" isn't enough anymore... even though it is obvious outside of the moronic stream media to put as much negative black light on the war in iraq, we are and have turned it around to such a large degree that the insurgency is really starting to fade... when you have 12 of 14 iraqi districts pacified, that is a win in my book, but you don't see that coming from the white house as a pending victory of any kind and they aren't advertising it at all... secondly, the terms of engagement in this war are abysmal to say the least... change the terms of engagement to benefit us instead of taking john kerry's stance of fighting a more sensitive war by letting 1000 terrorist suspects go for the sake of ramadan is hapless way to fight this war...

also, the level of pork that the president has allowed to enter into the budget is a staggering failure of his stewardship of being fiscally responsible as a conservative republican... there is no way on the face of this earth to call yourself that very thing and have such a staggering level of pork in bills that are effectively meaningless to say the least... a president must have his advisors inform him of what is in or not in these bills in order to fight for them or fight against them... that is what a president should be doing and if he is, i'm not seeing it... the level of PR in this administration is terrible... it never presents itself in a positive light or in any light at all... instead it has taken a tone of crisis management anytime something gets out of hand and in the face of the recent hurricanes of katrina and rita it has become glaringly apparent that that the american people have spent money in the form of taxes for DoHS consolidation to absolutely no avail... the people are not seeing a viable return on their money... this is another black eye for the administration...

another caustic and even more inflammatory problem is the energy bill and the price of gasoline in this country... the administration has taken a back seat to the problem and from what i'm seeing so far has become carteresque with calls from the administration to begin a gas conservation campaign... are you serious...? how can the president reconcile telling the american public to conserve fuel, spend $3 a gallon when you have to, while in the energy bill the oil producing companies get tax breaks and tax credits...? i'm a little confused about that mr. president... furthermore, when the president is called to explain how he can help the american public alleviate the burden of high gas prices on them, he has nothing to say, his administration has nothing to say, they can neither explain why gas prices have risen to record all time highs in the last year and a half... not to mention that when experts point out that oil capacity is in an actual glut, but refining capacity is maxed out, the administration has nothing, nothing in the energy bill to address this problem... we haven't built a refinery in this country in over 30 years...? why...? environmentalist fascism is why and the administration has cowed to this group of luddite nitwits as well...

instead of fighting this group of anarchistic sub-humans who would put the progress of the american public in a hostage crisis for flora and fauna that most of them can't even name, the administration is nowhere to be found other than being portrayed as playing and catering to the stoogism and cronism of the energy/oil lobby... are you guys seeing a pattern here yet...

i guess i should also mention the total lack of will on stemming the tide of illegal immigration in a post 9/11 america, while catering to big business even in the face of the fact that businesses that hire these illegals is illegal... it's taken a group of people known as the minutemen to publically embarras the presidents border policy into a shameful war of words and he's even ended up on the losing side of that... we know where you stand on illegals mr. president, but at least have the guts to say so...

with his poll numbers pendulumed into an all time low with no rise in sight of any significance, one would have thougth that the roberts judicial confirmation would have given him a boost in that regard and i believe it did and then he nominates meyers, his personal whitehouse lawyer... YAY team... what was he thinking...? i'd like to know if he actually sat her down and said, "if i nominate you to the supreme court, will you promise me that you will be as conservative as possible...? because while you are going to go through the confirmation process, you are going to have to be as neutral as possible..."

what did she say, “yes mr. president...” and he said, "okay, i believe you..."

this is insane... with a plethora of highly qualified grand-slam roberts style judicial nominees at his fingertips that are staunchly and publicly conservative, he picks a stealth candidate of no known reputation and while harry reid and schumer are visibly stunned into near wordless affirmation of the presidents pick, one has to wonder what the hell the president is thinking... did he forget janice rogers brown, a superb candidate that is a woman, is black, has the highest of credentials, and has served as a judge with record to match...? is there a strategy i'm missing here that someone neglected to explain to me, because i'm not seeing it...

what i'm getting at is that there is something truly baffling about the way this administration makes decisions and who they consult and how they come to their conclusions... granted, we shouldn't be privy to every nuance of what goes on in the white house, but really, is this so hard to imagine with the examples i've sighted...? that this president has taken his mandate, his political capital and spent it at the arcade...? where did he spend it...? where the hell did it go...? what i do know is that he's squandered it on his agenda... an agenda that has gotten him nowhere, has been attacked at every turn by the democrats with the aid of the squelching media as it's coat tailing sidekicks... and we as the base have nothing to show for it...

given the chance to really make the democrats heads swim with hatred for another good judicial nominee, we are now left with playing the guessing game of who this person is, what has she done and why, who she has represented in the past and for what and to essentially follow a paper trail of her resume... to many questions that should be completely unnecessary for us to try an answer with any other qualified candidate that would have erased these questions with their qualified resumes... so now, we as the base have been left with one oar down the river...

this president has pissed away his cache, pissed away his political capital on projects that have gone nowhere, has pissed away the base that put him where he is only to be left hanging in the wind to placate his need for a noncommitalism and the need not to stir a hornets nest just because he's afraid he might get stung even though he's in a bee suit with a big can of raid in his hand...

frankly i've had enough of this administration and while i personally voted for this president, i can't support him anymore... he's shown me that he is a conservative in words and not deeds... i'm afraid that the only road for this administration now is towards the road of a vote of no confidence...

good luck, mr. president, you are going to need it... oh and thanks for helping to define conservatism into something that has shunned people away from it and not want to vote for again for another generation...

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