RUSH: Nancy Pelosi and the gang have left town. There is nothing going to be done for five weeks, not a single appropriation bill -- nothing on drilling. And it was not just four years ago when we saw John Kerry hounding President Bush to go "jawbone" with the Saudis to bring the oil price down? Now, four years later, all they want is for the price to remain high. They want you miserable. They want you suffering.
Anyway, what Pelosi has basically done here is shut down the House so they don't have to talk about offshore drilling. They went out, got aboard their jets and they left town without taking any action on the president's request to drill for oil and other things. Twenty-five members of the House Republican caucus nevertheless stayed behind and continued to make speeches and discuss -- on the floor of the House -- the need to drill here and drill now. But Pelosi ordered the cameras from C-SPAN turned off, she ordered the microphones turned off, and she ordered the press gallery cleared. However, I have just been informed that the lights have come back on. (The cameras have not yet, at least according to C-SPAN.) So this is an excellent sign.
Now, what the House Republicans today are doing right now is just ramming it down the Democrats' throats. When the speaker of the House, who controls all this, orders the cameras turned off, the lights turned off, and the microphones turned off... you know, this is reminiscent of what happened back in the eighties with Newt Gingrich and his boys leading the special orders at night. Tip O'Neill finally got fed up with it and ordered the House closed. The special orders -- they're just in there making speeches to an empty body -- but as long as somebody is speaking C-SPAN contractually had to carry it. So the House Republicans, 25 or 30 of them, are just continuing to hammer away, and they're demanding that the Democrats come back and debate them and talk about this and take action on this thing that the American people care so adamantly about, and that's the supply of oil and providing it for ourselves to make us less dependent on foreign oil.
This is not going to be good for the Democrats, folks. They claim to be for the little guy, they claim to be for the great unwashed and the downtrodden, the homeless, the hungry, and the thirsty, but they've abandoned them -- and they've abandoned them with four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline. They want the price to stay high. The American people are starting to figure this out. The only people making noise about taking market action that would lower price is Republicans. And Obama is in big trouble on this. To sit there and take no action whatsoever and then to say, as he did today, he wants another stimulus check to every American, a thousand dollars paid for by oil company profits... The American people don't want the oil companies paying more taxes. The federal government gets 50% of all the profits that the oil companies report anyway, so this is a winning issue, and I suspect the president and the Republicans are content to have the Democrats out of town and showing that they care nothing at all about the American people. I mean, all the Democrats care about is their own reelections and their upcoming convention.
Now, Representative Mike Pence, Republican, Indiana, who is single-handedly trying to kill the Fairness Doctrine forever, is one of the organizers of this session that is taking place in the House of Representatives today. He says that up to 40 Republican members are prepared to keep the proceedings going. He is quoted as saying, "I'm prepared to stay here as long as we can." He added that before the Democrat motion to adjourn was adopted, a hundred Republicans, 100, had signed up to speak for five minutes each about gas prices, but the adjournment vote precluded that. Bu the Democrats skipped town, got in their own private jets, making their own carbon footprint and flew away. These kinds of tactics, folks, are exactly what is called for. This is worthy of your support.
If you can somehow find a way to let these guys -- the Republicans -- know that you are appreciative of what they're doing, that they're finally standing up and that they are fighting the Democrat majority on this and taking it to them on an issue that matters greatly to a vast majority of the American people, do it. And I want to congratulate them and encourage them to keep up these kinds of legislative tactics. They've been absent for way too long. This is gutsy and it's courageous, and it will stand these guys in good stead. It will inspire their voters, it will inspire them, and you can inspire them by letting them know you appreciate what they are doing.