RUSH: All right, so we had a breakfast today with Harry Reid, Pat Leahy, Arlen Specter, Bill Frist and the president, and Harry Reid came out (summary): “Oh, this is wonderful! We’re glad we’re being consulted. No names are mentioned but we’re going to get this done together. We’re working together. We love each other,” blah, blah, blah. It just made you want to throw up. Let’s listen to Chuck Schumer’s reaction.
SCHUMER: Let us hope that this is not the end of the consultation process, but the beginning.
RUSH: Arrogant, arrogant.
SCHUMER: Let us hope that there will be the kind of dialogue — I reiterate my call to the president to have a summit, to call a good number of Democrats and Republicans together for a day at Camp David, for an evening or a dinner at the White House and have a real back-and-forth where we roll up our sleeves and really get into a serious, detailed discussion of how we all feel.
RUSH: This is arrogance like I have never seen it. This is a guy who’s only got one arm sticking out of the quicksand saying, “If you don’t get me out of here I’m not going to save you.” This guy is beyond the pale. He wants a summit? Breakfast is not enough he wants a summit at Camp David? Get all these Democrats together; let’s really have a real consultation process. Only one problem, Senator Schumer: You are a loser. You didn’t win the election. You don’t get to do this. The arrogance that you seem to have that the Democrats run this country; it’s only legitimate when the Democrats are running this country.
I hope you can hear how you sound to people, senator, because you’re becoming a laughingstock. I mean, people that have not even been taught the Constitution understand how wrong you are, Senator Schumer. And we couldn’t complete this process without listening to Senator Leahy. He was on Inside Politics yesterday with Candy Crowley on CNN, and she says, “We’ve heard a lot, and I’m wondering here, if you take a conservative judge, when is a conservative judge simply that, and when is a conservative judge divisive?”
LEAHY: Well, they’re divisive because they’ve, uh, taken positions that’s shown that they’re almost monolithically in favor of one group, like just only rule in favor of business. They’ll only rule in favor of a certain class of people or — those — those — there are some judges that are like that. They usually end up being reversed but you don’t want them on the Supreme Court where there’s nobody there to reverse them.
CROWLEY: Would you support — ?
LEAHY: I worry when they’re an activist judge, uh, who almost reflexively vote down laws passed by the Congress or by the states and create laws of their own, substitute. The two most activist judges we have right now are Justice Thomas, uh, and Justice Scalia.
RUSH: (Laughing.) The two LEAST activist judges are Thomas and Scalia. What you just heard Senator Leahy do here — remember: words mean things — Senator Leahy is twisting the word “activist” around and applying it to originalists like Scalia and Thomas. This other gibberish about, “Well, they’re divisive because they’ve taken positions that show they’re almost monolithically in favor of just one group, like they’ll just only rule in favor of business, they’ll only rule…” Everything with these people apparently is class envy, and the court is there to balance the economic scale, guarantee equality of outcomes or sameness of outcomes or what have you. But regardless, I just think this is pathetic. I think these people …(sigh). They don’t have the ability to be embarrassed.
If they were embarrassed with themselves or could be embarrassed, they would have stopped letting Ted Kennedy go out and speak for them a long time ago. But it’s amazing to watch. Some might say it’s a once great party, the Democratic Party, literally now just crumbling. Doorjamb by doorjamb the mansion that was the Democratic Party is being torn down, doorjamb by doorjamb but it’s happening. (interruption) Well, I know. It’s frustrating. It’s frustrating to a lot of people. But you know what’s frustrating about it? I’ve always thought — just in interactions with people — we all have various personality types that rub us the wrong way. Whether it’s these guys in politics or whether it’s the neighbor, whether it’s a coworker, and speaking for me because I can only speak for me, the personality traits that have rubbed me wrong the most are arrogance, condescension, and lying — and insulting my intelligence, people telling me things I know are untrue, as though they think I’m an idiot and will believe it.
That’s all wrapped up into one bundle when you get these Senate Democrats. They are all arrogant. They are all condescending, and they think that all of us are absolute blithering idiots and the country can’t run without them in charge, and their birthright as Democrats is to run this country, and we have gotten in the way, and they think very little of us for that and they’re going to get even one way or the other. If they can’t persuade us to vote for them, then they will do their best to get the people we vote for thrown out of office or thrown in jail. If we don’t vote for them, then they will see to it that what they believe should happen to the country will be implemented by a bunch of activist judges where we can say nothing about it. But here when they have gone down to humiliating defeat in the House and Senate over the last — well, since ’94.
It’s ten years, ten, 11 years — when they are losing their percentages in both bodies and the margin of victory for the Republicans in the presidential race continues to expand, these guys act like they win. They act like they’re the winners and should have won. “So since we should have won we’re going to act like we did.” Just the whole arrogance here of Schumer demanding a summit, Camp David, dinner at the White House; Leahy lying through his teeth about who activist judges are, “always defending just one group of people. ” Yes, it’s frustrating but it’s also indicative, folks, of a party in the midst of its last gasp. One more bite from Candy Crowley. She said, “I know you know that Republicans have a different definition of what an activist judge is, senator.”
LEAHY: Well, it’s the same definition they’ve always used for, uh, Democrats. They said Democrats who would strike down a law passed by the people and substitute something of their own. I’m just using their — by their own definition, the two most activist judges there right now are Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
RUSH: What he’s basing this on is a recent poll that showed Scalia and Thomas have voted most often lately to say that a law passed by Congress is unconstitutional. That’s not what we mean by “activist,” and he knows that. Activist judges are judges that don’t interpret the Constitution. Activist judges are judges that actually don’t want there to be a Constitution. If we’re going to have activist judges, folks, we don’t need a Constitution. It’s just like if we’re going to let anybody in the country that wants in, we don’t have a country. We may as well not have a border. If we’re not going to enforce the border, we don’t have a country. Well, if we’re going to have judges that will not look to the Constitution, we don’t have a Constitution, and that’s what we get with activist judges.
We get activist judges who take their personal policy preferences to the bench, and then they decide cases on the basis of those personal policy preferences and they call that “law.” So their personal policy preferences become constitutional. Well, they’re not. You can say something is constitutional all you want but it is only constitutional if it is. If it’s not constitutional, it’s not — and these are, you know, not matters of debate. That’s why originalist is a key word. You go back; you look at the original intent. You can find it. It’s there. Federalist Papers, numerous discussions, the document itself. But look at this takings case in New London, Connecticut.
The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution is clear, but the US Supreme Court three weeks ago said, “Ah, we think it means something else.” So now we have a bunch of states and the US Congress thinking of writing a law that basically says what the Constitution already says. So we’re having to rewrite the Constitution because we’ve got a bunch of judges who are ignoring it, plain and simple. That’s the definition of an activist judge — and in this case, Thomas and Scalia are not activist. Basically let me make it as simple as I can: An activist judge is a liberal who believes liberalism should become institutionalized in the courts. You want a great definition? To show you how out of whack Leahy and his comments are, you look at the eminent domain decision out of New London, Connecticut. That was a bunch of liberals. Liberals are said to stand for the little guy. That’s what Leahy just is: They stand for the little guy against the big guy.
What did the Supreme Court just do? Just stood for a local government over a little guy and said the local government can say to the little guy, “You don’t own that property that you actually own. We’re going to take it away from you. We’re going to give it to this other private citizen because he’s going to generate more tax revenue for us,” and so a lot of people have to get it through their heads now. The US Supreme Court, the liberals of this country do not stand for the little guy. They’ll sweep the little guy out of the way as soon as he gets in the way. They have to. What’s paramount is big government. Be it local government, state government, federal government, it’s gotta be big. It’s gotta be big and all-powerful.