RUSH: All right, here we go. Senator Kennedy. A couple of bites here. A montage of Senator Kennedy obsessed with strip searching. It’s like water boarding. You’d think he’d stay away from this topic.
KENNEDY: I know that you have gone over the factual situation about the strip searching of a ten-year-old girl. The police took the wife and daughter upstairs, told them to remove their clothing, physically searched them — not as a protective frisk or search for weapons, but in the hopes of finding contraband, but the result of which we have the strip searching of a ten-year-old, ten-year-old that will bear the scars of that kind of activity probably for the rest of her life.
RUSH: Stop the tape! Am I the only one? I cannot be. I cannot be the only one. When I hear Senator Kennedy say this, “The result of which we have a strip searching of a ten-year-old, a ten-year-old that will bear the scars of that kind of activity probably for the rest of her life,” the name Mary Jo Kopechne just leaps off of the page at me here when I look at the transcript of this. The idea, though, of course, that Alito, “Oh, yeah for the fun of it, you want to strip search ten-year-olds? Fine, go ahead!” People aren’t going to buy this. This is all they’ve got. You have to understand they’re starting out with their big guns. They’re starting out with what they think is their hot and heavy. Any time the liberals are forced into circumstances like these kinds of hearings, and they’re on their own, and the mainstream press can’t re-characterize it or touch it until later in the day, can’t dress it up ’til later in the day, it is on display how everybody how pathetically pitiful they have become. This is about determining someone’s fitness to be a judge on the US Supreme Court. They take an instance of one case, and they try to mischaracterizing this to basically saying this guy is a pervert. “Yep, strip search a ten-year-old girl? Fine. Let me come.” That’s the impression that they want to leave here. Here’s the rest of what he said in his statement, slash, question, to Judge Alito.
KENNEDY: And as a result of your judgment in this case, we have the kind of conduct against this ten-year-old which she will never forget. Why? Why?
RUSH: Why? Why? Why? As if there can be no answer! Well, of course there’s Judge Alito, and there was an answer.
ALITO: Senator, I wasn’t happy that a ten-year-old was searched. Now, there wasn’t any claim in this case that the search was carried out in any sort of an abusive fashion. It was carried out by a female officer, and that wasn’t the issue in the case, and I don’t think that there should be a Fourth Amendment rule. But of course it wasn’t up to me to decide that minors can never be searched because if we had a rule like that, then where would drug dealers hide their drugs? That would lead to greater abuse of minors.
RUSH: Yeah, just a home run. Knock Senator Kennedy out of the park. I want to return to Senator Leahy. As I told you, the liberals seat court as their own only way to advocate for their out-of-the-mainstream views — in this case, terrorist rights. This is Senator Leahy who opened up with a defense of Al-Qaeda. Terrorist rights — and that’s what I said, other than his attempt here to bring along some Republicans to vote against Alito, which is what this is all about, by bringing up torture and constantly focusing on how the rights of terrorists have been violated by the Bush administration, he’s trying to bring some Republicans along with him to vote against Alito because other than that, this is political suicide, and once people find out that the first chance a Democrat got to ask this guy any questions he started out asking this judge if you’re going to defend the constitutional rights of our enemies. Here is Leahy.
LEAHY: I worry about this culture we’re getting, and I just want to make sure the courts. The Congress is not going to stand up and say, “No,” and the administration certainly is authorizing this. I want to make sure the courts — that the courts! — are going to say, “We’ll respect your privacy. We’ll respect your Fourth Amendment rights.” You know, if you have somebody who’s been spied on, warrantless spying, would you agree — and I think you did, but I want to make sure I’m right on this — do you agree hat they should have a day in court?
ALITO: Certainly. Someone who’s been the subject of illegal law enforcement activities, they should have a day in court, and that’s what the courts are there for, to protect the rights of individuals against the government and to — or anyone else who violates their rights, and they have to be absolutely independent and treat everybody equally.
LEAHY: And those Fourth Amendment rights are pretty significantly, are they not?
ALITO: They are very significant.
RUSH: What kind of question is that? “And those Fourth Amendment rights are pretty significant…?” You know what that is? “I don’t know what to say here! I better say something! He answered my question and I wasn’t expecting this good of an answer.” So it’s a mind burp, is what it was. Next up, Leahy asks Alito why he seems to give the benefit of the doubt to law enforcement. Question: “The only reason that I bring up these two cases, Judge, it seems in both of them you went beyond the four corners of the search warrant and you settled all issues in a light most favorable — the majority opinion didn’t, but you did — in a light most favorable to law enforcement. In fact, in Baker, the majority said that, and I worry about this, Judge, because I always worry the courts must be there to protect individuals against an overreaching government,” except when your name is Rush Limbaugh or Tom DeLay. “In this case, Judge, your position in the minority was that you protected what the majority felt was an overreaching argument. Am I putting too strong an analysis on that?”
ALITO: I think you need to take into account what was going on here. The police officers prepared an affidavit, and they said, ‘We have probable cause to believe that this drug dealer hides drugs on people who are on the premise, and therefore when we search, we want authorization not just to search him, but to search everybody who’s found on the premise, because we think he hides — we have reason to believe he hides — drugs there.” We’re supposed to read warrants in a common sense fashion, because they’re prepared by police officers for the most part, not by lawyers and they’re often prepared under a lot of time pressure. It seemed to me that reading that no common sense fashion, what the magistrate intended to do was to say, “Yes, you have authorization to do what you ask us to do,” but even beyond that, the issue there was whether these police officers could be sued for damages, and they couldn’t be sued for damages if a reasonable officer could have believed that that’s what the magistrate intended to authorize, and I thought that surely a reasonable officer could view it that way. Now, Judge Chertoff looked at it differently and there are cases where reasonable people disagree —
LEAHY: (vocalizing)
ALITO: — and that’s all that was going on.
RUSH: Now, Chertoff here is another Republican judge, and this is a typical liberal trick. They go out and cherry pick a Republican judge who they also hate, but apparently a Republican judge will do something right now and then — especially when they can nail another Republican judge. So they throw up this Chertoff guy as another Republican judge and they want to show Alito to be out of the mainstream and so forth. I haven’t yet seen — Has Ted Kennedy or has Patrick Leahy authored a bill in the Senate prohibiting search searches of ten-year-old girls? Have they? They haven’t. They find it so outrageous. This is an old case. Didn’t happen yesterday. Where is their concern? Where is their compassion for these ten-year-old poor victims, these drug mules? Where is their compassion? They should have authored a law saying can’t do this. That’s how this works. If you don’t like what’s happening in the legal system, then you change the law. These are the people that have the right to do that! Folks, I’m telling you, when I listen to these guys I’m more concerned or convinced than ever that they simply don’t have the intellectual firepower to take on the best that we have to offer.
So they have to make up these snares: Lie about what the president’s doing; lie about what Alito wanted to do. “Strip searching ten-year-old girls is fine. In fact, it’s fun! Let’s do it just for the fun of it.” You know, Leahy also got upset that an argument was made that attorneys general can’t be personally sued for violations of the law. He was astounded at that. But, you know, it’s very interesting. Members of Congress are constitutionally immune from private lawsuits, while acting under the color of their official duties. They can’t be sued, either. If they can’t be sued, why should the attorney general be allowed to be sued? They always talk about — and this is funny. Here’s Leahy, and Kennedy did it, too. They’re always talking about the courts protecting the individual from an overreaching government. But excuse me: Aren’t these the original big-government guys, and aren’t these big-government guys complaining about big government power? Want to talk about a little hypocrisy?
These guys, I guess to understand this you have to understand that they always side with the bad guys, whether it be Al-Qaeda or whether it be a local murderer or whether it be founder of a gang, they end up siding with the bad guys. We, folks, we conservatives, we are the limited-government guys. We are the constitutionalists. Leahy and Kennedy and all the rest of these Democrats, they are the big-government guys. They’re the ones that ignore the written words in the Constitution guys, not us — and then, of course, Kennedy he had to bring up the Princeton group that Alito was a member of. And I told you this was coming yesterday. Kennedy says, “Why, why, why, why, would you join such a discriminatory group?” And Alito said, “I didn’t even know that’s what they stood for. I joined it because of the ROTC. They were trying to ban the ROTC from campus during the Vietnam War, and I believed in the ROTC.” We knew what the answer was going to be yesterday. They had to know what the answer was going to be. They still asked the question. I’m telling you — I’ve used this analogy a lot — they’re just trying to sink battleships here with BBs.
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RUSH: As you people know, nothing gets by me. I am too sharp for these people. I know what they’re going to do and say before they do it. Strip searching of little girls? Can’t do that! Boy, I’ll tell you, the very big government that the liberals love — they promote, they fund — this big government per taxes, this government’s apparently very dangerous, because this government violates the rights of citizens, this government capital be trusted. It strip searches ten-year-old girls. The libs are of two minds, aren’t they? Big government but don’t trust big government. It’s their big government doing all these things. You listen to these horrors being committed in this country, it’s all because of big government. You can’t trust big government. Why, they’re going to strip search your ten-year-old! They’re going to violate the rights of their citizens. They can’t be trusted, period — and yet this is what they advocate.
Yes, I’m incredulous because I’m incredulous. They advocate big government. You know it. They want to raise taxes. The bigger the government is the better. But now all of a sudden, when people get in charge of this big government that they don’t like, why, look at how outrageous it becomes! They’re talking about strip searching little ten-year-olds. Tell me something, folks. Which political party and ideology is it that stands for and promotes and defends the rights of minor girls to have abortions without their parents’ consent? Ahem. Whom? Is it not the party of Senator Kennedy and the party of Senator Leahy? How in the world can they be so concerned about strip searches of ten-year-olds in drug cases and yet find no problem with whatever has to take place in order to have an abortion on a minor girl without her parents knowing about it? Hmm? These people, they sink themselves. All we have to do is let ’em talk and they sink themselves, and they’re in the process of doing so again.
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