RUSH: I walked out of the broadcast complex here of the studio, and went back to Snerdley’s little cubbyhole office. He always has C-SPAN on back there, and I walked in, and, of course, we know that Nancy Pelosi and her Democrats take over tomorrow, officially, but the way it’s being reported on it’s happening today. So that is the coverage of the news, is the Democrats take over and Pelosi this, Pelosi that. David Broder, columnist for the Washington Post is on television, I looked at Snerdley, and I said, ?What’s he doing, announcing the Democrat agenda?? It looked just like he was. I don’t know if any of you saw this today. Of course, the Washington Post has this story that the Democrats are reneging on their promise of bipartisanship in the House of Representatives, and they are planning to do this by using House rules to prevent Republicans from offering alternative measures to a number of measures in their first 100 hours.
House Democrats plan to assure the speedy passage of bills on a minimum wage hike, stem cell research. Of course they got polling data that shows the American people, great majorities are very much in favor of the minimum wage hike. I told you this before I left, and embryonic stem cell research, both of which are totally understandable when you understand how selfish, not self-interested, but selfish a lot of people are. I mean, the minimum wage, we’ve lost the argument on it. There’s no question that’s going to happen. But here’s my point about it. My point about all of this is it was embarrassing. On television this morning, Republican members of the leadership in the House, one by one, strode to the microphones and the cameras to lament this dirty double-cross by the Democrats. ?Well, I think they ought to be including us! This is not fair, we were expecting bipartisanship.? Hey, a little message to the Republicans. You lost the election! You have no power! It is unbecoming of you to start whining.
The way to fix this is to win the next election in 2008 and win back control of the House. This was embarrassing to watch. Who in the world thought the Democrats were going to end up being bipartisan? They never have been when they’ve run the house. Why should they start now? I don’t blame them. They won. They got their power back. It’s embarrassing to sit here and watch the Republicans demand fairness from the Democrats as though it were ever going to happen. Here’s the thing about this. I’m going to give you a little legislative reality. Pelosi, here’s a good question for you. How long will it be before Nancy Pelosi refuses to talk to Harry Reid? How long will that take? I’m getting looks from people on the other side of the glass, ?What are you talking about??
Well, let’s go through the legislative process. Let’s look at how it’s going to take place under Nancy Pelosi, as George Soros would say. She’s going to have these pieces of legislation, a minimum wage, embryonic stem cell, whatever. Maybe not these first bills, because they’re going to be symbolic more than anything else, but what’s going to happen when normalcy sets in is legislation is going to be introduced by somebody in the House for X, I don’t care what it is. The Democrats are not unified. They have all these wacky cauci. They have the Progressive Caucus, they have the black caucus, they have the Hispanic caucus– I don’t know how many caucuses they’ve got. Piece of legislation is introduced, it’s going to have to pass through all of those caucuses, and every one of those caucuses is going to get their pound of flesh in it.
?Well, for the black caucus to support this, it’s going to have to include X. For the Hispanic caucus to support this legislation is going to have to include Y. For the Progressive Caucus to include this, it’s going to have to be this and that and the other thing.? By the time the caucuses in the Democratic Party get finished with this legislation, it’s not going to look like anything when it started. It’s not going to resemble the original form at all. Then the Republicans are going to get their chance at it. They lost and they don’t have any majorities, but they’re going to be able to bottle things up for awhile. Not quite like they can in the Senate, where you’re going to need 60 votes for everything, but that’s the next phase. Whatever ends up of this mythical original legislation then goes to the Senate where Dingy Harry has a one-seat majority.
By the way, Tim Johnson is still in critical condition. You know, you can bet there are people taking bets now in official book rooms and so forth just when in the next two years Mitch McConnell will become the Senate majority leader, because of the advancing age of several Democrat senators. The two senators from Hawaii, Senator Inouye and Senator Akaka, are in their early eighties. Sheets Byrd is 89. There are a number of others that are of advanced age. So there are all kinds of things that are fluid. The point is you need 60 votes to get anything passed in the Senate, and Dingy Harry is not going to be able to come up — I mean, all Mitch McConnell needs is 41 votes to stop something. Dingy Harry needs 60 votes, and he’s got a 51-seat majority with a guy who’s in the hospital.
So Nancy Pelosi can pass whatever legislation she wants in the House. Then she’s going to send it over to the Senate, and you know what happens to legislation in the Senate. Already some Democrats, what is it, I think Bingaman, already throwing cold water — one of the things they want to do is the windfall profits tax on Big Oil. He says, ?Wait a minute, they don’t really want to go this direction.? Bingaman, ?We don’t really want to go in this direction.? So if Pelosi thinks the Senate is going to bend over and grab the ankles she’s got another thing coming. So when Dingy Harry is unable to deliver this wonderful agenda that Pelosi puts together in the House, how long is it going to be before she stops talking to him and starts taking out her failures on him? Oh, this is going to be a fun two years, ladies and gentlemen.
In the midst of it, to sit here and watch the Republicans complain and whine and moan, it’s unseemly, and, frankly, it’s embarrassing. You lost, it’s l-o-s-t, and lost means lost, and that means you have no power. To sit there and (crying) ?What about us! What about us?? I tell you, it’s like the Republicans think they’re going to get the same compassion from Democrats that Saddam Hussein’s getting, and it just isn’t going to happen. I don’t know. It embarrassed me, folks, I must be honest, it embarrassed me.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
One more sound bite here before we go back to the phones. This is about the Democrats and their first 100 hours in the house, Nancy Pelosi and their big agenda and so forth. As you know, the Democrats, by the way, whined too and wanted a little bit of power sharing, and the Republicans basically blew ’em off. All these years, DeLay and the boys blew ?em off. It’s the way power works, folks. The Democrats tried all those years to make the minority sound like the majority as they start talking about minority rights and all this. Republicans — some of you think they did cave. They caved in the sense that they didn’t want to offend anybody, didn’t want to offend the press, they didn’t go for the throats like the Democrats always do and will now. What’s interesting, I want to go back to January 16th, almost a year ago, 2006, Martin Luther King Day. This is Hillary Clinton speaking at the Canaan Baptist Church in Harlem.
HILLARY: The Democratic Party up until — this is self-serving to say — ’til January of 2001, had at least some power in our government. We either had the presidency, when we didn’t have the presidency we had one or both houses of Congress. For the last five years, we’ve had no power at all. And that makes a big difference because when you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation, and you know what I’m talking about.
RUSH: Now, that’s an interesting choice of words, Martin Luther King Day, ?it has been run like a plantation,? with the Democrats, of course, as the slaves. Well, the Democrats, Pelosi just announced she’s going to reopen the plantation because the Republicans are going to have no power there, as they should. They didn’t win anything. But they’re going to reopen the plantation, only now it’s the Republicans who will be slaves, and that’s cool. That’s absolutely fine. Nobody will be complaining about the way the House is being run this Martin Luther King Day when it’s time for all the speechifying. Even though it’s going to be run the same way the Republicans ran it, they’ll not call it a plantation, anything of the sort.