RUSH: Obama just left the Capitol. He just finished his meeting with Republican leaders up there trying to get them to go along with his stimulus package. Now, I want to explore something in a little detail that I brought up yesterday. Obama does not need a single Republican vote in the House to get the stimulus bill. He just needs two votes in the Senate to get it. He does not need Republican votes. ‘I won,’ he said. He can trump ’em. Why does he want Republicans on board? Why does he want Republicans on board with this when he can do it without them? Folks, I’m serious about this. If it’s such a great plan, if stimulus is such a great plan, then why not take sole authorship of it as the Democrat Party so that when it works you can then really finish off the Republicans? When it works you can say, ‘And this prosperity was brought to you by Obama and the stimulus package and not one Republican helped out. Not one Republican thought it would work.’
That would be the end of the Republican Party as we know it, so why doesn’t he do it if he’s so confident it’s gonna work? Because he’s not confident it’s gonna work in the way you hope it works. It’s gonna work, for what he has in mind. But it ain’t going to work in the ways you hope. It’s gonna work in building and strengthening the Democrat Party for as long as we live. It’s going to grow the government. It’s going to make the government the sole focus of the United States of America, not individual citizens exercising their daily lives with individual freedom. But there’s also another reason. It’s largely about political cover — and I think, by the way, you probably have seen, if you are one who reads the Internet and websites daily, some of the most personal and vicious articles written about me ever, from mainstream reporters. It’s vicious. It borders on, ‘I hope he gets cancer and dies.’
It borders on, ‘Why did Tim Russert have to be the one to get the heart attack?’ and these are from names that you know. These are from journalists, columnists, both local and national. Now, they’re really irritated. I thought I was irrelevant now. I thought all Republicans were irrelevant! Why all this vitriol aimed at me? This has nothing to do, by the way… Well, some of it has to do with Obama mentioning my name, ’cause just makes ’em mad, makes ’em mad. They wish that I would just vanish. So Obama mentions me, and it makes ’em mad. Just a little professional jealousy thrown in, but a lot of it is issues. Let’s go back to 1993 for the answer to this: why Obama wants Republican votes; why he wants a, quote, unquote, ‘bipartisan bill.’ The fear that these people are expressing I think is rooted in 1993. Bill Clinton passed — and if you remember this, my memory is long. Bill Clinton passed his ‘economic package’ — the tax increase, the retroactive tax increase on people, after he worked so hard for a middle-class tax cut and couldn’t bring it off.
He did that without any Republican support. Do you remember, my friends? That tax increase went through with hardly any Republican support. He tried a few other things, without Republican support. While this was going on, here we were. I was being made an honorary member of the House freshman class in 1994, and there was a distinct conservative message, and that distinct conservative message coupled with the fact that not one Republican had compromised his conservatism by agreeing with Clinton’s tax increase, allowed for a great contrast to be drawn, and along with a lot of other factors, the Republicans won the House for the first time in 40 years in the 1994 election. That’s what they are afraid of. The reason Obama mentioned my name, the reason Obama is desperate to have Republican support for this is to see to it that what happened in 1993 does not happen here in 2009, and that is that no conservative alternative supported by the Republican Party is to get traction.
If he can co-opt the Republicans — if he can co-opt McConnell and a number of Republicans in the Senate to go along with him on this — then when this blows up, they’re on record with him as being responsible for it blowing up. It is why it’s crucial that they hold out. Because Obama doesn’t need a single Republican vote in the House to get what he wants, and he only needs a couple in the Senate — and that couple is just to break cloture. It’s all he needs. Two Republicans. Republicans have got to hold firm on this. They have got to hold out on this. Let Obama go alone like Clinton went alone in 1993. That’s what Obama and the Democrats don’t want to happen. They want the Republican Party co-opted under the term bipartisan, and they want conservative opposition relegated to what people are going to be led to believe is a fringe little band of people out there who we can barely see ’em, they’re so small and they’re so fringe.
So while he’s trying to co-opt trillions of dollars of the US economy, he’s trying to wipe out the conservative movement and the Republican Party. The last people to see this for what it is are the Republicans themselves. They are so cowed by fear of other things, and they’re so cowed by language and so forth. They’ve got a big decision to make, and that’s why Obama’s romancing them. It’s why he’s talking to them now. I’m watching the press go, ‘Wow! We never saw Bush come up here and work with Democrats. We never saw a president do this. Obama is really reaching out. He’s really a new kind of guy.’ He’s trying to co-opt them! He’s trying to destroy them. He’s trying to make sure that he still wins when this stimulus package bombs.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: President Obama, after his meeting with Representative John Boehner and other Republican leaders up on Capitol Hill in a hallway.
OBAMA: I recognize that we’re not going to get a hundred percent of support, uh, but I — I think everybody there felt good, uh, about that — that I was willing to explain how we put the package together, how we were thinking about it, and that we continue to welcome some good ideas.
RUSH: Oh, oh, it’s getting frustrating. I don’t know how confident he sounds there. He can get this passed without John Boehner. He can get this passed without a single Republican vote. He doesn’t want that. He wants Republican cover. Folks, I’m going to ask you one more time, if this bill is so dynamic and if it’s so wonderful, it’s so miraculous, if this is going to bring about all the hope and change, if this is going to bring back all the jobs that have been lost, all the value in the stock market, all the value in your homes that have been lost, why doesn’t he want sole credit for it? Do you realize that if his stimulus bill would do all of that, he would welcome no Republican signatures on board this thing. He could finish off the Republican Party forever if he thought this bill was going to do all that, but he knows this bill won’t do any of that, and that’s why he wants cover. He’s trying to co-opt the Republicans. He wants them to take some of the heat here; 1993, Bill Clinton’s first budget, not one Republican vote. That was one of the many ingredients that led to the Republicans taking the House back for the first time in 40 years in the campaign of 1994.
John Boehner has said, ‘We’re going to do everything we can to work with the president.’ It is my understanding that the gag order has gone out on Capitol Hill from Republican leaders to the rank and file that they are not to speak critically of President Obama. They can speak critically of the package. They can speak critically of the legislation. But there is a gag order on any criticism of President Obama. I cannot say that this is 125% fact, I cannot say this with ontological certitude, but I have heard it from a couple of different sources that this, quote, unquote, gag order exists. Now, Boehner has put out a press release: 20 facts about the Democrat stimulus package. Let me just go through some of these that Boehner has put out, and these are the result of people that have read the legislation.
The $825 billion package will exceed more than 1.1 trillion when adding in the interest between 2009 and 2019 to pay for it. That’s $300 billion plus something. I remember back in the eighties when the Reagan deficits were the monster, the Reagan deficits, the annual budget deficit of $400 billion or whatever they were, the Democrats were just screaming bloody murder, and one of the arguments the Democrats used back then was, well, you know, if we’re going to borrow all this money, and we’re going to have all these deficits, that’s money that’s not going to be available in the private sector. Well, they were right. But the Reagan plan dealt with that by keeping a lot of money in the private sector in the hands of people who build the economy, i.e., us. I’ll give you a little pop quiz. What percentage of GDP is American consumerism, just the American people buying, selling, driving, flying, hotels, American people going about their lives, what percentage of the GDP, what percentage of the economy? Seventy percent is the exact number. Seventy percent. The other 30% would be the defense program, the government, building airplanes and so forth.
Now, therefore, what do you think needs to happen to bring this back? That 70% is not going to be 70% once these people get through. There is $650 million in this bill for digital TV coupons. It’s not stimulus. There is $600 million for a new fleet of green environmentally approved cars for the federal government. And, by the way, that $600 million is double the current cost for the existing fleet. Six billion dollars for colleges and universities, many of which have billion-dollar endowments. Fifty million in funding for the National Endowment of the Arts. Forty-four million dollars for repairs to the US department of agriculture headquarters, 200 million to the National Mall, including 21 million for sod. The stimulus bill establishes 32 new government programs at a cost of over $136 billion. That means that more than a third of this plan’s spending provisions are dedicated to creating new government programs.
There is $4.19 billion for neighborhood stabilization or ACORN, community organizing voter fraud groups, that is, we are paying to fund Obama’s army. Just one in seven dollars of an $18.5 billion expenditure on energy efficiency would be spent within the next 18 months, one in seven dollars. The House Democrat bill will cost each and every household $6,700 in additional debt. The bill provides enough spending, $825 billion, to give every man, woman, and child in America $2,700. Eight hundred twenty-five billion is enough to give every person in Ohio $72,000. Eight hundred twenty-five billion is enough to give every person living in poverty in the US $22,000. And it goes on. There are six more categories and items. But this is just the beginning. Once this kind of thing happens, we had stimulus all last year, didn’t work. We’ve had bank bailouts, and it hasn’t worked. In fact, what’s really damning about this is that a credit crunch is largely to blame for all of this, correct? The credit crunch, because there’s debt out there, we got way too much debt, that was leveraged at 30 to one, unsupportable ratios. What is this? What is this?
This is debt like we haven’t seen in an annual budget deficit. And, by the way, Obama said that he was gonna cut wasteful government spending. Where’s that list? You remember he said that he was going to go through every line and find out the programs that weren’t necessary, gonna get rid of them. Haven’t seen that, have you? I’ll tell you where he’ll find those programs. Where do you think he’ll find those programs? He will find programs that we don’t need that we can cut, I guarantee you he will. Every Democrat president always has. It’s called Pentagon. It’s called the Department of Defense. It’s called closing Guantanamo Bay. It’s called demilitarizing space. It’s called going on al-Arabiya TV and saying the United States has too often dictated, not listened. We are not your enemy. If you are a jihadist listening to this, this is a big day for you, watching Obama last night.