RUSH: Anyway, these commentaries out there, folks, this is classic ruling class, people wanting to be in the big clique. We had a horrible decision in terms of the rule of law. Politically, I think the decision yesterday in Arizona by that Clinton appointee is just another nail in the coffin politically for the Democrats come November. So politically, yeah, you can see, but legally, as far as the rule of law is concerned, this is a disaster. It is an outrage. And we got people saying, ‘Well, there’s some victories to celebrate in here. There are some positives; there are some up sides here.’
Example. They’re saying that the judge let stand for now the employer sanctions. Big whoop. It doesn’t matter because you can’t — if you want to know ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ this is it, except not in the military. This law as it stands now in Arizona is ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ It’s now illegal to be illegal in Arizona. But when you say that there’s some positives in here, the judge let some things stand like employer sanctions, this is how the rule of law gets dumbed down. Here we have a federal judge who refused to allow the state of Arizona to implement its law, which compliments federal law by striking at the heart of the law, including the ability of state and local law enforcement to ask individuals who are detained or questioned for other possible offensives, which is something that still gets demagogued in this, whether they are here legally or not and require aliens to carry papers with them. That’s been struck down. You can go find positives all you want but there aren’t any. The guts of this have been taken out of it. You want to go try to find positives, if we can’t call things what they are, we’re not going to have chance here to get rid of some of these things. There aren’t any positives here. Not as far as the rule of law is concerned.
Now, the judge said that this might create due process issues and an undue burden for the federal government in law enforcement to enforce their own law. We don’t have the resources. She completely ignored — and I’ve talked to legal beagles about this — the judge completely ignored the Supreme Court’s own standard for issuing a stay. So, in other words, in the name of upholding the law she defied the law. Looking for positives here? We are supposed to celebrate the fact that this judge allowed to stand a part of the law that should have been allowed to stand anyway? Oh, wow, you’re gonna let that part stay in it? That’s the law anyway. It’s like applauding a court affirming that murder is still murder and is a crime. Big whoop. We’re supposed to claim this is a partial victory? There is no victory when a federal judge refuses to uphold the law, whether a part of it or all of it under circumstances like this. And to claim partial victory, I don’t know what the objective is here, to claim partial victory is to give credit where credit is not due. Sometimes the people on our side of the aisle baffle me more than the people on the left ’cause I totally understand the people on the left.
From the United States federal website, welcome guide to the United States, on page eight: ‘As a permanent resident, it is your responsibility to obey all federal, state, and local laws,’ except in Arizona. ‘Pay federal, state, and local income taxes,’ except in Arizona. ‘Register with the Selective Service if you’re a male between 18 and 26, see page 11 for instructions.’ All this is true except if you are illegal in Arizona. ‘You are a permanent resident required to maintain your immigration status,’ except in Arizona. ‘And you are required to carry proof of your permanent resident status at all times,’ except in Arizona, and by extension, every other state now, theoretically. If you can’t preempt federal law anywhere else, then we in big doo-doo, heap big doo-doo.
The Heritage Foundation has a great piece in the Morning Bell: ‘Surviving the Obama Assault on the Rule of Law.’
The New York Times has a big story about this today, and they’re somewhat accurate about it on the political side. ‘Hours after yesterday’s decision by President Bill Clinton judicial appointee Susan Bolton to preemptively stop enforcement of Arizona’s immigration enforcement law, Thomas A. Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), told The New York Times: ‘This is a warning to any other jurisdiction.’ Just in case the message from the Obama administration and its leftist allies was not clear, Obama appointee U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke told The Associated Press: ‘Surely it’s going to make states pause and consider how they’re drafting legislation and how it fits in a constitutional framework.”
As I said yesterday, this is judicial activism, textbook case: rewrote the Arizona law to her own needs; followed the spin of the media; followed the spin of the ACLU; followed the spin, not the law, of the federal government; invented her own facts and ignored clear federal law. ‘President Jimmy Carter appointee and immigration law professor at Yale Law School Peter Schuck told The New York Times: ‘She rushed to judgment in a way I can only assume reflects a lot of pressure from the federal government to get this case resolved quickly.” When a Yale Law professor comes out against a Clinton appointed federal judge, folks, momentous. ‘The Obama administration’s case against Arizona sought to preemptively stop enforcement of Arizona’s new immigration law. The legal term for this is a ‘facial challenge,’ and federal precedent is clear that facial challenges ‘must be careful not to go beyond the statute’s facial requirements and speculate about ‘hypothetical’ or imaginary cases.’ But that is exactly what Judge Bolton did.’ ‘Well, this could lead to X, and it might cause Y to happen, and if that happens, then Z might happen.’ A bunch of hypothetical circumstances led the judge to rule that the guts of the law are unenforceable, unconstitutional.
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RUSH: In the New York Times story that I referenced moments ago, there’s somebody who says, ‘Well, why didn’t the judge just let the law be implemented, just let the law take effect to see if what she said would happen actually happened?’ Well, there’s a very good reason why they don’t want the law to take effect, because what they say is going to happen will not happen. It’s no more complicated than that. She and the federal government are afraid it won’t happen. I’m talking about profiling. They’re afraid it will not happen, which is why they rushed the lawsuit and why she rushed her ruling. She declared that enforcing the federal law interferes with it. So the judge and Holder (the Department of Justice) rushed this decision precisely because they knew they would not have the profiling and other horrible things that they were saying would happen.
All of these hypotheticals, they weren’t going to happen. They’re not part of the law. So the light of truth would be shining on this; the jig would be up. This would be seen for what it is: A bunch of spin and lies and distortion about the law. Now, why would Obama have any empathy for the citizens of Arizona or any of the states that are now overrun by illegal aliens? Why does anybody think he would? You know, Joe Arpaio asked, ‘Why don’t we partner with Obama?’ Well, for whom does Obama have sympathy now? He reserves his empathy, sympathy, whatever, for terrorists and other enemies of the United States. We used to partner with Israel. That’s out the window now. We’re going to have NASA outreach to Muslims?
We’re going to outreach to the enemy. We didn’t try to stop these WikiLeaks documents. ‘Eh, no big deal. No big deal. It’s just what we’ve always known: Bush sucks and the war is not right. It’s an excuse to get out of there pretty soon.’ He doesn’t have any pain left to spare for average Americans, especially the rubes that didn’t vote for him. You think Obama doesn’t keep a tab and his regime doesn’t keep a tab of who supported him and who didn’t? Investor’s Business Daily is particularly good with this paragraph on the Arizona ruling yesterday: ‘By the logic of Bolton’s ruling, the state trooper who arrested Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh on a speeding violation in 1995…’
This is a great analogy. McVeigh was speeding away from Oklahoma City. A state trooper arrested him on a speeding violation. That would now be prohibited. That trooper would be prohibited from arresting McVeigh for the federal crime of the bombing. The bombing was a federal crime, and only the feds can enforce federal law. So if this judge had rendered a decision in Arizona years ago, back in the nineties, McVeigh would have been released. It would have been an illegal arrest. I think it’s a great analogy. ‘If it wasn’t clear before, it is now: The federal government has no intent of enforcing the laws against rampant and brazen illegal immigration,’ Investor’s Business Daily says.
‘Indeed, it will punish those states that try, leaving them at the mercy of the kidnappers, terrorists, gangsters, drug dealers and human traffickers that now freely cross our southern border.’ Now, folks, to shield these kinds of thugs is to sentence the innocent to certain harm. That’s not by the consent of the governed. This is not the will of the people, what happened in Arizona yesterday. Not even close. This is not big government, either. This is lawlessness. This is closer to big anarchy. It’s preventing the police from performing their most fundamental task and that is to serve, protect, and defend law-abiding tax-paying citizens — who, I tell you, are taking it in the shorts everywhere they turn around. Financially, legally, the people playing by the rules, the people paying the bills are the ones being savaged. This ruling yesterday was an act of aggression against the people of Arizona.
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RUSH: Phoenix, Arizona, is the kidnapping capital of the world. Well, outside Mexico City. Phoenix, Arizona. Throw Mexico City out of it. Phoenix is the kidnapping capital of the world. Now, should the local authorities stop arresting kidnappers? ‘Cause kidnapping’s a federal offense. If you get kidnapped, the FBI is gonna come knock on your door. If somebody in your family gets kidnapped it’s the FBI that’s going to come calling. The FBI wants to get involved. But can local authorities do anything here when somebody gets kidnapped? It’s a big, big crime in Phoenix. We used to be a country that was described as ‘We, the People,’ but we’re not anymore. Obama doesn’t look at this as ‘We, the People.’
He looks at the United States as ‘Me, the Government,’ pure and simple. My good friend Andy McCarthy, National Review Online, making the complex understandable: ‘In essence, Judge Susan Bolton bought the Justice Department’s preemption argument — i.e., the claim that the federal government has broad and exclusive authority to regulate immigration, and therefore that any state measure that is inconsistent with federal law is invalid. The Arizona law is completely consistent with federal law. The judge, however, twisted to concept of federal law into federal enforcement practices (or, as it happens, lack thereof). In effect, the court is saying that if the feds refuse to enforce the law the states can’t do it either because doing so would transgress the federal policy of non-enforcement … which is nuts.’
But that’s essentially what’s happening. That is totally nuts, but that’s what the judge’s ruling said. ‘Look, you cannot preempt the federal government no matter what it does — and the federal government has chosen not to enforce the law, therefore you can’t.’ Now, you apply this to any other crime. Apply this to Tim McVeigh blowing up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City and driving away and being pulled over for speeding by a state trooper. If the federal government had decided that blowing up federal buildings was not a crime, the state trooper couldn’t stop the guy. If you’ve heard this word ‘preemptive,’ or ‘preemption,’ this is the best description of it. You cannot preempt federal law no matter what they do, on the enforcement side, too.
Because the law mirrors federal law. Arizona’s law mirrors it. It’s almost a carbon copy, and the judge says if the feds choose not to enforce their law then you in Arizona can’t, either. You cannot preempt federal law. Federal law’s exclusive including enforcement. It’s absolutely insane. This judge is a partisan political operative. Nothing is real. The law is not even real anymore. She wears a robe and she has a gavel but she’s not a judge. She’s a partisan political operative of the left appointed by Der Schlick Meister, Bill Clinton. I said yesterday, and I keep reminding people of this, ‘This is how they set us up.’
Well, they didn’t set me up, but the way they tried to set everybody up: ‘Oh, no, this woman? Yeah, she was appointed by Clinton but, no, no, no, no. This woman is not a partisan judge at all. Why, we’ve examined her rulings! We’ve examined her opinions. This woman isn’t partisan at all.’ Let’s listen to the governor of Arizona. This is Jan Brewer last night on Hannity. Question: ‘In your mind today’s court ruling to say that it appears that the federal government won’t protect American citizens, won’t enforce the law — and also, on the other hand, now the state of Arizona, you can’t do it, either. Is that fair?
BREWER: Very fair. That’s the truth. We now have been told by a federal judge and by the federal government that they’re just not gonna enforce their laws and they’re not going to allow Arizona to help them enforce their laws. So it was a bit of disappointment, but let me say that, you know, this is a little road bump on the path. The lawsuit will continue through the court.
RUSH: ‘And what are your next steps? What are you going to do next?’
BREWER: Tomorrow we will file an expedited appeal at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Knowing that the Ninth Circuit, of course, is a pretty liberal situation then I assume that we will move forward then to the Supreme Court.
RUSH: Right, right, right.
BREWER: I’m not a quitter. The people of Arizona are not quitters. America is not going to sit back, I don’t believe, and allow this type of action to take place. We are a nation of laws, and we believe they need to be enforced.
RUSH: ‘Selectively’ is how they’re being enforced, and they’re being ignored. But she’s not going to quit. You know, I asked her this. I interviewed Governor Brewer for the next issue of the Limbaugh Letter, and I try not to cannibalize the newsletter by telling you what’s coming up in it, but I gotta tell you this. I asked her — ’cause she’s been the focus of personal assaults, her family. You know, she’s getting the Sarah Palin-Rush Limbaugh royal treatment. I said, ‘Do you ever think about just chucking it all in? Do you think about just saying, ‘Okay, okay. Never mind’?’ and she said, ‘No. No, but it has been tough.’
As she said yesterday, ‘This is just the first step.’ God bless this governor. She’s showing a resolve, a courage, and a toughness that’s not found very often in too many places in American politics. Last night on Larry King Alive on CNN (which is just another venue liberal activism) Larry talked to the Univision anchor Jorge Ramos about the Arizona immigration law. Larry King says, ‘Hey, Jorge! I gather you agree with this. It’s just a temporary injunction. It can be released in a couple days if they file an appeal to it, right?’
RAMOS: This to date nothing — absolutely nothing — has changed. Everything is still the same and I still can’t believe that the most powerful country in the world is persecuting the most vulnerable, 11 million people. All men are created equal and right now there are many millions of people in the United States who are not being treated equally.
RUSH: This is just… You go insane here if you try to analyze this stuff rationally. You literally go insane. You start banging the table. ‘What the hell is he talking about?’ But he’s saying exactly what he means. Let me talk about what’s ahead for the Ninth Circus, ’cause the governor is right. The Ninth Circus a ‘very liberal situation,’ as she called it. The first thing that’s going to happen is that a three-judge panel from the Ninth Circus — and the three judges are pulled at random. The three-judge panel will review the case and issue their finding. Somebody is gonna win and somebody’s gonna lose. The loser can then ask for the entire Ninth Circus to examine the thing, to look at it ‘en banc.’
And there are probably a lot of activist judges on the Ninth Circus who want to get their mitts on this, who want to get their fingerprints on it, and so probably the request for an en banc hearing on the entire Ninth Circus would take place. After they rule, she’s asked for an expedited ruling — and, by the way, it’s all speculation. I’m just telling you what could happen. After they’ve ruled, then whoever loses — and we expect Arizona to lose at the Ninth Circus twice. I mean I do. The Ninth Circus is what it is. So I expect Arizona to lose twice there, and then for it to go to the Supreme Court. Now, there was something fascinating, front page, above the fold, New York Times last Sunday. Did you see it, Snerdley? It was a huge picture of the Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts. The headline: ‘The Most Conservative Court in’ whatever length of time.
Decades, centuries, what have you. This is how they do it, see? This is how they do it. It’s no accident. Here you’ve got Kagan, who’s going to be an absolute disaster. Kagan, this judge, judicial activism? Kagan is not a judge. She’s never been a judge. They’re gonna give her a robe and a gavel and it’s going to be like putting somebody from the Institute for Policy Studies or Greenpeace or the Sierra Club or the NAGs, some interest group like that or Media Matters for America on the Supreme Court is essentially what’s going to happen here. Or Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism at Columbia. He’s big on the Journolist, the listserv. He’s no more a professor of journalism than I am. He has one of the founders of the Students for a Democratic Society. He’s Bill Ayers without the bombs and he’s teaching journalism at Columbia University! Zev Chafets told me when he was writing the book about me, An Army of One, he went and talked to Todd Gitlin.
Todd Gitlin said, ‘The guy shouldn’t even be on the air,’ meaning me.
Zev told him, ‘You’re a professor of journalism. Have you ever listened to him?’
‘I don’t need to listen to him! He ought not be on the air,’ and of course the guy has said Fox News ought not be on the air.
This is a professor of journalism! Kagan getting on the court would be no different than this guy getting on the court.
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RUSH: Fort Mill, South Carolina, this is Luke. Great to have you, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. Twenty years of dittos and God’s blessings on your new marriage.
RUSH: Thank you very much, sir.
CALLER: Yeah. I was listening to you earlier talking about the federal government working with local law enforcement, and I had the — I wouldn’t say it’s good luck, I had the bad luck to be the last hijacking in the United States before 9/11 of a passenger airplane. I don’t know if you remember that one in 1978 where we jumped out of cockpit windows and escaped and everybody broke their legs in Denver?
RUSH: Yeah, I remember.
CALLER: Yeah, anyway what happened was after we escaped from the hijacker, we already got the passengers off, the FBI arrested him, he surrendered because he didn’t have hostages and then we were getting interviewed and they were going to charge him with the hijacking but he’d already been declared insane by the Veterans Administration. Under federal law you can’t incarcerate an insane person who commits an act or a crime, so they charged him under state kidnapping laws, this was the FBI, and had a hearing to see if he was competent. They declared criminally insane. He’s still in the funny farm down in Colorado. He’s never been charged with hijacking.
RUSH: Right, ‘they’re coming to take me away, ha-ha.’
CALLER: Right. What I’m saying is they’re selective and enforce what they want to enforce when they feel like it and they can use state laws for their benefit —
RUSH: That’s exactly —
CALLER: — use federal laws.
RUSH: That’s exactly what I was going to say. When it suits their purpose, they’ll play ball.
CALLER: That’s right.
RUSH: When it doesn’t suit their purpose, they won’t. It’s very, very clear now this regime is not at all interested in protecting the borders. This regime is not interested in keeping illegal aliens out of the country. Now, what is it that you think makes them work for cheap labor? What is it that makes them work cheap? It’s being illegal, right? It is. When you grant ’em amnesty, when they become citizens, they’re not going to take it. The next group of illegals are going to come along and work dirt cheap. So are they shafting themselves in the long term anyway here? It’s being illegal that makes them afraid to demand more money, but when they become citizens they’re competing with the next wave of illegals and it will be fascinating to see how that shakes out.
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RUSH: Here’s Phil in Bethlehem, California. Welcome, sir, to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: It’s Bethlehem, Georgia, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you very much. Bethlehem, Georgia?
CALLER: Bethlehem, Georgia.
RUSH: We got 15-year-old technology. The C & G looked the same.
CALLER: Okay. It’s a pleasure to talk to you.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: Rush, I have a question for you.
RUSH: I never heard of Bethlehem, Georgia, or California, by the way. Bethlehem is either in Israel or Pennsylvania to me.
CALLER: Well, we have one here.
RUSH: I’m glad you’re there.
CALLER: I have a question. With this judge knocking out this law and everything in Arizona, if somebody down there now, an American citizen, is attacked, is raped or robbed or beat up or hospitalized or even murdered, with the federal government behind this here, does that person or person’s family have a right to sue the federal government for allowing the illegal to be here?
RUSH: Uh, well, I’m not a lawyer. My dad was a lawyer. But I’m not. And I don’t know. I think, as best I can determine the federal government does not think the behaviors or crimes that you described are bad enough or serious enough to try to stop, so I think you’d be sorta SOL if it happened to you. Just my guess. You don’t get very far suing the feds, especially this bunch of them.
CALLER: Well, you go to the federal courts, you tie up the federal courts and everything else, and somebody has to find them guilty of allowing this to take place.
RUSH: Look, the bottom line here is it’s no longer illegal to be illegal, so we can’t ask them anything about themselves, much less did you murder anybody.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: I mean why do you think Arizona is doing what they’re doing? ‘Cause everything you described is happening, and nobody’s doing anything to stop it. So Arizona says, ‘If you’re not going to, we will,’ and the judge said, ‘No, if the federal government’s not going to stop it, you can’t preempt ’em and stop it yourself.’ That’s essentially what the judge had to say.
Michael in Oklahoma City, you’re next on the EIB Network, sir. Great to have you here. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. Permit me with respect to offer a rebuttal to a portion of your opening monologue.
RUSH: Sure. Go right ahead.
CALLER: Judge Bolton is the one we’ve been talking about —
RUSH: Judge Susan Bolton, correct.
CALLER: She did not, what, overrule, held unconstitutional or throw out the Arizona statute. She issued a very narrow ruling which was to grant the government’s request for what is called a preliminary injunction. The question as to the constitutionality of the portions of the statute which she enjoined preliminarily, that question remains before her and has not been decided. I think it’s important to note that.
RUSH: Well, yes, that’s all true, but do we have any doubt now how she’s gonna decide it, and regardless how she decides it it’s going to be appealed to the Ninth Circuit, we know how that’s gonna go, with either a three-judge panel or a full en banc panel. We know that this judge has pretty much indicated how she’s a going to rule. Yeah, it’s a temporary injunction, but temporary is temporary, how many years is it gonna take to resolve this?
CALLER: I think it’s a distinction worth noting. If we just believe, ‘Well, naturally this is what she’s going to do,’ it’s too much cynicism in that.
RUSH: No, the cynicism is the other way around. The reasonable thing is let the law go into effect and see if all these hypotheticals that she cited actually happen. She issued the temporary stay based on a bunch of hypotheticals. Nobody knows. And the hypotheticals are based on spin, racial profiling, all these other rotten, horrible things, to legal citizens that are going to happen? I’ve seldom seen a stay, preliminary, temporary, whatever, based on hypotheticals. ‘Well, that could happen, so we better –‘ let the law go into effect. They can’t let it go into effect. See, this is the thing, they can’t let it go into effect because then everybody would know there’s no profiling in the law and there aren’t all of these threats. But they couldn’t allow that to be demonstrated. This is activist political ruling. There’s nothing judicial about this.