RUSH: I want to go back to the decision here from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and Judge Silberman. I may have left the wrong impression that I agreed with the guy or I thought he got it right. Nothing could be further from the truth! What I was trying to point out here is we’ve had another conservative cave, big time. “The right…” Here, listen to what Silberman wrote. Silberman is not young anymore, but I can remember the many times I’ve been introduced to him, people told me I was meeting “the pope of the law,” and he came across that way. He’s a man of impeccable integrity — and conservative through and through, top to bottom, backwards and forwards. The mandate, Judge Silberman wrote, “seems an intrusive exercise of legislative power, certainly is an encroachment on individual liberty.”

Well, right there! But all of a sudden this encroachment’s fine, and why? If you read further, ’cause we got big problems, and the government’s gotta solve ’em. Folks, this is a cave. This is an abandonment. I don’t care what legal judgments he made. This is a total abandonment of principle. So what we’re saying is we can encroach on individual liberty. “The right to be free from federal regulation not absolute. It yields to the imperative that Congress be free to forge national solutions to national problems no matter how local or seemingly passive their individual origins.” When I say this guy is conservative, all I’m trying to do is illustrate, this is not some fence hugging conservative. This is a guy that’s conservative from front to back, and something’s happened here. Whether he’s misinterpret the law, looking at precedent the wrong way?

This would be equivalent to me coming to this microphone and saying, “Folks, you know what? Everything I’ve told you for 23 years I’m abandoning. I changed my mind. I don’t really believe, the problems are too big, I’m going liberal. That’s the point that I was trying to make here, just another cave. I don’t care about the reasoning Judge Silberman got to. This is shocking to me — and it is a problem, because he’s gonna be looked at the by the Supreme Court. Now we’re gonna have to have people on our side filing brief after brief after brief to try to discredit this. It’s not good.