RUSH: Louie Gohmert, one of our all-time favorite members of the House of Representatives. He’s from Texas, and Louie… I have to say this. Louie is a judge. He’s a former judge. One of the reasons that he wanted to get elected to Congress is he was driving around one day between cases, and he heard me explain baseline budgeting, and it infuriated him. It literally infuriated him. Of course I explained it in such a way to make it simple.

It was easy to understand, and he didn’t have to call me and say, “What do you mean? What is it?” He understood it, and so he’s been in Congress for awhile. There were hearings yesterday on the budget and number of other things, and this was also hearing where Eric Holder, the AG, came up, and Louie went after him on Fast and Furious.

The attorney general, Eric Holder, said, “I’d be very careful. You don’t want to go there, buddy. You don’t want to go there, buddy.” In Holder’s mind, he’s untouchable. You can’t get anywhere near him. He’s the attorney general, and you’re just human debris. “You’re just a gnat. I’m the attorney general! You’re asking me Fast and Furious? You don’t want to go there, buddy!” But you can’t scare Louie Gohmert.

So let’s go to the first of the floor of the House yesterday afternoon where Louie Gohmert from Texas is speaking about the federal budget…

GOHMERT: In the 1990s, I heard what apparently was a “lovable little fuzzball” that turned out to be Rush Limbaugh, talking about the absurd of the United States government doing something that no person, no family, no business, no charity in all of America could do. Show me a business, show me a family, show me an individual, show me a charity that has an automatic increase in every year’s budget! ‘Cause America can’t do that, and I was shocked that this was going on.

RUSH: So was everybody else. (chuckling) The baseline budgeting technique goes back to the Watergate era or thereabouts. It’s not tied to Watergate, it was something else that happened, but that’s how fairly recently it is. Baseline budgeting is the baseline every year is what the government spends that year. Every department gets an automatic, depending on the department, eight to 10% increase, no matter what.

Anything that expands that baseline therefore expands government spending. It’s a dream come true. This is why the agriculture department advertises at the end of the year for more food stamp. They want the money spent because that way eight to 10% of that baseline, what was spent, bam! It just keeps growing and growing. Whether it’s needed or not, whether the previous year’s budget was spent, whether it was too much or not enough, it doesn’t matter.

Baseline budgeting is just an automatic increase, without any other factor. The budget is never put together in such a way to say, “Let’s take agriculture. Okay, what did we spend last year? Did we need all that? No? Okay, well, we can cut it by X.” Unh-uh. And baseline budgeting is actually how a “cut” is actually an “increase.” Here’s how that works.

If your department is scheduled for an 8% increase in spending from one year to the next and then when the new budget comes out you’re only given 4%, you run around like a chicken with your head cut off and you start complaining that your budget’s been cut 4%. But it hasn’t. Your budget is going up 4%, in the example I’ve given you. But since it was supposed to go up 8%, it’s a cut.

That’s how everything in Washington is a “cut,” when it isn’t. There are no cuts. But yet Democrats run around every day talking about Draconian budget cuts that the Republicans want. There aren’t any. Have you ever seen the budget get smaller? Is the national debt going down? Is the deficit going down? Are we spending less? No. So how could there be any cuts? There aren’t any.

There are only reductions in the rate of growth, which the Democrats now are permitted to call “cuts.” Now, the Democrats for the longest time didn’t have a response to this. Their strategy was, “Leave it alone. It’s too complicated. Nobody’s gonna understand it. As long as it’s people like Limbaugh, we can deal with it.” But now they’ve had to come up with an answer to it.

Chris Van Hollen responded to Louie yesterday on the floor of the House. If I have this right, the Democrats’ response and defense of baseline budget is that baseline budgeting — these automatic increases — protect the government from inflation so that the value of government benefit dollars remains constant or increases to the recipient. “So if we guarantee an eight to 10% increase every year, Mr. Limbaugh, we are protecting the people from inflation.”

That’s how they’ve structured their response or their defense to baseline budgeting. Now, Louie then said that when he got to Congress, he found out it was hard to change. ‘Cause he thought listening to this, “It’s gonna be easy. This is so stupid. This is simple common sense. We can’t budget this way!” He thought it would be not easy, but he thought he would have an easy time explain this to people and changing it.

He found out the opposite.

He found out how hard it was.

GOHMERT: In ’05 and ’06 the Republican chair of the Budget Committee said, “We have to do the automatic increases,” and I said, “Why?” He said, “‘Cause it’s the law.” I was shocked. We make the law; we can change the law. And then of course our friends across the aisle took the majority, and for four years there was no chance of eliminating the automatic increase in every federal department’s budgets. But then we got the majority back. Speaker Boehner agreed that if Paul Ryan passed a zero-baseline budget ending the automatic increases out of committee, then he would bring it to the floor.

RUSH: They’re trying to get this done. Now, they know Obama would veto it, they know current Senate would never pass it, but they’re making a statement. The House Republicans are actually doing it. Louie’s leading the effort here to actually do something about this, which is more than anybody else has ever done on this besides talk about it. Now, I mentioned Louie had his run-in with his buddy Eric Holder yesterday.

Now, this is during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on oversight of the Department of Justice. Holder testified, and here it is with Louie Gohmert…

GOHMERT: I’ve read you what your department promised, and it is inadequate. And I realize that contempt is not a big deal to our attorney general, but it is important that we have proper oversight.

HOLDER: You don’t want to go there, buddy. You don’t want to go there, okay?

GOHMERT: I don’t want to go there?

HOLDER: No.

GOHMERT: About the contempt?

HOLDER: You should not assume that, uh, that is not a big deal to me. I think that it was inappropriate and it was unjust. But never think that that was not a big deal to me. Don’t ever think that!

GOHMERT: There have been no indications that it was a big deal, because your department has still not been forthcoming in producing the documents that were the subject of the contempt.

RUSH: Ooh! Folks, you don’t talk that way to people in this Regime! You just don’t do that. Hip, hip, hurray for Louie Gohmert! This isn’t done. They kind of cross-talk, and you really can’t hear it, but Holder said, “You don’t want to go there, buddy.” But it comes… This is a 40-second bite, and this is the first 10 seconds. So play this again. It’s worth hearing again, but listen very closely here to the open.

GOHMERT: I’ve read you what your department promised, and it is inadequate. And I realize that contempt is not a big deal to our attorney general, but it is important that we have proper oversight.

HOLDER: You don’t want to go there, buddy. You don’t want to go there, okay?

GOHMERT: I don’t want to go there?

HOLDER: No.

GOHMERT: About the contempt?

HOLDER: You should not assume that, uh, that is not a big deal to me. I think that it was inappropriate and it was unjust. But never think that that was not a big deal to me. Don’t ever think that!

GOHMERT: There have been no indications that it was a big deal, because your department has still not been forthcoming in producing the documents that were the subject of the contempt.

RUSH: That’s it. That’s it. That’s just fearless. (summarized) “Well, there’s no indication it’s a big deal. You can sit there and say it’s a big deal, but there’s no indication in it ’cause you still haven’t given us what we asked for!”

GOHMERT: We’ve been trying to get to the bottom of Fast and Furious where people died, where at least a couple hundred Mexicans died, and we can’t get the information to get to the bottom of that. So I don’t need lectures from you about contempt —

HOLDER: And I don’t need lectures from you, either.

GOHMERT: — because it is very difficult to deal with asking questions. As a former judge, I never have asked questions of someone who’s been held in contempt.

RUSH: And we’ll be back.