RUSH: Okay. We have a vote on the rule on the budget resolution in the House called the cromnibus omnibus and it’s a little bit in the weeds to explain this, therefore nobody better than me to do it. What just happened is that the rule setting the stage for the vote later barely passed. They had to vote on the rule, the procedure, in order to set the stage for the vote on the final passage of the omnibus bill in the House of Representatives.
The vote was very close. It was 214 to 212. Not a single Democrat voted for this. Now, you might say, “So what? Two hundred and fourteen Republicans did, so it passed.” Two-hundred and twelve Democrats voted to shut down the government, is what it means, in essence. Not a single Democrat voted for the rule that would then bring the budget up for vote in the House.
In other words, 212 Democrats voted against the rule, voted against bringing up the final vote on the omnibus bill. Now, you could say, as I just did, that the Democrats essentially voted to shut down the government, but nowhere would this ever be portrayed as what actually happened.
I’ve gotta take another break here. I went long in the opening segment. I apologize for that, but back before you know it and I’ll explain all of this.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: A 214 to 212 procedural vote passed in the House of Representatives, which now clears the way to pass the omnibus budget bill in the House. The procedural vote is what is called a vote on the rule, and the rule governs debate and what is permitted during debate and what is permitted. It basically gets Boehner to write it. It set the rules as he goes and set the stage to get votes for them during the voting process.
If this were gonna be stopped, it would have had to have been stopped at this level, at this point, the rule. If the rule had gone down to defeat, then we’d be talking turkey here. But the rule passed. Now, here’s the thing about the rule passing. It was 214 to 212. No Democrats voted for the rule. In other words, not a single Democrat… There were some Republicans that voted against it, too.
But the point is: Not a single Democrat voted for the rule, which is what’s necessary for the final vote and ultimate passage. So you could say — and you would be accurate in doing so — that 212 Democrats essentially voted to shut down the government. Now, they didn’t win. They lost by two. Now, if it had failed — and I know it’s “if,” but I still want to make this point about things.
Because the reason this happened is because the Republicans are…
Well, everybody’s saying it now. Everybody.
They’re just cowards.
They’re afraid of the media. They are afraid of what’s gonna be said about them on some matters. Other things, like amnesty, they actually agree with it and support it, because most of their big donors do. But if the rule had failed with not a single Democrat voting for it, do you think anybody would have accused the Democrats of shouting the government, or endangering the economy, or hurting the nation’s poor or whatever they accuse the Republicans of doing, vis-a-vis a government shutdown?
Because that’s what happened. Had those 212 Democrats sided as one, we’d be looking at a government shutdown right now, and it would have been made possible by the Democrat Party because every damn one of them in the House voted against the rule. You could accurately say the Democrats in the House voted for a government shutdown. You want motivation? Who knows what motivation could give to shut the government down, ’cause they know the Republicans are gonna get blamed.
They wanted to shut the government down ’cause they don’t like the spending, they don’t like the bill itself, who knows? But the point here is that while Republicans are running around scared to death, afraid to represent their constituents… Republicans are running around afraid to act on the election returns because they’re afraid what the media is gonna say about them, and the biggest fear they’ve got is they’re gonna be blamed for government shutdown.
I’ll tell you where it stems from, and we’ve addressed this before. It goes back to 1995. Newt Gingrich was the speaker of the House. Bill Clinton was the president. The Republicans had had some success in balancing the budget before this, and the Democrats were reeling because for the first time in a long time there was actually some spending discipline. The House featured a whole bunch of genuinely conservative members of the freshman class.
They arrived untainted. They arrived as virgins in terms of the way Washington worked. They were brand-new. Nobody in the media knew who they were. They were not part of the old boy network, they were not part of the social structure, and they came in and they actually began to vote the same way they promised they would during the campaign, which featured the Contract with America.
They did all of this, and for the first time. I’ll never forget when John Kasich gaveled the Budget Committee to order. The Democrats have exhausted all their debate, and Kasich said, “It’s time to do this,” and they did it, and they balanced the budget. The Democrats were just paranoid. The Democrat were fit to be tied. Well, all of this led the Democrats to using new tricks to stop the Republicans.
One of the things that happened in the 1995 budget showdown was the school lunch cuts, if you recall. Now, stick with me on this. It’s all a lesson. I just want you to understand why the Republicans react the way they do today, and it’s all because of what happened in 1995. The school lunch “cuts.” Democrats began to pepper the media and the country with the idea that Republicans wanted to starve kids.
Now, the school lunch program was not going to be cut.
No item in the budget ever is really cut.
There are sometimes reductions in the rate of growth, but you know how that works with baseline budgeting. When an increase in budgets spending is not as much as they’d hoped for, they called it a “cut.” You could spend 5% more next year than this, and if they expected it would increase 8%, they’d call it a 3% budget cut, when in reality it was a 5% increase. Well, that was what was happening with the school lunch program.
The school lunch program was going to get more money spent, just not as much as the Democrats had thought and hoped. So they immediately began tarring the feathers of Republicans as people that wanted to starve kids, and the Republicans said, “Who’s believe this?” and they basically didn’t think it was any problem. They didn’t think there it was anything to panic over.
“Because who in their right mind is gonna think that we want to starve kids? We have kids. This is absurd.” Then all of a sudden letters began to arrive in offices in Washington, to members of the House. They were written by kids, supposedly, and the letters pretty much all said the same thing: “Dear Mr. Congressman: I can’t study when I’m starving!” “Dear Mr. Congressman: I can’t learn when I’m hungry!” “Dear Mr. Congressman: Please don’t deny me lunch! I can’t function if I don’t have lunch!”
Nobody ever stopped to be considered. It was just simply idiotic. Of course, if such a thing ever did really happen, what about parents and fixing lunch for their kids to take to school? None of that was ever considered. So the Republicans didn’t really put a lot of stock in it and didn’t fight back on it, which was a mistake. Now, they didn’t have to fight back and defend themselves by saying, “Oh, we don’t want starve kids.”
What they should have said is, “Look at how ridiculous the Democrats have gotten now. We have the Democrats so much on the ropes that they’re now accusing us of wanting to starve children! Is this the best they’ve got?” But rather than do that, they did nothing, figuring nobody would believe it. Well, we all know better now, because the left has driven their base so insane, they believe practically every insane allegation anybody on the left makes, from Hillary Clinton to Bill Clinton to Elizabeth Warren, you name it.
So the government got shut down.
Newt held fast on the Republican budget items, and the government got shut down. What we learned later was that Bill Clinton had made a closed-door, behind-the-scenes deal with government union leaders, and the deal was that whatever happened to them during the shutdown in terms of lost wages, Thanksgiving turkeys, you name, all of it would be made good once the shutdown ended. So union leaders didn’t oppose what was going to happen.
They actually ended up supporting the Democrats and their opposition to this. It isolated the Republicans, and then the media got in gear, and every night on CNN was a different person whose life had just been destroyed because of the government shutdown. It went on like this from a couple of months. This happened in October. It went on like this for a couple of months and then finally the Republicans waved the white flag.
And it’s that experience that guides them to this day.
They think that they had their heads handed to ’em on a silver platter back in 1995, and that’s why, to this day, election results from last November and election results from 2010 don’t matter. The only thing that matters is what happened in 1995. If somebody produces a poll that says the same thing that happened in ’95 is gonna happen today, then that guides them. By the way, a lot of people have asked me, “Rush, you say that the Republican establishment’s opposed to conservatives. Yet they’ve got two terms of Reagan, two landslide Republican victories.”
I said, “Great question, but that he isn’t what the Republican establishment goes back to when they hear ‘conservative.’ They only focus on Barry Goldwater. So to the Republican establishment, a conservative nominee equals a Goldwater landslide loss. It does not equal a Reagan two-term landslide win.” So the Republican establishment and their consultants, everybody in the political class is guided by and motivated by events from 1964 and 1995, in determining political strategy today.
So here we are on the day where the rule, the procedure vote on this budget (that basically is a Democrat budget with a couple of exceptions) that funds the government through the end of next September. The rule was up for a vote and not a single Democrat voted for it, and that means that all Democrats in the House voted essentially to shut down the government, because voting against the rule meant voting against a final vote on the budget, on the omnibus bill.
But the ayes had it, 214 to 212.
Not a single Democrat voted for the rule. Not a single Democrat essentially voted for the budget. They voted against the final vote taking place, and the only way to analyze it is it that the 212 Democrats voting in unison essentially were voting to shut down the government. So my question is: Had the procedural vote failed, had the vote on the rule failed, do you think the House Democrats would have been accused of shutting down the government?
Do you think they would have been accused of endangering the economy or hurting the nation’s poor or whatever other disaster happens with a government shutdown? And what did they vote against? The Republican budget funds Obamacare. The Republican budget funds Obama’s executive amnesty. This budget funds, pays for everything the Democrats want. Yet it’s conservatives that are the problem, right?
It’s never the left that’s the problem.
It’s never the establishment. No, no. It’s never Obama who’s the problem. In matters like this it always seems to come back to the fact that conservative Republicans are the problem. Yet 212 Democrats voted against the budget bill going forward, essentially voted for a government shutdown, knowing full well that had the government shutdown prevailed — had the rule gone down to defeat — the Republicans would have been blamed for it.
Even though not a single Republican voted for a government shutdown, because they’re scared to death that they’re gonna get blamed for its. So the answer to, “Okay, so what should the Republicans do?” It’s become quaint. It’s almost mockable when you answer the right thing. The right thing to do is to do the right thing, and save the country, and to hell with what the media says about you. To hell what the Democrats do. It’s nutcracker time, in more ways than one.
This is when you do the right thing!
You save the country, and you know full well you have a majority of voters behind you.
That’s what they elected you to do!
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: The 212 votes, they’re not all Democrats. There’s some Republicans that voted against the rule, too. My point to you is that every Democrat, every single Democrat voted against the rule, which means at the end of the day that virtually every Democrat in the House voted for a government shutdown, because, had their side prevailed, that’s what would have happened. If the rule had gone down to defeat, there could be no debate and no final vote on the bill.
There’s a story from Reuters on this: “Democrats Balk at US Spending Bill, Raising Shutdown Risk.” And that’s true. However, as Elizabeth Warren is out there saying, it’s the Republicans who want to shut down the government, even though the Republicans passed the bill, the Republicans are the ones that wrote the damn thing.
This is from yesterday, so it’s good. It sets the stage. Now we know what happened, so let’s look back at the way this was portrayed. Reuters: “Congressional Democrats objected on Wednesday to controversial financial and political campaign provisions tucked into a $1.1 trillion US spending bill, keeping the risk of a government shutdown alive. The complaints from House of Representatives Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats clouded the chances for passage of the funding bill as a midnight Thursday deadline drew near.”
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Man, there’s just so much going on. You would never think that this is the holiday season. Back in the summer you never thought there was a recess, no vacation. It’s just intense. I mean, everything in the world, every day just seems to be coming at us. There’s not even a chance to catch your breath if you want to stay up to speed on this stuff. And I think about people to whom it’s not even their job trying to keep up with this. If people make a serious effort, it can seem overwhelming. And that’s why we are here, ladies and gentlemen, to make all of this understandable, take all of this complexity and make it simple. Because when you boil all this stuff down, it can be made simple.
Now, I checked the e-mail during the break. “Rush, why do you keep harping on the Democrats and the vote. I mean, that side lost.” That’s a good question. Sometimes I go into long-winded explanations assuming that there’s a contextual understanding based on people listening every day. It’s a really great question. The point that I’m trying to illustrate here by illustrating that every Democrat in this procedural vote voted to shut down the government.
My point is, I’d love to get through to the Republicans and say, “Stop being cowards! Stop being afraid of what the media is gonna say about you. Forget what happened in 1995. It’s not in 1995. It’s 2014, and things are much worse than they were even in 1995, and it’s time this stuff gets stopped. And you realize you’ve been elected to stop it. And it’s time to realize that. It’s time to be confident. It’s time to get a little swagger as you walk around that town and you walk around Capitol Hill.
“And it’s time to stop blaming your friends. It’s time to stop blaming your buddies. It’s time to start realizing who is causing all of these problems and who it is that has to be stopped. And it’s not conservatives. It’s not Ted Cruz. It’s not Marco Rubio. It’s not me. It’s not Sarah Palin. It’s Democrats, wherever you find them, in Washington or wherever. That’s what we’re up against here.”
You’ve heard it. The reason I was asked to be on TV last Sunday is because I simply disagreed with the accepted notion that the Republicans will get blamed if there’s a government shutdown and therefore we must avoid it at all costs. Well, at all costs avoiding it means Obama gets everything he wants. All because of fear? It’s time to get rid of that. And my point here is illustrating 212 Democrats voted today to essentially shut down the government. They would not have been blamed for it had it happened. The Republicans would have ended up being blamed. And you know how? Elizabeth Warren has provided the road map.
There are two so-called controversial provisions in this thing, one about individuals being allowed to contribute even more, corporate people, even more. That ticks the Democrats off. And then some regulations on derivative funds were relaxed, allowing them more leeway and that’s power for Wall Street. Elizabeth Warren’s fit to be tied over this, and she was gonna blame the Republicans for shutting down the government over those provisions, even though she’s in the Senate, it has nothing to do with what happened in the House.
So the Democrats were prepared to shut down the government knowing the Republicans are gonna get blamed for it. My point is actually directed here at the Republicans: Stop worrying about all of these ifs and stop worrying about polls. You just won a landslide election. How can that not matter? How can winning a landslide election be simply erased in their minds by the presence of a poll?
So that’s why I’m spending so much time on this, as well as trying to make everybody understand, help everybody understand what just went down. It came close, folks. At one point it was 213 to 213, and Boehner found a Republican to switch his vote and change his mind. We don’t know who. Do we yet? (interruption) Who was it? Snerdley knew it and forget it, so he’s looking it up. But it was tied at 213.
So Boehner found a Republican to change his vote and that made it 214 to 212 and so the rule was defeated. But every Democrat, not all 212 votes in opposition, but every Democrat voted against the procedural rule. They voted to shut down the government, and yet the Republicans say they are worried that people are gonna blame them for it?
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RUSH: Now, interesting story here from Roll Call. Let me give you the headline. “Lacking Sufficient Support, House GOP Leaders Delay ‘Cromnibus’ Vote.” Last updated 22 minutes ago. “Unsure whether they have the votes to pass a trillion-dollar federal spending package, House GOP leaders on Thursday afternoon delayed a final vote on the ‘cromnibus.’ They did so with mere hours to go until the government is set to run out of funding, and just before the House was scheduled to vote.
“GOP leaders called a recess to floor proceedings, with a GOP leadership aide confirming ‘no conference meeting [is] planned at this time.’ The aide said ‘leadership teams are still talking to their respective members,’ and noted, ‘We still plan to vote this afternoon.’ It’s not clear, however, what they will be voting on. If Republicans can’t surmount the impasse, they could decide to proceed with swiftly moving a short-term continuing resolution through the chamber, which the Senate could also pass before midnight. In doing so, they would be throwing away months of hard-fought negotiations between appropriators.”
The point is House Republican leadership doesn’t have very many options. “After barely winning a procedural vote to bring the spending bill to the floor for full debate and consideration,” they realized they may not, despite the vote on the rule, they may not have enough votes for passage, because a lot of Republicans voted “no.” Those 212 votes “no” were not all Democrats. There were some Republicans. All the Democrats voted “no” is like 196 of them.
So it’s not a slam dunk. It’s not going the way the leadership wants, folks. I don’t know what’s gonna happen the rest of the day, but even though the vote on the rule happened, it doesn’t appear that what would be an automatic vote up and down on the whole thing after some debate is now gonna happen. There’s trouble in paradise, is the bottom line. Just further justification for my throwing away a day off and coming in tomorrow.
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RUSH: So the Democrats are still on the verge of shutting down the government, folks, is what that means. Democrats could be the ones to do it.