RUSH: Here’s Jake, Fort Myers, Florida. Hi, Jake. I’m glad you called, sir. Great to have you with us.
CALLER: Thank you.
RUSH: You’re welcome.
CALLER: Thank you very much, Dr. Limbaugh, if I may call you so. So I called back in ’09, and forgive me, but I wanted to challenge you on how could you know that President Obama would shred the Constitution and so forth. And please forgive me, my 33 years of experience, and obviously you have proved us all wrong. However, my question to that is, if a constitutional government is the best form of government, and the constitutional government has allowed us to go so far away from the Constitution, would there have been a better way to have gone? And, please, forgive, 33 years of experience, I could only base it on that. And, granted, you know, we all read the books. I mean, the Constitution’s in black and white. It’s pretty obvious how it’s supposed to go, but for a constitutional government to have led us so far away from it, you know, what is the step, what would be the next way to go?
RUSH: I will tell you how this happened. This is actually a good question. We don’t need to replace this. If you’re thinking that, you are as wrong today as you were in 2009. I say that with all affection. You have a lot of guts here to call and admit. I remember, maybe not you specifically, but I had a lot of people calling in 2000, even during campaign year, ’08 and 2000, “How do you know all this? This is crazy, Obama’s gonna do this, how do you know? He hasn’t been president for a year, how do you know?”
My answer is I know liberals, don’t doubt me. I knew it was a monumental, Herculean task. It’s so frustrating, it was so obvious to anybody who knows this stuff, this was going to happen. And if the education system of this country was up to snuff it wouldn’t take people like me trying to warn people; they’d know it already. Anyway, the Constitution didn’t fail here. There are numerous safeguards. You’re asking, if the constitutional republic is so great, how has it failed? It’s the wrong way to look at it that way.
The Constitution has not failed. What instead has happened, the number one safeguard that’s built in, Jake, is the separation of powers. The Founding Fathers knew human nature. The people that put together this Constitution understood that it was only a matter of time before power-thirsty and -hungry despots would try to take this country over and turn it into the average, ordinary tyranny that every other country in the world has been or will be. That is human nature. They were students of history. They knew that what they wanted to do with the United States had never been done. It had never been done, a country organized around the sovereignty of the people, with the government in a secondary role. It had never been done.
Most people have grown up under tyranny of one degree or another. They’ve grown up under bondage and torture, you name it. But liberty and freedom have been rare, real liberty, self-determination, liberty and freedom have been rare. They believed in it. They left England to escape it. They set it up here. They did everything they could, think of, and conceive to see to it that the Constitution would remain strong and valid. And the number one safeguard that they wrote into it was the separation of powers.
They took what they understood about human nature, the acquisition and desire for power, and they put limits on it. They divided us into three branches: the executive, which is the president and his cabinets. The Department of Justice, all those things, the courts, the judiciary, Supreme Court on down. And the legislative: Congressional, Senate, so forth. And they assigned responsibilities to each. They denied power to each. And they wrote the limitations of power on all three.
They understood that most men elected to be president would try to coalesce and steal, acquire as much power as they could because they understood human nature. They put limits on what the executive could do. They put limits on what Congress could do. And they also understood that members of Congress would not want the president stealing all their power and would fight to the death to keep their power and try to get some of his. It was set up for a constant war for power.
What has happened — I’m giving you the CliffNotes version here — what has happened, when the Democrat Party also gained control of Congress in 2008, both houses, the Congress surrendered its own power and willingly gave it to Obama. He was allowed to take as much as he wanted, because they believe in their ideology being dominant. They totally squandered what the Founders assumed would never happen, and that is Congress giving up its own power.
Congress is extremely powerful. There’s not a dollar that can be spent in this country without Congress first authorizing it and granting permission. That’s gone. Obama can spend whatever he wants now, and does. He can borrow whatever he wants. The Congress gave that up. The Democrats gave it up. They want a ruler, not a president. They want him to be of their party. They wanted the executive to have magic wand powers, so they willingly gave it up.
But they were not alone. The Republicans the first two years couldn’t stop anything because they didn’t have enough votes. They literally couldn’t stop anything the Democrat Party wanted to do, Jake. But then the people of this country so objected to this massive collection of power, they may not have understood what was going on per se, but they knew they didn’t like what Obama was doing, as evidenced by the 2010 midterm elections.
So they threw the Democrats out in record numbers, Jake, and put Republicans in. But the problem remained. The Republicans were so afraid of criticizing Obama that they willingly capitulated in trying to hold onto congressional power. They did a much better job than Democrats did, but they were basically neutered and remain so to this day. The one big safeguard that’s failed — and there are many, by the way — but the one safeguard that’s failed is the separation of powers.
Nobody is willing to stand up to Obama. Obama is left without restraints in violating the Constitution, from executive amnesty to the way he’s done Obamacare. It’s shocking. It’s really scary to contemplate all the things Obama has done in violation of the Constitution with nobody objecting. That’s the reason, Jake. It’s not that the Constitution is flawed. It’s not that there’s a better way. It’s that the competing branches stopped competing and pretty much let Obama have the run of the place.
He didn’t get everything he wanted. I mean, there was some opposition certain things. It’s never a hundred percent. But the CliffNotes version is that is what’s happening, and it still exists today. To this day, Congress is still timid and unwilling to stand up and describe for the American people what Obama is, who he is and what he’s doing. They have taken impeachment off the table. They have openly admitted that they will do nothing to stop him. They’re just waiting for the 2016 election, hoping they win the White House so that the power then will be theirs.