RUSH: Now, I know what many of you are thinking, and it is next up in the Stack right here. Here is the headline. I don’t care where you see it, this is the headline: “Congress Deal Funds Sanctuary Cities, Obamacare, EPA, Planned Parenthood; Does Not Provide Money for the Wall.” Now, if you look at that headline and you happen to believe that it’s true — which it is. I mean, we extended the budget. There’s not gonna be any shutdown. Republicans are going (sigh), “Thank God! No shutdown.” So we have extended the budget, not for a week, but all the way through September.
Why is anybody voting Republican, if this is what happens when we win?
We won the House, we won the Senate, we won the White House, and the Democrats thwarted everything we supposedly said we were going to do with our victory. Well, I don’t want to use the word “we,” ’cause I’ve got nothing to do with this. This is another reason why I do not get close to these people. I do not… I would not relish having to have you call here today and make me justify what all happened here, had I been out there promoting and ballyhooing. That’s why I keep my distance from these people, ’cause I don’t have any control over what they’re gonna do or say, what their policies are going to be.
But I think this illustrates a much larger problem that we are going to have to recognize, and it’s the real reason Donald Trump was elected. It’s the real thing that he has got to do, and he’s got to start doing it. And it is not going to happen if he continues to work with Republicans, because it is obvious, for whatever reasons — and we can get into them — the Republican Party has no intention of defunding Planned Parenthood, no intention of defunding sanctuary cities. They don’t want to pay for a wall. Who knows what they really want in Obamacare. But then again, is it really the Republicans? I think there’s something much larger going on.
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RUSH: There’s no reason to keep electing Republicans if this is what we’re gonna get with this budget deal, which pays — continually pays — for sanctuary cities, funds Obamacare, funds the EPA, gives money to Planned Parenthood and no money for the wall. If you’re asking, “What am I voting for Republicans for?” you have a legitimate question. This is one of the reasons Donald Trump was elected. This is the swamp. This is what needs to be drained: The way the budget happens, the way legislation happens, who’s responsible for it. I’ll tell you where I’m going with this. I want to go back and play a sound bite from me on Friday’s program. This is the direction that I’m thinking this has to go…
RUSH ARCHIVE: Where’s Trump on this? For crying out loud, Trump’s elected president! Trump’s got a mandate. This was clearly part of it. Like building the wall, like any number of other things, repealing and place Obamacare was mentioned at every rally, so why doesn’t the president go in there and tell them what-for?
RUSH: Now, I don’t mean to be ragging on Trump there, but my point is this. The legislation making process in Washington, everybody I think is under some misunderstanding about it. Mr. Snerdley, how do you think legislation happens in Washington? I mean, take me from there’s nothing and then there’s a bill. What happens? Where does it start? (interruption) No, it does not… (interruption) No, I’m not asking spending. I’m talking any bill, any bill whatsoever. Where does it start? Who writes it? Who’s in charge? Say you… (interruption) There you go: The lobbyists, the donors.
This is the problem.
The Republican Party is not a party that writes legislation. The Democrats don’t write legislation anymore. You know where legislation is written? Legislation is written by the quote-unquote “special interests.” You know where they’re located? They’re located on K Street. They’re lobbyists; they are donors. They are the people, and 96% of Washington, D.C., — which is where these people live — voted against Donald Trump. He got 4% of the vote in D.C. among this group of people. Not the whole population, but among this group of people. Depending on the Republican Party for this is a loser’s game. Trump is going to have to take over the legislation-writing process himself.
That’s why I was asking, “Where’s Trump on this health care?”
Screw the House leadership! Write your own bill and get it passed.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let me try to explain this as best I can. When I saw this headline, it brought some things into focus for me, because this is gnawing at the edges here of irritation. The impression that I’ve had — you’ve had it, too — that something’s out of whack, something’s not wrong right. We won the election. I’ve described it, I don’t see the glow of victory on Republican faces. I don’t see optimism. I don’t see happiness. I don’t see confidence. I don’t see an attitude that says, “Man, what an opportunity we have.” And as I say it’s just been eating away at me.
And like everybody else, I’m trying to nail it down, explain it to myself so that then I can explain it to you. And then I see the headline at FrontPage Magazine: “Congress Deal Funds Sanctuary Cities, ObamaCare, EPA, Planned Parenthood, Doesn’t Fund Wall.” This doesn’t make any sense. It makes no common sense whatsoever when you juxtapose it against the election returns.
So what explains this? Why hasn’t there been a flood of legislation emanating from the Republicans in the House and the Senate to begin the process of implementing the Trump agenda? I know, I’ve answered my question. I’m doing this in a rhetorical sense to set up a premise. As I’ve stated many times, the Washington establishment’s totally opposed to Trump. They don’t want anything that Trump campaigned on to happen. They don’t want an outsider coming in and succeeding and thereby demonstrating how it can be done.
Nobody on the outside is supposed to be able to come in and reform Washington and improve it. The establishment has set it up so they have an exclusive, exclusionary club that very few people are capable or qualified to be part of, and that’s that. So the last thing they can afford is for somebody like Trump, who’s not a politician by trade, to come in after winning an election and totally turn the town upside down. They will not do it.
I go back to Lindsey Graham. He’s changed his mind since, but go back to Lindsey Graham before the election. (paraphrasing) “I would rather lose and be on the outs for 25 years than to win with Donald Trump.” That happens to be the frame of mind and the attitude of Washington, D.C. There isn’t, in that town, folks, in all of the places where legislation is written — oh, and let me issue one other caveat here.
Normally I would be happy that no new laws are being made. Every new law is potentially an erosion of freedom. I’m not one of these people that defines Washington’s success by how many bills get passed and signed into law. But in this case, the legislation needed is that which will unravel and unwind things which are destroying the country or wreaking great harm and damage on our culture, the economy, and what have you.
But the dirty little secret is that there isn’t any evidence that anywhere in Washington is there any aspect of the Trump agenda on display. It doesn’t seem to be that in the House of Representatives that there is a desire to implement any of the Trump agenda. It doesn’t seem in the Senate that there is a desire to implement any of the Trump agenda. It does seem in the House that there is a lot of energy devoted to stopping a Trump agenda. Ditto in the Senate.
So the people who are running the show in Washington are impervious and unconcerned about public opinion and the results of an election and are now in the process of doing what they can to thwart the will of the people in a very clear issues-dominated and issues-oriented election. Trump wins, he has a specific agenda. Where are the members of his party writing legislation to get going on the implementation of his agenda?
When Obama was elected, do you know the stimulus bill was written even before Obama was inaugurated? Who wrote it? Who actually wrote the stimulus bill? It was written before Obama was inaugurated. The stimulus bill was off and running nine days after he was inaugurated. And then they were off and running on Obamacare. And then off and running on whatever else the Obama agenda was. The Republicans didn’t have the votes to stop anything, so they were irrelevant in the process the first two years.
Well, what I said in the previous segment, the fact of the matter is that corporate interests or special interests or lobbyists or what have you, is where legislation gets written, because that’s where the donors and their money are headquartered. And the donors, the big money more than likely determine what does and does not happen in Washington. And I can tell you this. On K Street, the lobbying firms, the Chamber of Commerce, big donors, there’s nobody in that group that is in favor of the Trump agenda.
Now, Trump knew this; it’s why he ran for office. You knew it. I knew it. We all knew this. This is what being opposed to the ruling class, being opposed to the establishment is all about. But now it’s become crystal clear. Now it’s no longer a matter of speculation and theory. Now we know, we’ve just extended a federal budget all the way through September and there’s nothing in it that represents the will of the American people as expressed in the election. There’s nothing in it that represents the campaign pledges, promises, objectives of Donald Trump. Quite the opposite.
This budget is a direct slap in the face. This budget is a stop sign. And it’s throwing down the gauntlet. “You may be elected president, but you’re not getting anything. Nothing’s gonna happen here.” And if Donald Trump cannot rely on the members of his own party — are you really telling me we can’t get a replace and repeal Obamacare bill after all this time? And I don’t mean since Trump won the election; I’m talking about since it was passed seven years ago, six, whatever it is now.
But for Trump to rely on his allies on Capitol Hill to commence with legislation that implements his objectives is not gonna happen. Obviously it’s not gonna happen. We’ve had enough months now under our belt to know exactly what the lay of the land is. Now, you can say, “Well, yeah, Rush, but it was the fear of a government shutdown.” No, it’s not that. That’s such a convenient excuse.
I’m telling you, folks, the will isn’t there. The establishment, whatever you want to call this bunch of people, the ruling class, the establishment, the donors, whatever you want to call ’em, they’re not just gonna roll over and let Trump implement those things that he campaigned on just because he won the office, just because he won the presidency. And he’s going to have to overcome this if he’s going to be successful. And the way he’s going to have overcome it, he’s going to have to have his own staff, legislative staff in the White House that writes this legislation and muscles its way through.
And it’s gonna be tough. You see the obstacles here with Obamacare, the repeal and replace. They’re making this so much harder than it should be, so much harder than it is. One thing that’s become abundantly clear in the Obamacare fiasco is that official Washington does not trust free markets. Official Washington is not interested in letting the free market determine the solution to any problem. Understandably so. They have less power if the free market runs.
These people have control and total say-so over money, how it’s spent, who gets the money, and this kind of thing. Why give that up? So it’s gonna be a knock-down, drag-out. I’m not saying any of this because I don’t think Trump knows it. I think he’s more than aware of this. And I would fully expect a White House official reply to what I’m saying today to be, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but we know what’s going on, but, look, the next budget coming up in September, when we go for the next fiscal year, that’s when we’re gonna put the pedal to the metal.”
Well, okay, fine, I understand that, but that’s what we Republicans have been told for I don’t know how many years: “Well, we got to do it this way now, but I’ll tell you what. The next time this comes up, we’re gonna hammer ’em.” And they never get hammered.
So it is a Herculean battle, ladies and gentlemen, and it’s all compressed right here in this one story about this budget. The Democrats are gloating like you can’t believe. Grab audio sound bite number four. We have a little montage here of the Drive-Bys declaring victory for the Democrats and reminding Trump that he said everybody was gonna get tired of winning so much. They’re starting to now gloat, “Where’s the winning, Mr. President? Where’s the winning?”
CHRIS CUOMO: A good day for Democrats. The border wall is not in there. The money that goes to Planned Parenthood is in there.
NANCY CORDES: The money cannot be used to build a new border wall. The bill keeps funding for Planned Parenthood.
GRIFF JENKINS: Democrats have been quick to praise the deal as a victory.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Big victory! Democrats are refusing to fund President Trump’s border wall.
AINSLEY EARNHARDT: Democrats getting plenty of concessions, but money for the border wall? Nowhere to be found.
STEVE DOOCY: …money for a border wall nowhere to be found.
JOHN BERMAN: I’m hearing a lot more Democrats crowing than Republicans.
RON BROWNSTEIN: …victories in stopping things that Trump wanted to do.
ADRIANO ESPAILLAT: This is a clear victory for Democrats…
They want us to believe that the Republicans still haven’t quite gotten the courage to take the Democrats on. I don’t think that’s what’s going on at all here. I think what’s really going on is that the action is not in the Congress, the action is not in the House, and the action is not in the Senate. If the House Republicans are unwilling to implement the Trump agenda, why? Is it because they disagree with Trump’s ideas, Trump’s issues, or is it because there’s outside pressure threatening them if they do? And is that pressure monetarily?
Are donors telling them, “If you help this guy, you can forget being reelected; you can forget our help”? Is that what’s going on? More than likely it is, because that’s what always has gone on. The lobbying effort gets bigger every year, spends more money every year and, as such, has more power every year. And Trump knows it, folks. That’s what draining the swamp really was about, not simply getting rid of all of the embeds in the bureaucracy, in the deep state. It’s also dealing with K Street and overcoming the influence there, because nobody there is elected. Nobody on K Street — no lobbyist, no donor — none of them are elected. And that’s where legislation either begins or is prevented.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Listen to this list of things that were funded in the latest budget deal and ask yourself: Why are you voting Republican? “The bill continues funding refugee resettlement and visas from the six countries from which Trump wanted to suspend immediate immigration, despite this budget being the last recourse against the judicial tyranny.” This was a… This budget was an opportunity to stick it to the judges. It did not. “Sanctuary cities were funded…” Congress could have weighed in in any number of ways to stop this. The American people are tired of it; Trump is tired of it.
“Sec. 543 of the omnibus contains a provision opening the door for more H2-B low-skilled workers this fiscal year. $990 million increase of the ‘Food for Peace’ program in Africa. Government-run health care? HHS will see a $2.8 billion boost in spending, of which $2 billion will go to the [National Institutes for Health], which was supposed to be cut by the Trump budget. Green energy programs within the Department of Energy, programs Trump would have eliminated, received a modest spending increase.
“The federal judiciary saw its budget increased by 3%, to $7.4 billion, from fiscal 2016, despite engaging in civil disobedience against the rule of law. The unconstitutional Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is fully funded despite GOP promises to dismantle it. … California’s high-speed rail will continue to be funded by the Federal Rail Administration.” What was “not funded”? “The border wall. Although $1.5 billion in additional ‘border security’ funds were allocated,” and there were a couple of other little things done to ramp up border security and fewer people are coming in because of the fear factor, but this makes no sense.
It makes no logical sense whatsoever if you have a particular view of politics.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let me be clear about something. It wasn’t just Trump that people voted for. It was Republicans in Congress, Republicans in the Senate. People voted to do the exact opposite of what has happened in this budget. It’s not just Trump voters. Now, you can say it’s betrayal. It certainly is. But it’s much more than that.
All right, now, look. I’m seeing all kinds of adjectives in the media various places how we got screwed, how we got betrayed and all of this. I… Folks, I think, yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s no question. But none of this should be a surprise. It’s disappointing, and the election had specific reasons for happening. People voted for specific reasons. Among them was stopping the current inertia, reinstituting the rule of law throughout our country; trying to save the constantly degrading culture, the growing expanse that is the Washington, D.C., government and the entitlement component of our government that just seems to have no end.
What’s on display here is exactly how Washington, official Washington does it — and in that, it’s another learning opportunity. Now, I know what the objections to what I’ve said in the first hour are gonna be. I can predict them right now. “Rush! Rush, come on. You know that this is a stopgap. You know that this was just basically a spending omnibus, meaning we gotta throw everything into it ’cause we gotta keep the government running! Enough of these one-week continuing resolutions. Enough of this one month here. We need to get this funded through the end of the year” well, the fiscal year, which is September, “so that we can turn our attention to things that really matter.”
No, no, no. This is the stuff that really matters.
“But Rush, there was gonna be a government shutdown. We can’t afford a government shutdown. A government shutdown would destroy whatever credibility…” No, no, no. (chuckles) The Republican Party doesn’t have any credibility right now, not after a budget deal like this. It would have been better for the Republican Party to let the Democrats go ahead and shut things down than to do this. What are the Republicans thinking? Ask yourself this: Why are the Republicans probably not worried at all about this? You think they are? Why aren’t they?
They followed instructions to the letter is exactly what they did. Now, you could say their masters are their paymasters, their donors or what have you, but one thing is crystal clear. Can you find any single piece of legislation that is in anywhere near final form since Donald Trump was inaugurated, or even before? As I say, in the case of Obama and his stimulus, it was written before he was inaugurated. He wins the election; he knows he wants to have a stimulus bill because he knows what he wants it to be.
It wasn’t a stimulus. I don’t want to re-litigate this, but it was a payback to his donors and it was a sop to unions. It was not a stimulus. It was not gonna grow anything, and it didn’t, and it was not gonna build roads, bridges or anything. It didn’t. The point is they wanted it done and it got done even before Obama was inaugurated and it was voted on and implemented within a week, two weeks of his inauguration. Where is that corresponding behavior? We won the election. Where is all of this pent-up legislation that we supposedly have been believing in and dying to have passed for the last eight years?
The legislation we’re talking about is legislation that fixes years and years and years of mistakes. The legislation we’re talking about is legislation that could have done an end run around these judicial rulings that have tried to stopgap Trump ever since he became president. No effort whatsoever behind any of this. And they’re gonna say, “But, Rush, it’s a stopgap. We really… We’re gonna do all this stuff once we get the real first Trump budget when that kicks off next year.” Okay. If we want, we’ve got no choice but to sit around, wait, and see what happens.
What they mean by that is that the next fiscal year budget, which will be Trump’s first, kicks in October 1st of this year. The fiscal year starts October 1st. So the budget negotiations that we’ve just been through are gonna happen all over again. And Trump’s gonna be back, and he’s gonna be touting the fact that we’re gonna build a wall, we’re gonna have it paid for by somebody. The tax cut that Trump has advanced, that’s going to be part of the budget as well. But, remember, the budget is not the president’s. The budget originates in the House of Representatives.
And by, you know, using intelligence guided by experience, why should we expect anything different in the next budget after what we’ve just seen in this one? Trump is going to have to take the reins, which is what his campaign led people to believe he was going to do anyway. This is a battle between Donald Trump and not the House Republicans per se. It’s not between Donald Trump and the congressional Democrats, House and Senate. This is a battle between Donald Trump and official Washington. And the House members and the Senate members, in large part, are employees, not of us, but of official Washington.
He’s going to have to have a staff of people in the White House who take over the process of writing the legislation. Because if he waits for it to happen in Congress, it isn’t going to happen. It’s clear and abundant. And it’s not just since Trump. Throughout the eight years of Obama — do I need to repeat the story for you? — every election year we hear wonderful, marvelous things from the Republicans. We hear exactly what we want to hear. We hear exactly the common-sense that we demand.
We hear it. We hear it so loudly and we’re in favor of it so much that those people win. The Republicans now have the House, the Senate, and the White House. But nothing changes, does it? Republicans don’t act like winners, don’t seem to be excited about winning. I mean, in the sense that the power and opportunity that it presents them. So we’ll see how this next budget fight goes. We’ll see how this all shakes out, if it’s any different. Trump has got to be furious. I don’t know to what extent Trump knows what he’s up against.
I have to think he knows better than I do, better than anybody else does, ’cause he’s living it. I don’t know what his expectations were. I can believe that he expected the Republicans were gonna be deliriously happy at his victory and deliriously happy to work with him, and I fully think that he expected the Republicans to be on his team and that they would be working together to get a whole lot of this stuff done to fix and repair America and stop this descending trend that our country is in.
But he hasn’t found that to be the case. Where is there any legislation to fix — not even the Obamacare repeal — are you telling me it’s this complicated? It isn’t this complicated. There’s no trust in the free market, obviously. It’s not that there’s no trust in the free market. There’s no desire for it. These are people who have control over the market. Why would they give that up? By free market, if you want to fix Obamacare, let the market hash it out. The market will do a much better job of fixing American health care than these so-called Washington experts have been doing for 50 years.
Free markets have been determined to be successful. They work every time they’re tried. That’s the problem. It’s almost the same analogy Trump coming to Washington as an outsider and those insiders cannot afford for Trump to succeed. What would that make them look like? They would be unmasked and illustrated to be close to fraudulent.
Well, they tell us only they are capable, they’re experts, you have to have certain number of years of experience. Your life has to be devoted to this, that, and the other, the way to make Washington work, governance, the policy, process, all of this stuff. And some outsider comes in and inside of a four-year term fixes it all? They can’t let that happen. So it’s gonna be a battle royal, a knockdown, drag out. The thing is, it hasn’t really begun yet, as evidenced by this particular budget.
Now, we’ll present the other side of this. Trump is on a roll in terms of his attitude and his agenda and his objectives. We have the audio sound bites of the rally over the weekend and some of his interviews over the weekend with the media. It was actually hilarious. He was on Face the Nation, said, “You know what I call your show? I call your show Deface the Nation.” Well, I don’t care if we’ve said it here before. You imagine any other president telling the anchor of the CBS show Face the Nation, “I call your show Deface the Nation, Slay the Nation,” whatever it is.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: This budget not only provides no money for the wall, it limits how Trump can use new money for border security. It’s astounding when you get further into the weeds on this thing. I keep trying to get away from it, and it keeps sucking me back in.
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