RUSH: We have the predicted — and it, frankly, wasn’t hard — I mean, I would love to take credit for brilliance on this. But, you know, a sand flea could have predicted what the Democrats and media were gonna do in reaction to the retirement announcement of Justice Kennedy. Of course Trump… (laughing) Trump has thrown gasoline on all this by saying, “I’m honored that Kennedy said he felt comfortable enough to retire with me as president.” That has just sent them into orbit! I want to start… You probably think I’m gonna start with my prediction from yesterday.
And I’m not, ’cause it’s coming very soon. I want to talk about something a little bit more overarching than that. What happened yesterday that has caused a meltdown all over the left? Jeffrey Toobin was on CNN (crying), “No! Oh, no! (sobs) Roe v. Wade is doomed. (wailing) Oh, my God, babies are gonna live! Oh, no!” What can cause this? Well, that’s what happens. If a baby’s not aborted, it lives. I’m sorry if this is offensive. Take it up with God, not me. I’ve got nothing to do with it.
But if a baby’s not aborted, it lives, and here’s Jeffrey Toobin (wailing) “Nooooo! Roe v. Wade is doomed!” An 82-year-old judge, one man… We have a population of 300-some-odd million, and one 82-year-old (could have been 32; doesn’t matter; I’m just giving you the factual content here) has announced that he is retiring and heading off to that great cloakroom, wherever he goes after he retires. And look! Look at the absolute meltdown that has taken place over a single individual saying he’s leaving.
Now, what can possibly justify this kind of meltdown? We have three branches of government. We have the legislative, we have the executive, and we have the judiciary. You’d be amazed at how many people think that the branches of government (laughing) are president and vice president and speaker of the House. You… (laughing) It’s a shame. But we have the legislative, we have the executive, and we have the judiciary, and they are coequal, and they always…
It’s been set up as founded that they battle for power — and the battle for power is supposed to slow things down. Change is supposed to occur at a snail’s pace in this country, as designed by our brilliant founders, for the express purpose of taking emotional reactions out of everything. But yet that’s all we’re dealing with now. The left has entirely gone every day… How much emotion is left in their reservoir? Do you realize every day is a panic and a crisis to everybody on the left? Every day!
So now an 82-year-old guy, Justice Anthony Kennedy has said… Did you see this? A Comedy Central writer who said he wished Judge Kennedy had been shot instead of President Kennedy and instead of Robert Kennedy. Comedy Central. This is a comedy network! This is where you tune in to laugh and you tune in and some locoweed says (summarized), “Yeah, I wish Anthony Kennedy had been the one shot instead of John Kennedy.” You want to throw out all the great rulings you got from Anthony Kennedy?
How these people can marshal even 30% of support from people in this country is beyond me now. It’s not that if it doesn’t appear… A lot of people watch Comedy Central. People tuning in to watch. How in the world do you not blanch at just the stupidity of it, much less the coarseness. They call Trump uncivil, and they say Trump is dangerous to our discourse and so forth. So back to the three branches: The executive, legislative, and judicial.
If I were a member of Congress today, a member of the House or Senate, and one judge announces he’s quitting and everybody acts like it’s the end of whatever they believe in, I’d be asking myself, “Well, what am I, chopped liver here? Is the Congress chopped liver? Is everything deferred to the Supreme Court?” And, yes, it is! And the reason for that is the left. I mean, you can go back to Marbury v. Madison where the Supreme Court said, “You know what? We are going to decide what’s constitutional or not.”
Or you could go back to Earl Warren and his court 60 years ago where they affirmed, they were gonna sit in judgment, that they were gonna be the final authority. This was never what the Supreme Court was intended to be, the final authority. But the left insisted on it because the judiciary is their backup for losing elections. Why should a Supreme Court justice…? How has it happened that a Supreme Court justice — one — is so powerful, when all they are supposed to do is to decide the law, whether a law is constitutional, whether the cases that come before them…
You know, they decide cases, and not every one of them is a constitutional case. But we have invested in the Supreme Court as the final authority. But! But! The left did that. When the Supreme Court trends to not giving them the final result they want, you think they’re just gonna sit there and accept it? They don’t accept anywhere else in our society where they lose. You think they’re just gonna sit there and accept if they lose it the Supreme Court? That’s not who they are. They will continue to agitate and try for more and more upheaval.
But what it really means is that the executive order branch and legislative branch have kind of ceded power. They’ve let it happen. They’ve let it happen that nine people in robes have the final authority on all of this, when they not supposed to do that, because they’re not elected. They’re not representatives of the people. They are appointed by the president, confirmed by the people in the Senate and so forth, but they are not elected, and therefore they have no direct link to the people.
Our country is a representative republic, and the people that we elect to the House and the Senate are there to represent us. I know judges are supposed to be totally free of bias and all that. Of course, that’s a myth as well. I just find it fascinating to watch the reaction when one judge decides to retire and what it says about what has happened to our country and where it’s going.
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I mean, I’ve gotten a little bit beyond where this stuff irritated me. I mean, it does, but I now see the humor in a lot of this. Because we’re dealing with, I mean, closed-minded, sheer stupidity. Yeah, Comedy Central writer: “I wish Justice Kennedy ‘had been shot’ instead of JFK or Robert.” What’s this clown’s name? Curtis Cook, “a Los Angeles based writer for Comedy Central.” Do you think they’re rethinking hiring him? Is this funny? Oh, and Trevor Noah, who also works there. He had something crazy to say.
“In some ways, it feels like all hope is dead.” So you’re tuning in to the Comedy Central network to watch what you think is Jon Stewart — and he got out of there long ago. He could see what’s coming. His replacement where you go to laugh has just told you that all hope is dead. Why? Because a judge retired! So the investment they have made in the Supreme Court becoming the final arbiter was always destined to come back and bite ’em.
It’s gonna come back and bite everybody on both sides, depending on rulings. And Dan Rather! Dan Rather also tweeted out… (laughing) Now, Dan Rather, of course, is a newsman. He was the anchor for CBS Evening News after Walter “Klondike” retired, and Dan Rather eventually had to retire himself because he got caught making up the news about George W. Bush and the National Guard. He actually used forged documents. His excuse was, “Well, maybe the documents are forged, but the story is accurate.” (laughing)
Right.
“My source material may be fake, but the story is real.” Anyway, they get rid of Rather at CBS. They’ve got no choice. Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw immediately recognizing the potential danger here to all of journalism, create a new award, a lifetime award for great news presentation or some such thing, and they have a big dinner, and they give Rather the award to save liberalism and to save the news business. So Rather tweeted yesterday afternoon, “Justice Kennedy retiring… If you are deeply disturbed, absorb the shock. But respond with even more determination.
“If you see this as a fight for the future of democracy, let those in power know that the will of the majority can still hold sway.” Earth to Dan: This is the majority holding sway! Trump won the election, the Republicans won the House, the Republicans won the Senate. They get to choose because they are the majority. Just like… People have forgotten. Obama nominated Elena Kagan, perhaps one of the least qualified people to sit on any court, much less the Supreme Court.
He nominated her during the year of a midterm election, and nobody said he shouldn’t have been able to do it. Nobody said he should have to wait ’til after the election. When Obama nominated somebody for the court, most people said, “Okay. Okay. First African-American president. Whatever you want, you can have it. We’re not racist.” That’s how much of the Obama years happened. There was no opposition to it. Now, I have a question for Dan Rather. “If you’re deeply disturbed, absorb the shock.” Can you tell them how to do it, Dan?
‘Cause it doesn’t look like they know. Morgan Freeman is not absorbing the shock. The Comedy Central guy who wishes that Anthony Kennedy had been shot instead of President Kennedy? I think they’re having trouble absorbing the shock. You’ve been through this, Dan. How do they do it? Second thing is, “respond with even more determination.” What’s that? Will you explain this? “Respond with more determination.” To do what? What does that look like, Dan? What does responding “with more determination” look like?
I’m just asking, what would it be? What are these people not doing that Dan thinks they need to do? Well, they’re not absorbing the shock, and I don’t know how they could be more determined. Competent and qualified to figure all this out and to oppose it’s another thing, but I think they are determined. So there’s that. And my prediction yesterday has already come true. It came true — much as I thought it would — before the end of the day yesterday, and it has come true over and over and over again throughout the Drive-By Media.
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RUSH: Now, here’s what’s going on, ladies and gentlemen. The courts have been invested… The Supreme Court particularly, but not just them, the appellate courts obviously. But the entire judiciary. It is not insignificant — it’s not a throwaway line — to say that the left, the Democrats have sought to use the judiciary as insurance, if you will, for losing elections. We’ve documented the evidence of this over the many years of service of the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
But the retirement of Anthony Kennedy and the opportunity here now to replace him with a Trump-appointed judge… I’ll tell you what’s happening. I think, as I mentioned yesterday, the Supreme Court decisions this week are clawing back freedom — individual liberty and freedom — for the people and reasserting the primacy of the Constitution. What really worries the left here is that what Trump is doing is not only… He’s changing everything up in terms of the way the established order has run from our relationship with allies like NATO and the foreign trade deals like NAFTA.
He’s turning that upside down.
He is now, I think, attempting here with the court and his judicial nominations… I think that there is, for lack all of better term, a claw-back now that the Trump administration and Trump personally are trying to reverse this decades and decades of leftist judges, such as those that stopped his travel ban and so forth. It’s a long process. This is not something Trump is gonna be able to complete himself.
But I think one of the reasons for the panic on the part of the left is that once the Supreme Court no longer becomes their backstop — once the Supreme Court is not the final authority for their victories — they are gonna be in abject panic. Where do they go? It’s kind of like the United States, if it were ever to lose freedom, where in the world do you move to for freedom? We’re the last great hope for all this stuff. The Supreme Court the last great hope for the left. And if that is removed from their control, “Uh-oh. We’re not safe.”
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RUSH: Here’s Bernadette in Akron. I’m glad you waited. You’re next, and it’s great to have you with us today. How are you?
CALLER: I’m fine, Rush. It’s a real pleasure to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: You alluded to it in the first hour, about the job of the Supreme Court. For as long as I remember, it’s been taught that Marbury v. Madison established the way they were gonna do things. What were they doing before then?
RUSH: Well, Marbury v. Madison judicial review, meaning the Supreme Court will sit in judgment of whether or not acts of Congress and legislation of Congress is constitutional… Look, it was a power grab, and this is what historically the three branches have always engaged in: The quest for power. What’s been fascinating to me is when Obama was president, the Democrats in the House and Senate willingly gave it up.
They willingly surrendered power to Obama because they like authoritarianism. They like power invested in a singular individual. It’s why they so loved Fidel Castro. It’s why they loved Hugo Chavez or Mao. “One guy, all that power!” The cases that the court handled beforehand were like railroad versus land deal, cases that appear before courts every day. The court decides which cases they take — and they, course, reject the vast majority that they are requested to hear.
But prior to that, it was legal disputes that ran the gamut. The idea that the Supreme Court would become the final authority on the constitutionality of work by the U.S. Congress is what Marbury v. Madison established, and it was… Who can tell the court they can’t do it? See, that would take another court with a new chief justice and a whole bunch of other cases to wipe that out. But they’re not gonna give up that kind of power, and it’s just amazing how everybody’s acquiesced to it.
CALLER: Just falling in line.
RUSH: Falling in line. Well, look, we can’t ask God, so the Supreme Court’s the closest we can get? “Is that correct? Is that legal? Is that fair? Is that right? Is that constitutional?” The left was happy to do this as long as they had the power to populate it. Now that is being threatened, and it’s got them very, very nervous. But they were more than happy for this singular authoritarian repository — and it’s kind of like human nature.
Deciding controversial things is controversial. Remember the base closings from back in the eighties? We decided need to downsize some of the military, and one of the ways to do it was downsizing military bases in the continental United States. Rather than Congress do it, they hired a bunch of ex-congressmen who missed the power and missed the perks, and they said, “Come on back, guys! We’re gonna make a blue ribbon panel on here, we’re gonna put you on it, and you’re gonna decide which base are his closed.
“So when you decide that a base is closed, say, up in Sacramento the guy in that district can say, ‘I didn’t do it! The blue ribbon panel did it.'” So the history of Congress (and individuals, too) being willing to pass off controversial decisions to others in order to escape any blame or accountability is as old as humanity itself is. So when Marbury v. Madison came along, it was controversial at first (and remains controversial to some people), but it was accepted.
It takes a lot of people off the hook, and it puts a bunch of people who never have to face voters on the hook so they’re not really on it. I mean, judges don’t have to be elected. They don’t have to campaign. So they can do whatever they want. You can’t do anything about it. But the willingness with which members of Congress have given up power over the years has always amazed me, ’cause I remember when Reagan was president, Tip O’Neill ran the Democrats in the House of Representatives, it was a daily battle for power.
The Republicans today in both the House and the Senate, marginally, are not doing much to back up Trump, and in the first six to nine months they did nothing to backup Trump because they believed the Russian collusion story and thought that he was soon gonna be history. And when they figured out that, “Hey, maybe he didn’t do it; maybe Mueller doesn’t have anything,” then they got supportive and we got tax reform and so forth. But it’s still basically Trump against Congress. This Congress is not so much trying to reap and reclaim power as they are not lending their power in unison to a president in their own party.
But Trump is finding a way to overcome even that, too, which is continuing to frustrate those who are trying to find new ways to stop him.
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