RUSH: Let’s reiterate here. You know, try to make the complex understandable. Trump is being impeached for what?
It isn’t about the Ukraine phone call. It’s not about interfering in the election in 2020 and all of that. They can’t let go of what they thought 2016 was gonna produce. They are still locked in on that. They’re still focusing on it, still hoping that the allegation that Trump’s 2016 election was illegitimate. And what has Trump done?
All Trump has done is ask questions. One of the questions was of the president of Ukraine. Trump is asking questions. He’s got investigations going, trying to find out what happened to him. Who did this to him? Who did this to his voters? Who’s in the process of trying to disenfranchise his voters. He’s simply asking questions. He’s being impeached for trying to get answers.
The United States government — and by that I mean the administrative state — has literally lied to the people of this country for three years and counting now about Russia collusion. They’ve been trying to put Donald Trump in jail, not just reverse the election results. They have been trying to get Donald Trump in jail. Their problem is, he has been completely exonerated and vindicated by their own investigative body, the Mueller report.
This is basic human nature. So Trump is pursued, he’s lied about, he’s libeled, he’s slandered for three years. Then he is completely exonerated and vindicated, so what does he do? He starts asking questions about what the hell happened? He starts asking questions. He wants answers about how in the hell this happened. And he’s talking to the president of Ukraine, and he’s asking him to help come up with some of these answers.
And now the same people that set Donald Trump up, the same people that lied about him and tried to put him in jail are now impeaching him for defending himself. They’re the ones who behaved illegally. They are the ones who threatened the Constitution. They are the ones who have stood everything decent upside down.
Trump is simply asking questions about them, who they are, what they did. All he’s doing is defending himself. He’s being impeached for defending himself, pure and simple. Because in today’s Democrat world you are not permitted to defend yourself. You take the allegation and you deal with it.
Let’s go to Mitch McConnell and the sound bites. We’re gonna start here. This is in order at number 1. Pelosi was scorched today by the Turtle. It may not sound like it in every utterance because the Turtle is the Turtle, but he blew her up in this 30-minute speech on the Senate floor. Here’s the first sample.
MCCONNELL: Speaker Pelosi’s House just gave in to a temptation that every other House in our history has managed to resist. They impeach a president whom they do not even allege has committed an actual crime known to our laws. They’ve impeached simply because they disagree with a presidential act and question the motive behind it. There were powerful reasons, Mr. President, why Congress after Congress for 230 years — 230 years — required presidential impeachment to revolve around clear, recognizable crimes, even though that was not a strict limitation. Powerful reasons why for 230 years no House, no House opened the Pandora’s box of subjective political impeachments. That 230-year tradition died last night.
RUSH: He continued.
MCCONNELL: Speaker Pelosi suggested that House Democrats may be too afraid, too afraid to even transmit their shoddy work product to the Senate. Mr. President, looks like the prosecutors are getting cold feet. They said impeachment was so urgent that it could not even wait for due process, but now they’re content to sit on their hands.
RUSH: The next bite is one that resonated with me because I think in this bite I will be able to indicate, I’ll be able to illustrate for you a prediction I made yesterday, that maybe not in our lifetimes, but at some point down the road the Democrats realizing the one thing in our political system they don’t control, that stands in their way, is elections. And at some point, folks, it’s gonna happen.
Some Democrat somewhere, someday is gonna come along and suggest that elections are old-fashioned, outmoded, outdated — and they’ll have all kinds of reasons. It’ll be because people are uneducated. People don’t know what they’re talking about. The people are too stupid, or we can’t trust them to do the right. It will be something along those lines, but it’s gonna be because Democrats keep losing, and in this bite, I might be able to extract… Not evidence of that.
But it’s an indication that that’s how the Democrats are thinking. Here is McConnell suggesting that he’s not gonna let “thirdhand testimony from unelected” bureaucrats, i.e., Lieutenant Colonel Vindman — O say can you see — and Yovanovitch and Fiona Hill and what’s his name, George Kent — the bow-tie guy — and Bill Taylor… He’s not gonna let testimony from unelected, thirdhand bureaucrats determine who is and who isn’t president.
MCCONNELL: President Trump is not the first president with a populist streak, not the first to make entrenched elites uncomfortable. He’s certainly not the first president to speak bluntly, to mistrust the administrative state, or to rankle unelected bureaucrats. None of these things — none of them — is unprecedented. I’ll tell you what would be unprecedented. It will be an unprecedented constitutional crisis if the Senate literally hands the House of Representatives a new partisan vote of no confidence. It will be unprecedented if we agree that any future House that dislikes any future president can rush through an unfair inquiry, skip the legal system, and paralyze the Senate with a trial. It will be unprecedented if the Senate says secondhand and thirdhand testimony from unelected civil servants is enough to overturn the people’s vote.
RUSH: Let me take a brief time-out. We’ll come back and I’ll explain some things about this bite when we get back.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: McConnell made the point that the Democrats over in the House requested extraordinary amounts of sensitive information from the Trump White House, exactly the kind of things over which presidents of both parties have asserted privilege in the past. It was predictable and appropriate for Trump to do this. He’s been impeached for it! This is what they’re calling “obstruction of Congress.” But it’s a never-ending quest for power that the branches fight with one another, that they have now criminalized in the form of impeachment.
McConnell made the point that none of what Trump has done here is unprecedented. In fact, it’s all happened before, and it’s common. Houses of Representatives have always wanted White House documents. Presidents have always said, “Go pound sand. If you want ’em, we gotta go to court.” The president’s gone to court claiming executive privilege. More often than not, the president prevails in court. This is exactly what the president did in these circumstances.
They’re calling this “obstruction of Congress” because they’re desperate to get the word “obstruction.” They want to use the word “cover-up.” They think it went well during Watergate. He says, “This is not a constitutional crisis. We’re nowhere near a constitutional crisis because this is normal!” None of this is unprecedented. The routine occurrence of separation of powers is nothing. What happened is what should have happened! It’s what always happens.
There’s nothing here that Trump has done that constitutes anything unconstitutional or illegal or obstructive. I mean, McConnell was on fire. But I want to go back to his specifically mentioning, “It would be unprecedented if the Senate says secondhand and thirdhand testimony from unelected civil servants is enough to overturn the people’s vote.” That is exactly what this has been about since the entire-Russian meddling-and-Trump-collusion fiasco began.
It has been about reversing the election result, as you well know.
Now, I contend to you that a party brazenly and openly attempting to reverse election results is a party that is entirely capable down the road of canceling elections, period. Now, don’t misunderstand me. I’m not suggesting that this is Pelosi’s objective now. I’m telling you, I’ve studied the trend line of the American left and where it’s headed my entire life, and particularly the last 30-some-odd years of this program, and they have trended so far to the left now that they are openly socialist and trending communist.
They even use the word “socialist” in many of their factions proudly to describe themselves. But make no mistake. They don’t like the results of this election, and they’re trying to reverse them — and look how they’re doing it. They’re bringing in so-called experts that are not elected to comment on the qualifications of the man who was elected, and they’re turning to these unelected bureaucrats that you never heard of before any of this happened, that you didn’t know of. You had no idea what they do, how good they are at it or not.
And now all of a sudden, their testimony is sufficient to produce an article of impeachment suggesting that this president — elected in an Electoral College near landslide — is unfit. McConnell’s exactly right. The basis on which this impeachment process is attempting to overturn the election results is the fact that the existing Washington establishment claims this man is not qualified, this man is unfit. They are exactly trying to overturn a duly constituted election by lying about it, but falsely accusing people who won it and participated in it.
What are they trying to do? They’re trying to deny the election result. They’re trying to deny the choice and the will of the American people. We’re not far from it. We’re not far from the day — and, believe me, they’re already thinking about it. I will as close to guarantee it as I can without having actually heard them talk about it. But I will wager you that they, among themselves, have had conversations about the problems they face just having to do elections.
That they resent having to go through this whole thing, this whole process of elections. If they could ever find a way to eliminate them, not… They would replace them with something. I mean, they’d try to make it palatable to the American people. It’s who they are. They are attempting to do it right now.
They have been for three years. They’re not going to stop. This entire next year is going to be based and predicated on “Trump’s unqualified.” Now they’ve got the blemish: Impeachment. That will be part of the 2020 campaign. The last thing… The one thing that Pelosi will not permit is Trump being acquitted. Ergo, there won’t be a Senate trial unless, somehow, she’s convinced there’s gonna be a conviction.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: One of the ways they could try to replace elections is do it with polls. Think of how they use exit polls today. Those involve elections, but the signs are all there.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: One more Mitch McConnell sound bite. It’s number 4. Now, this is a favorite topic of Senator McConnell’s. When I first met him — and I don’t remember when that was — he gave me a lesson on what the purpose of the Senate is, as designed by the founders, and he touches on it in this bite.
MCCONNELL: The framers built the Senate to provide stability, to take the long view of our republic, to safeguard institutions from the momentary hysteria that sometimes consumes our politics, to keep partisan passions from literally boiling over. The Senate exists for moments like this. There’s only one outcome that is suited to the paucity of evidence, the failed inquiry, the slapdash case — only one outcome suited to the fact that the accusations themselves are constitutionally incoherent. Constitutionally incoherent.
Only one outcome will preserve core precedents rather than smash them into bits in a fit of partisan rage because one party still cannot accept the American people’s choice in 2016. It could not be clearer which outcome would serve the stabilizing, institution-preserving, fever-breaking role for which the United States Senate was created, and which outcome would betray it. The Senate’s duty is clear. When the time comes, we must fulfill it.
RUSH: Now, the way he described it to me when I first met him is he said, “Rush, I want you token of the Senate as a cup and saucer. Over in the House and all through the country rabid partisanship is the name of the game. Imagine that rabid partisanship is coffee that is poured into the cup, and that partisanship sometimes boils over. It gets so rancorous and it gets so mean and it gets so heated; it just boils over, and where does it end up? It ends up in the saucer — and, Rush, the Senate is the saucer.
“The saucer is where what was in that cup boils over and ends up cooling down. It doesn’t get consumed. It sits there in the saucer and it just sort of cools down and sits there — and that, Rush, is the role of the Senate: To slow everything down, to take the partisanship out of it.” That’s what he’s talking about here. And he, in this case, has accurately described Pelosi and the House Democrats and what they have done. But I just have to comment because this was one of the best floor speeches in regards to this kind of partisanship in Washington that I’ve heard him give.
I mean, he referred to it as the most unfair impeachment inquiry in modern history. He ripped Pelosi for delaying all this, said the Democrats are afraid to transmit shoddy articles. What it is, just to refresh your memory or if you missed the first hour… What all of this is, is Pelosi knows she’s not gonna get a conviction in the Senate so not gonna send ’em over there. This is, again, the thing about this that had everybody puzzled.
All of these official commentators, official analysts on cable TV and in the newspapers and the blogs and the websites asked, “Why is she doing this? It’s gonna lead to an acquittal. It’s the exact opposite of what she wants.” Not if she doesn’t send the articles over. If there isn’t a trial, there can’t be an acquittal. And what she’s basically saying is she’s not going to assign any House managers, any prosecutors until she gets an idea of “the arena.”
What she means by that, she’s not gonna send them over there until she can be assured that they’re gonna convict and remove Trump from office. Otherwise they’re not gonna be sent over. Which makes total, perfect sense. They want the blemish. They don’t want the news stories, “Donald Trump impeached in December of 2019 and acquitted in January of 2020.”
They don’t want that. They don’t want anything other than Donald Trump impeached in December 19th and removed from office in January 2020. That’s what they want. If they don’t get that, she’s not gonna send ’em over there. The absolute worst thing that could happen is for this reprobate, in their minds, this existential threat to the country, this guy that colluded and stole the election has to be thrown out, to have all of this be thrown at him, and he ends up being acquitted in an election year? Ain’t no way. Ain’t gonna happen.
And her out is going to be claiming the Republicans are unfair because they’re partisan. They’re racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes, whatever else she wants to throw into the pile as her justification for not moving forward. (imitating Pelosi) “It won’t be a fair trial. I’ve heard Senator McConnell already say that he’s going to acquit. I can’t do this. I can’t conduct this if it’s not going to be a fair trial.” Well, there hasn’t been anything about this from the get-go that’s been fair. But that’s her out.