Category Archives: Rush Limbaugh

John Roberts: Traitor or Diabolical Genius? A Roundup of Opinion

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The opinions on the SCOTUS Obamacare ruling are coming fast and furious and they seem to be pretty split. (By the way, I’m talking about conservative pundits, the only ones who opine in good faith.)

We start with Rush Limbaugh:

The administration and the Congress said, “No, it’s not a tax!” Arguing before the court, they said, “No, it’s not a tax!” Then a couple of whispers, “Yes, it is a tax.” The chief justice says (paraphrased), “I can’t forbid this. It’s not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices. I gotta find a way. Congress wants this, so I gotta find a way to make it happen. Okay, we’ll call it a tax, and that makes it perfectly legal.” So today the sovereign nature of the individual wasn’t just weakened; it was eviscerated.

George Will:

Conservatives won a substantial victory Thursday. The physics of American politics — actions provoking reactions — continues to move the crucial debate, about the nature of the American regime, toward conservatism. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has served this cause.

[…]

By persuading the court to reject a Commerce Clause rationale for a president’s signature act, the conservative legal insurgency against Obamacare has won a huge victory for the long haul. This victory will help revive a venerable tradition of America’s political culture, that of viewing congressional actions with a skeptical constitutional squint, searching for congruence with the Constitution’s architecture of enumerated powers. By rejecting the Commerce Clause rationale, Thursday’s decision reaffirmed the Constitution’s foundational premise: Enumerated powers are necessarily limited because, as Chief Justice John Marshall said, “the enumeration presupposes something not enumerated.” 

Mark Levin:

There’s nothing about the Obamacare decision that is redeeming.  Nothing.  I will talk about it at length on my show tonight – 6 PM eastern.  There are lawyers and political operatives spinning this decision, but don’t buy any of it. 

Charles Krauthammer:
 

How to reconcile the two imperatives — one philosophical and the other institutional? Assign yourself the task of writing the majority opinion. Find the ultimate finesse that manages to uphold the law, but only on the most narrow of grounds — interpreting the individual mandate as merely a tax, something generally within the power of Congress.

Result? The law stands, thus obviating any charge that a partisan court overturned duly passed legislation. And yet at the same time, the Commerce Clause is reined in. By denying that it could justify the imposition of an individual mandate, Roberts draws the line against the inexorable decades-old expansion of congressional power under the Commerce Clause fig leaf.
Law upheld, Supreme Court’s reputation for neutrality maintained. Commerce Clause contained, constitutional principle of enumerated powers reaffirmed.

That’s not how I would have ruled. I think the “mandate is merely a tax” argument is a dodge, and a flimsy one at that. (The “tax” is obviously punitive, regulatory and intended to compel.) Perhaps that’s not how Roberts would have ruled had he been just an associate justice, and not the chief. But that’s how he did rule.

And perhaps most interestingly, the changing opinion of Ken Cuccinelli, Attorney General for Virginia who was a leading voice in the case:
Virginia Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli told The Daily Caller that after reviewing the Supreme Court’s decision on President Barack Obama’s health care law, he’s changed his mind and determined that the ruling actually isn’t so bad for the country in the long-term because it actually curbs federal power.

“If you asked me at the beginning of this process if I could have this ruling, would I take it, I’d have taken it,” Cuccinelli said in a Thursday afternoon phone interview.

The attorney general said he and his staff were gathered in their executive conference room early Thursday when they watched the news that the court largely upheld Obama’s health care law.

Cuccinelli’s first reaction was “negative,” he said, “based primarily on the fact that the law mostly stayed up.” He reacted Thursday morning by putting out a press release saying, “This is a dark day for American liberty.”

But his thoughts on the decision changed, the Republican said, as he dived into the ruling. “Once we got into the opinions, we got considerably more optimistic because our first motivation here is protection of the Constitution and restraint of the federal government. And that was very much achieved in this case.”

[…]

“One hundred years from now this will be looked on as a win,” he said.

Curiouser and curiouser.

MORE: Some diverse opinion on the Spectator Blog, but mostly anti-.

NRO Editors: Roberts’s Folly.

Rick Santorum, Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh Walk Into A Bar

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As stated in my previous post, there are no Democrat scandals anymore, but there are certainly Republican ones. While this is hardly a “scandal” it might meeting the proverbial “Watergate” criteria for Rick Santorum.

Drudge is the nation’s editor. What’s on his page is what’s talked about. Some have accused Drudge of doing Romney’s bidding. I don’t think Drudge takes order from anyone. However, the fact that he’s headlining this story about Santorum’s comments on the USA and the devil from a few years back is intriguing.

But where it really gets interesting is the comment from Rush Limbaugh as Allahpundit explains:

Rush Limbaugh defended him half-heartedly on his show today, noting that the media thought it was cutesy-poo when evil clown Hugo Chavez compared Bush to the devil a few years ago but conceding that Santorum will “have to deal with it. He’ll have to answer it. I don’t know. It’s just not the kind of stuff you hear a presidential candidate talk about.”

If you’re making Rush cringe, you’ve got a problem. This may turn out to be a big nothing, but I suspect if Santorum starts to sink, this might be where it starts.

And if this post doesn’t annoy Santorum supporters, this post from Erick Erickson surely will.

The MSM Hates You

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Caught a little bit of Rush Limbaugh’s opening monologue yesterday and it was epic. Rush talked about the opening of the South Carolina debate where John King asked Newt Gingrich about his ex-wife’s recent claims that he wanted an open-marriage and other tawdry details. Here’s the clip in case you haven’t seen it:


Now this is where Rush is valuable because he sees beyond the obvious and gets to the heart of what’s really going on. Every American who considers themselves a conservative, libertarian or even just a moderate Republican needs to hear this: 

RUSH: The audience is eating it up! They’re eating it up off the floor. They’re sucking it up with straws! They love it! Now, let me tell you one thing here, folks: You cannot shame the mainstream media. If any of you are thinking that the media learned a lesson — if any of you believe that the media finally had it handed to ’em, if you believe that the media had their eyes opened and they are fully awake now and they understand what they’re dealing with — forget it. John King is proud of what happened last night. John King is a hero in the Main Street media because he didn’t back down, because he continued to illustrate how it is that the media does really control the agenda. That was a demonstration of the power they hold over every public figure’s head, that they choose to hold like a guillotine.

John King… There may even be some jealousy and envy within the journalist ranks (well, not journalists; within the Democrat Party ranks) because John King is a guy that got in Newt’s face, stared him down — and the fact that Newt told him off? It’s a badge of honor. If you are thinking that John King was embarrassed and ran away with his tail tucked between his legs and learned his lesson and it’ll never happen again? Ah, ah, ah, ah. You cannot shame the mainstream media. They are proud of this. They delight in their power to destroy candidates that they don’t like. They revel in the fact that they can keep so many conservatives from even thinking about getting into politics. A lot of the so-called journalists watching this probably were pumping their fists.

A lot of the journalists watching this were doing the Obama cheer: “Yes, we can! Yes, we can!” and do not doubt me. If you think King was embarrassed — if you think he was suffering from an elevated heart rate during the middle of this, if you think he felt shamed, if you think, “Oh, my God, Newt’s beating the crap out of him” — you are dead wrong. He got exactly what he wanted out of this. Do NOT doubt me. At the end of the day the message to every conservative who hasn’t run for office is: “You want a piece of this? You want some of this? You want Brian Ross hounding you and your ex-wife and then you want me asking you about it on national TV the next night? Come on in. We’re ready.” That’s the message from John King and CNN last night, and do not doubt me on this. 

That’s exactly right. Rush is the father of the fight that Andrew Breitbart is fighting, that James O’Keefe is fighting, that NewsBusters is fighting and I (in a very small way) am fighting. The Fourth Estate is really a Fifth Column. This is never going to change unless politicians stop playing by the MSM’s rules. It’s time for a media revolution.

National Un-Intelligence

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Director of National Intelligence James Clapper created a firestorm today when he said the Muslim Brotherhood is a mostly secular group. Now I understand that in foreign policy red-herrings are a useful weapon but I for the life of me can’t see any kind of benefit to a statement like this. El Rushbo went off on Clapper and the administration in this clip via Right Scoop.