June 5, 2009 08:05 AM
Conservatives must rededicate themselves to the Constitution
[The following is the transcript of a speech Mr. Limbaugh delivered to the Conservative Heartland Leadership Conference on Thursday, June 4, 2009. Reboot Congress has posted a video of Mr. Limbaugh's speech here.]
I appreciate the opportunity to be here. I’ll get right into it. As [Ed Martin] said, you guys will not have the real red meat until I’m done, but I’ll give you the imitation red meat for now to hold you over, or at least I’ll try to.
With all the excesses of the Obama administration, what I’m most distressed about is the complacency on our side. I have a law partner who is probably as conservative as I am, although that’s probably not possible, but is not bugged about what’s going on because he isn’t as engaged in politics, and second, doesn’t really believe that somebody could be up to what Obama is up to in trying to implement. I want to wake our side up out of the apathy, or help to wake our side up.
Obama wasn’t kidding when he said he wanted to make fundamental changes, and I have to say for the first time in my life, I’m actually afraid that my kids won’t grow up and live in the same nation that we are living in today, that they might end up impoverished and in slavery in a way that is unimaginable to us. Obama came onto the national scene riding a perfect storm with a financial crisis he recognized as an opportunity to actualize his years of training as a Chicago community organizer. He inspires a cultist attraction, has a spooky Messiah complex that is nurtured and exacerbated by a fawning mainstream media, a media either so corrupt or so mesmerized that they can’t or won’t report on his penchant for compulsive deception. And I speak my words deliberately. His every policy address is a virtual seminar in doublespeak, every other paragraph pregnant with internal contradictions, always pretending to be something for everybody. And all of this, the media dutifully conceals.
He says he has a transparent administration. He’s only selectively transparent. He says he’s bipartisan and not polarizing; yet a bipartisan poll says he is the most polarizing president in recent history. When confronted with a demand to compromise or a request to compromise, he says, “I won” with arrogance. He says in his speech, “I don’t intend to re-litigate the past eight years. Then he precedes every paragraph following and every sentence following re-litigating the past eight years, scapegoating President Bush’s Administration.
Now, the framers established a system of limited government, but warned that the Constitution alone wouldn’t preserve our liberties in the absence of a national moral fabric. You know that John Adams said the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. Well, we can’t continue to abandon traditional moral principles and preserve our system of government, because it’s based on the unwavering principle that man is made in God’s image and thus entitled to dignity, freedom, and God-given rights that no government can take away. But Obama is systematically abandoning these principles across the board with a radical assault on our God-given liberties and expanding the government’s role, and this expansion is fueled by a disrespect for our founding principles and a belief in a government-created perfect society. Our life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness are in jeopardy.
On the life issue, Obama restored taxpayer funding of overseas abortion providers with a stroke of an executive pen. He reinstituted federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. He’s considering overturning the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of Medicaid funds for abortion. He’s revisiting conscience protections for healthcare professionals who refuse to perform abortions all the while telling the people at Notre Dame that we need to honor those conscience protections. And he militantly supports partial-birth abortion and has supported the Infants Born-Alive Act, or the version of it in Illinois.
So, on judges, we all know he supports the idea of empathy-based jurisprudence and judicial activism and reverse racism. He’s hostile to the idea of blind impartial justice because he wants the judicial branch to be a policy-making branch because it’s unaccountable to the electorate. And, folks, this sounds clichéd, but it happens to be true. And he also -- today we just read that he lifted the rule on not providing lawyers, counsel, for illegal immigrants. He’s now going to provide counsel for illegal immigrants, if you haven’t read today’s news. He is a trans-nationalist who believes that federal judges ought to apply foreign law when interpreting the United States Constitution.
On the issue of the environment, we have a dominant media culture, which has declared a false scientific consensus on catastrophic man-made global warming with the purpose of shutting down debate. They ignore that some 31,000 scientists disagree. They use this crisis mentality to attack capitalism, shut down progress, and send us back to the Stone Age. Now, he is implementing this cap and trade debacle and CAFE standards. And now we read on the website that the fringe leftists – and I’m not so sure they’re fringe – want to jail global warming deniers. Obama will tout energy independence while he keeps us from drilling in ANWR or off-shore, and he prevents us from developing nuclear power while encouraging Iran to do so.
Concerning free speech, the First Amendment, this government actually singles out and targets private individuals who disagree with him. They want federal control of the Internet. They want right-wingers targeted as terrorists. They talk in these code words that our conversation on the Internet is “chatter.” “Chatter” is code for terrorist threat, imminent terrorist attack, actually. They have talk radio targeted, and you people, these are fighting words, and not just because Rush is my brother and Hannity and Levin are my good buddies. This is serious stuff, thinking about cutting, suppressing political speech of your opponents, the very reason the First Amendment was enacted in the first place.
This Administration has declared war on achievement. It rewards and subsidizes failure. It promotes mediocrity even in their commencement addresses, Obama and his wife. They have declared a war on capitalism, business, producers. They promote class warfare, generating envy and covetousness among people. They say the rich don’t pay their fair share when we know that the top 1 percent of income earners pay some 40 percent of their taxes, the top 5 percent pay some 60 percent. They are taking over private industry, subsuming ever greater elements of the private sector, firing corporate executives, setting corporate salaries, wanting to do that beyond these companies that have accepted bailouts. They’re selectively closing car dealerships, and we expect they’re doing so for arbitrary reasons. We don’t know and we don’t say more than the facts allow, but we sure believe that there’s something there that is suspicious. They won’t allow many corporations or many states to reject bailout money if they can get away with it. They’re bridging private contracts and ignoring the contract clause in the Constitution. They are promoting cap and trade, as I mentioned, and socialized medicine.
There’s a recurring trend on the left, folks, and it is: Well-meaning government interferes with the free market, things turn sour, they blame the market, and they demand more government control. It happens from the auto industry to education to healthcare to the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Once government gets its tentacles in, there is just no letting loose. We see it with the bailouts. It was promised to be just in the financial sector, and I think Bush meant that when he implemented it. But now it has expanded way beyond the private sector and it’s not temporary, as it was contemplated. It’s going to be permanent. And, yes, I believe that’s the intention. This isn’t about financial relief, but government control.
Spending is literally, horrifyingly, catastrophically unprecedented under this Administration. Left alone, the economy would cyclically recover, but Obama views this as a crisis opportunity to expand government irreversibly. He views the Stimulus as just a down payment. He is not the least deterred by these forecasts of debt which he is deliberately piling up. He regards previous excess spending not as a reason to stop the practice, but as an excuse to continue and multiply it. But it must be stopped lest our children be impoverished and enslaved. If we are 50 years old today, those of us 50 years old or older with a college degree can expect to pay some $81,000 in our lifetimes apiece to pay interest on the debt created with the White House’s budget. If we’re 40 years old, some $132,000. And these are conservative estimates because, as Obama said, he’s just getting started. There is a plan to double the national debt in 6 to 10 years. Do you know what that means? I’m not talking about the deficit, the national debt, which means the debt will increase from now until 6 to 8 years more than we’ve accumulated debt from the entire time of the beginning of the Union until today. Unbelievable. Obama is using the ratcheting up of the Bush budget in the last year with the extraordinary TARP expenditure -- which many of us opposed anyway, so I’m not going to apologize for it -- and the economy going south as a new baseline from which he can then expand. In other words, the Bush average budget deficits were $300 billion and going down until the last year, but they went up extraordinarily in the last year and they would have gone back down if we had let the economy recover and not done this insane madness spending. But Obama is acting like Bush was up to $1.2 as a matter of course, $1.2 trillion, and we’ll now increase from that. And then he acts like he’s going to slow it down a little bit, but look at his budget in the out-years. It gets up to $1.8 trillion, or maybe it’s $1.2. Who cares? A few billion here or there. But I’m telling you folks, it’s unsustainable, and this guy has admitted it’s unsustainable. He admitted it’s unsustainable, but has had no effort to curb it back.
Keynesian economics, it has never worked ever in history including during FDR’s efforts during the Great Depression. But even if it did work, there would still be two problems with Obama’s plan. First his plan is not stimulative like he says it is. The CBO, bipartisan CBO, or nonpartisan, says most of it is not stimulative. But even if it were stimulative, we couldn’t afford this doubling of the national debt. But, again, the purpose of the Stimulus Bill is not to fix the economy, but to redistribute wealth, to engage in patronage, and to fund groups who will keep these misfits in power. Listen, socialism never produces prosperity because it kills the human spirit. When you separate rewards from efforts, people quit producing. American history is rife with evidence on this, with the Utopian experiments in our past and also the international experiments, the other countries’ experiments with Communism. It never works. Government control and expansion always tends toward Absolutism.
We have a corrupt Administration filled with tax cheats, unapologetic. We have promises not to lift rules on lobbyists and now they have reversed that position, as well. It is Chicago politics writ large. We have Acorn-type groups funded. The Department of Justice the other day dismissed a slam-dunk case against the New Black Panther Party even though no pleadings were filed and thus the allegations were deemed admitted, and some Democratic commentators have admitted it’s the worst example of voter fraud in our political history.
On national security, we see President Obama traveling the world engaged in a world apology tour. “If we’re just nicer to the world, to the other peoples, there won’t be any terrorists.” “If we just hadn’t attacked Iraq, there would have been no 9/11.” Oh, wait, the timing off. Sorry. [Laughter] “If there was just no Gitmo, we wouldn’t have beheadings.” Like waterboarding, we’ll leave otherwise peaceful Muslims to beheadings.
He wants to disarm our nuclear weapons. Iran deserves nukes, but not us. He wants to reduce and will reduce, is reducing our missile defenses while other nations are proliferating. He has released the torture memos telegraphing and informing terrorists about our techniques used against them to save lives. He is closing Gitmo despite two-thirds of Americans oppose it and despite the fact that he has no plan as to how to handle the prisoners.
Yet with all of this, we are the ones who are sheepish, tentative, and cowed. We’re the ones who are accused of being extremists. My brother, who articulates mainstream conservatism, is demonized as an extremist. We’re always the ones who have to apologize for our beliefs.
But our beliefs aren’t extreme, folks….
• We aren’t the ones who sermonize about tolerance while exhibiting the vilest form of intolerance.
• We aren’t the ones who crucify judicial nominees with personal attacks and lies because they honor judicial restraint and don’t tow the liberal activist line.
• We aren’t the ones who advocate exterminating babies in the womb, killing babies in the women. Let’s call it what it is.
• We aren’t the ones who apologize the world over for America.
• We aren’t the ones who are gutting the military and missile defense because of some dangerously egotistical notion that we have the magic to turn evil into goodness with our charisma and eloquence, or even worse, because we stubbornly refuse to recognize evil in the world except as emanating from these great United States.
• We aren’t the ones who have so little faith in our fellow human beings that we diminish their dignity by patronizingly and systematically expanding the welfare state and increasing man’s learned dependency on government.
• We aren’t the ones who judge people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.
• We aren’t the ones who pit economic groups against one another and stoke the flames of envy and greed.
• We aren’t the ones who punish success, reward failure, and promote mediocrity.
• We aren’t the ones who are always siding with the world’s tyrants and dictators.
• We aren’t the ones slavishly attached to leftist propaganda about impending environmental catastrophes.
• We aren’t the ones who promote a secular humanist world view that considers government a quasi-deity that can perfect the human condition.
• We aren’t the ones who insist on moral equivalence between enhanced interrogation techniques to save innocent lives, which have saved thousands of innocent lives, and the infernal beheading of innocent lives.
• We aren’t the ones who want to criminalize policy differences and prosecute the previous Administration like a thuggish third-world dictatorship for implementing enhanced interrogation techniques that our Party’s leadership was briefed on and approved.
• We aren’t the one whose Party leader falsely accused the CIA of lying concerning those briefings.
• We aren’t the ones who voted to give President Bush authority to attack Iraq because we believed based on our best intelligence at the time and that of the intelligence of all other major nations that Iraq had WMD, and then spent the next 5 years attacking Bush for attacking Iraq and lying about Bush’s alleged lie, saying a man they painted as the dumbest president in the history of the world duped them into believing WMD existed. [Laughter]
• We aren’t the ones who actually blocked military ballots but then falsely accused the other side without any evidence whatsoever of suppressing black voters.
• We aren’t the ones who publicly declared that President Bush delayed the federal response to Hurricane Katrina because he’s a racist, with utter disregard for the abominable lie it was and also of the untold damage it would cause to race relations.
• We aren’t the ones who aren’t honest about our beliefs, fearful the voters would reject us outright if we were.
• We aren’t the ones who are using government money we don’t have to fund community organizing groups to manipulate the census, gerrymander districts, and register illegal voters by the thousands, perhaps millions.
• We aren’t the ones who consciously employ sinister tactics of radical Saul Alinsky to target, freeze, and demonize private citizens who dissent from our policies.
• We aren’t the ones who selectively suppress freedom of speech.
• We aren’t the ones who want to eliminate secret ballots for union membership to intimidate workers into joining the union and then have the audacity to call it “Free Choice.” That one is just unbelievable.
• And we aren’t the ones who oppose vouchers to keep intercity minorities trapped in inferior schools while pretending to be their caretakers and while sending our own children to the privileged private schools.
• We aren’t the ones who want to reverse welfare reform to endear ourselves to voters despite its proven successful track record.
• We aren’t the ones who have heretofore obstructed entitlement reform and cynically denied there was a problem, though Social Security and other entitlements are on the brink of bankruptcy, now even more accelerated than before.
• We aren’t the ones who believe it’s kosher for judges to twist the Constitution into saying whatever judges want it to say.
• We aren’t the ones who insist on nationalizing healthcare instead of implementing market reforms in the face of overwhelming evidence that socialized medicine is a disaster everywhere and every time it has been tried.
• We aren’t the ones who glamorize the world’s tyrants and dictators and euphemize the conditions in their countries, their “thugocracies.”
• We aren’t the ones who ignore the verdict of history, that socialism destroys the human spirit and cannot work in the real world, assuming it would be desirable if it could, which it would not.
• We aren’t the ones who believe in unlimited borders and universal amnesty for illegals all for the purpose, mostly for the purpose of buying votes.
• And we aren’t the ones who believe government should be the primary arbiter of philanthropy in the United States.
But we are the ones – and this won’t be as long [Laughter] – we are the ones who want to restore Constitutional principles, knowing we owe our liberties to the uniquely structured government and the Judeo-Christian principles undergirding it. And we are the ones who favor a strong national defense. We are the ones who believe in the individual and want to unleash his entrepreneurial spirit and provide him equal protection under the law. We are the ones who do recognize evil in the world and insist on safeguarding our national sovereignty and in a robust national defense. We are the ones who want to protect innocent life in the womb. We are the ones who defend traditional values, values that have withstood the test of time and been instrumental in making this the freest and most prosperous nation in the history of the world.
The bottom line, folks, is that we must wake up. We have to quit trying to make the GOP Democrat-like. Sixty percent of Americans consider themselves conservative. We need to thus return the Party to its roots. Quit kowtowing to political correctness. Just articulate mainstream conservatism. Stand up for our beliefs unapologetically like the left does. Quit allowing the left to define the terms of the debate. The other side recognizes it is in a war. When are we going to start recognizing it and get back in the war with them instead of rolling over? [Applause] You should have clapped way before that. There’s a lot of red meat in here. [Laughter]
If we truly desire to bequeath to our children and their children the freedom tradition bestowed upon us by our parents and other ancestors who believed in liberty and the moral underpinnings of this great nation and are willing to make the ultimate sacrifices to sustain them, then we must reaffirm our commitment to the Constitution and the principles that sustain it. Today, we must rededicate ourselves to the United States of America, our glorious Constitution, and its unique liberty tradition. Thank you. [Applause]
Mr. Limbaugh is a partner in the law firm of Limbaugh, Russell, Payne and Howard in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
With all the excesses of the Obama administration, what I’m most distressed about is the complacency on our side.... I want to wake our side up out of the apathy, or help to wake our side up.
