[Rush was Hot this AM!] Where We Stand: What Speaker Boehner Told Me This Morning
July 25, 2011
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I got a question about the world markets. They didn't plummet, did they? All week along we were told we gotta get this done. Obama on Friday at that petulant, childish, cracking-up press conference, everybody, I mean even David Brooks was disappointed at the deportment of The One. I mean all of these inside-the-Beltway intellectuals were totally savaged by The One's behavior on Friday. It was the strangest thing.
By the way, greetings and welcome back, great to be back in the EIB Southern Command. Dittocam is up and running. Happy to have you here, folks. Our telephone number if you want to be on the program is 800-282-2882.
So, you know, Kathryn and I were in Boston. We got into Boston at 4 a.m. on Thursday. I had a meeting in Los Angeles at 6 a.m. It ran a couple hours and then we hightailed it to the airport in Van Nuys and split the scene. We arrived in Boston for a funeral the next morning at ten o'clock, which we wanted to make sure we arrived there at 8:15, 8:30. We got in at four o'clock, went to the funeral, the burial site. That was most of the day. We were gonna spend the weekend in LA and chill, so we decided to stay in Boston for the weekend rather than head home, and on Friday afternoon at five o'clock, I'm sitting there... you know, I think all of the money that I have spent over the course of my career and life on Apple products, I went to my first Apple store. I actually went inside an Apple store. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I was recognized. It's no big deal. I walked in the Apple store and I bought a bunch of things I didn't need, and then went back and was playing with them.
I got a couple MacBook Airs, a little 11-inch job, a little 13-inch -- that 13-inch, I call it the baby. It's cool. I'm sitting there and -- (interruption) yeah, I bought a little -- (interruption) I'll unfold it here in a second, it's the cutest little thing. But anyway, I'm playing and all of a sudden I start getting e-mails from people, "Boy, Obama's acting like a child at this press conference. Boy, Obama is ticked," and it's six o'clock on a Friday, and I'm saying, "Nah, this has to be e-mail from yesterday." So I went in, turned on the television, lo and behold the world has blown up at 5:30, six o'clock on a Friday when everybody is gone. This is unprecedented and Obama is acting like the guy I know he is, childish, narcissist, whimpering, blaming everybody else, certainly not of presidential stature, and even to the point that all of his supporting comrades in the stenography corps, also known as the press, were also alarmed over this. And then Obama finished and Boehner's gonna answer at 7:15, and this was the press conference where Boehner refused to accept Obama's call, and I said, "My gosh, what am I missing here?" I'm getting all this in the e-mails as I'm toying around with my new toy. So I say, "I gotta go turn on the television."
So Obama calls Boehner, Boehner refuses to take the call, refuses to go up to see the guy at that moment, request was for 11 o'clock Saturday morning, and Boehner's gonna have his own response at 7:15, and at the time I looked at Kathryn and I said, "You know, this is substantive stuff, Boehner's just throwing it right back and slapping him in the face here." Cut, Cap, and Balance, Balanced Budget Amendment, Boehner said, "You know what, I can't work with you anymore, you know, we sit here, we had a deal --" and, by the way, my antenna went up on "we had a deal on $800 billion in revenue." I said, "Where did that come from?" That was the first I'd heard of that. And then Obama at the last minute wanted to add $400 billion to it, thankfully Boehner said, (imitating Boehner) "I'm out. You know, it's like a bowl of Jell-O, I can't deal with you. I'm gonna go back, and I'm gonna deal with Senate leaders, and we're gonna get something done. So Obama, (imitating Obama) "No, please come back, please come back. You be here at eleven o'clock tomorrow morning summoning these people." At which point Boehner said, you know, the way the Constitution works is that we in Congress basically write the laws and then you decide whether you want to sign 'em or not, a little constitutional lesson.
So on Friday night I'm feeling pretty optimistic about the way things are hanging tough because, you know, when we had left the program on Thursday, we had Speaker Boehner on the last segment of the program and you were melting the Capitol Hill phone lines on Thursday with all the leaks coming from the New York Times. You remember the horrible stories the deal had been cut, turned out that it hadn't. So they were working feverishly over the weekend. They had their meeting on Saturday at the White House, lasted 50 minutes, and it was more of the same, Boehner to Obama, "Yes, sir, yes, sir," three bags full, and they leave. And then over the weekend it's grind the fingernail time 'cause they're starting to talk to McConnell, and that's always a risky thing, given what Senator McConnell wants to do. And then Dingy Harry, have you seen the pictures, by the way, of Boehner and Dingy Harry and Obama, I guess it's in the cabinet room. Not sure which room it is. But Dingy Harry is sitting there and you just want to slap the facial expression off his face. Nose and face up in the air like he's too big to be there and Obama with the same kind of arrogance on his face, and Boehner looking like, "What am I doing here?"
So it all breaks up, and they start working feverishly over the weekend, and then Obama, in that press conference that he had on Friday, "You know, the markets are gonna open Monday and if we don't have a deal I can't promise interest rates aren't gonna skyrocket." Here comes the next threat, the next crisis, the next Armageddon. Asian markets first to open, and, lo and behold, watching the news yesterday, tracking the Asian markets, what will the Asian markets do, so now we gotta do what we gotta do to save the Asian markets. And everybody knows what this is, it's just the latest dog-and-pony show, the latest lame attempt by the inside-the-Beltway ruling class to get us jittery and frightened about our credit rating. Meanwhile, our credit rating had already been downgraded by an outfit. I have it here, let's see. Nah, I must have left it on the other computer, but I think I printed it out here. But we'd already been downgraded last week, and it wasn't because of the debt limit; it's because of our unserviceable debt. It's tied to unsustainable debt. This was from July 18th. It's a week ago.
"Credit rating agency Egan-Jones has cut the United States' top credit ranking, citing concerns over the country's high debt load and the difficulty the government faces in significantly reducing spending." Nothing in here about the debt ceiling as the reason why Egan-Jones cut our rating, and this is true. This is right on the money. The debt ceiling is not the primary concern; it's all of our unfunded obligations, the out-of-control spending. So where are we? Where are we? Well, this morning about an hour and 15 minutes ago, I answer the phone -- and on the other end of the phone line was the Speaker of the House, John Boehner.
Congressman Boehner, the Speaker, filled me in on what is the latest proposal on the table. What's going on is that Boehner and Reid and McConnell are working among themselves. Boehner told Obama that. Obama got aggravated even more that he's been left out of this. I'm told that Senator McConnell is in a better position than he's been lately, that he's on a better page, on the same page with Boehner now. So the deal is that they're gonna offer Obama (take notes if you want) $1.1 trillion in cuts and a $1 trillion debt limit increase in the first round. They are going to appoint six members of each chamber to recommend the cuts.
So we're gonna go back to something like Simpson-Bowles, only this one's appointed by the Congress. Each congressional leader, two from the House and two from the Senate, will get three appointees. No names were mentioned to me. So the House will get six members on the commission; the Senate will get six members on the commission. Congressman Boehner would not tell me who he's going to put on the commission. This short term deal has no tax increases in it. It's $1.1 trillion in cuts, and a $1 trillion increase in the debt limit. Speaker Boehner said to me that these are not accounting gimmick maneuvers. These are real rate cuts. There will not be any defense cuts in the $1.1 trillion. The second round... Now, this is the whole deal that Obama has to accept.
The second round would require a vote on the Balanced Budget Amendment. So the cuts are real -- they're not accounting gimmicks, as I was told today -- and no defense cuts. The question was, "Will the cuts be now or later?" and the Speaker said the 12 members of the blue-ribbon panel will make recommendations on what's to be cut and when. Then after all of that's done, they take a vote. So we don't know what the cuts are, and we don't know when they will occur. I asked Congressman Boehner, "What do you do after this runs out?" He said, "Well, that's the point. This takes us through next April. We have to do this all over again next April." This is something like a six to nine-month deal. In other words, what they're denying here -- and I think, from a political standpoint, this is important.
They are denying Obama what he really wants, and that is a deal that raises the debt limit beyond 2012. He wants something done today that will take them through and beyond the election, and Boehner is saying that's not gonna happen. I'm not gonna make a deal with a guy who's more concerned with his reelection than he is for the country. January, February, March of next year is when this debt ceiling will (expire), and they'll have to go through at all over again, but there will be recommended cuts and so forth. This is what's going to be proposed. So we don't know what the cuts are. We don't know where they are.
We know that the commission of 12 members of both houses will decide and vote on the cuts. Now, we have to assume there are gonna be liberal Democrats on this committee. You have to assume. Democrat leaders, one in the House and one in the Senate, each get to appoint three. You know, there are gonna be some statists on there. So the cuts are thrown to a committee. The cuts are not actually being proposed in this. So you could sit here and say, "Well, this is what happens: You farm out the really tough choices to a 'blue ribbon' panel of people who are not standing for reelection, who don't have to worry about that, on the theory that you'll get the honest, tough choices from them," but you also will get purely partisan political choices from the left as well.
So that basically is the summation of the deal that's going to be presented to Obama. Over the weekend, I really had the sense that, based on his performance, he's cracking up. I do think that he's losing control here. This doesn't happen to him. This is not happening to him. He summons people up; they show up. He says he wants this, and he's always gotten it. This is not the way this was supposed to play out. The way this is supposed to play out, the Democrats and Obama propose nothing, the Republicans propose all the details; the Democrats reject them, send them back to do it again; the Republicans end up negotiating with or compromising with themselves. As I adroitly pointed out to Speaker Boehner on the phone Thursday.
"You know, you're compromising with yourself. At some point it's gotta stop." So we shall see. Now it's up to Obama to accept this. I thought on Friday they could send him anything and he would accept it. I thought he was that panicked, over the weekend. I thought at this point he's accept anything 'cause he's not winning this now. The polling data says he is not winning this. I got the backup on here. He is not winning this. He's not pulling the wool over people's eyes on this. There's too much of a record! There's nearly three years of Obamaism for people to judge. This comes up in February, March, April. That's not a bad time for this to come up again: Tax time. We'll see.
I have to take a break here now, folks. I'm still assimilatin' all of this, if you will. It's all coming in the fly -- or on the fly. Maybe in the fly! It used to be you could prepare the program, and do it. Now, why even prepare it 'cause it all happens while the program's happening
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