I Am Literally Sick Over This Obamacare Travesty

By Rush Limbaugh

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay, folks. I now know what happened yesterday. I've had time to dig into this. Time that I did not have prior to yesterday's program and did not have during the program. And I can't tell you how sick I am. I am literally sick over what happened yesterday. I don't know how else to describe it. Literally sick. ...
A giant total fraud was perpetrated on this country yesterday. The Supreme Court  as an institution is forever tarnished. There are now no limits anywhere on the size, scope, the growth of government. We were the victims of a purposeful, intentional fraud yesterday. There is no way, were anybody in Washington concerned about the Constitution, there is no way Obamacare gets anywhere close to being law in this country. There is no way it even approaches constitutionality.  And the chief justice of the US Supreme Court  knew that.  He felt it was his duty, however, to save the legislation.

I don't even care about motivation. I don't care if it's because he wants the New York Times and Washington Post in love with him. I don't care if he wants to be the next John Marshall. I don't care.  All I know is that we were defrauded in front of our eyes, wide open.  We were taunted, defrauded, mocked, laughed at. I guess 5-4 court decisions are perfectly fine now. Oh yeah, hey, we'll take whatever we can get, we'll take it however we can get it. Even if they have to invent law, even if they have to rewrite a statute that was so poorly written, it wouldn't have gotten past a first grader who understood the Constitution.

Folks, having now learned what happened, and by the way, I can't take much more reading the faint praise for Justice Roberts. There are a lot of conservatives who are trying to find some comfort in all of this by pointing out that justice Roberts ruled that the Commerce Clause isn't a catchall that justifies anything Congress wants to do. "Hey, Rush, we got to look at what we won here." I understand that theory. You do want to try to take the best of things that you can. But this is theft!  Theft of liberty and freedom right in front of our eyes. Okay. So the Commerce Clause has been limited, so? Now we get to pay a tax for something we don't do. But it's worse than that. It really is akin to going into a 7-Eleven, and saying to the clerk, "No, I really don't want to buy any gum."

"Well, okay, tax on that is $2.35."

That's what's happened here. I see all these people running around now thinking they've got free health care, and for the next year-and-a-half that's what it's gonna look like. Michelle Obama, "Guess what, contraception is now free." She's got a list of all the things that are free. AP has a list of all the things that are free for everybody.  What happened here basically is that Justice Roberts stretched the limits to avoid being accused of activism.  He wanted to avoid being accused of activism. Activism, in this case, would have been finding the law as it is unconstitutional. So he succumbed to fear that doing that, upholding the Constitution, would have resulted in him being accused of activism. So what he did, he stretched the limits to avoid being accused of activism, and in the process, he became more activist than any justice in recent memory.

He actually wrote this. It makes going without insurance just another thing the government taxes, like buying gasoline or earning income. That's all it is here. He's got this law, Congress wants this law, the president wants this law, it's entirely unconstitutional. And they all knew this. Other than the four liberals, they all knew the whole thing was unconstitutional and Justice Roberts decided to rewrite it. He rewrote the legislation in a way that Congress never intended it. It would be like a judge making up for an incompetent lawyer in court and finding somebody who's guilty totally innocent just because the judge wanted to appear magnanimous. Or vice versa. It makes going without insurance just another thing the government taxes, like buying gasoline or earning income.

Well, there's a big difference. You don't have to buy gasoline. And for 48% of the country, you don't have to earn an income. But we are all going to have to pay a tax for not doing something. And that starts a limitless universe of activity or lack of activity that can be taxed. There's a doctrine of law that says you don't reach constitutional issues if there is an alternative basis to decide the case. Do you recall we talked yesterday toward the end of the program, and I was admittedly confused because I hadn't had time to read the decision, nor read any analysis of it. Things were happening lickity split here, rat-tat-tat. But something yesterday that had me constantly confused was Justice Ginsburg's dissent. She's in the majority, what was she dissenting against?

Then after the program, I go home and I'm starting to do show prep for today's show, and I find out that a bunch of liberals are ticked off at Roberts, because of what he did with the Commerce Clause. So now I'm really confused. They won and they're complaining about Roberts and Ginsburg wrote a dissent. What was she dissenting from? So I looked into it. They're ticked off at Roberts, essentially she criticizes Roberts for violating the principle that you don't reach constitutional issues if there's an alternative way to decide the case.  So Roberts contended that the mandate was unconstitutional, but it could be upheld as a tax. And Ginsburg said, well, if you're going to do that, there's no need to even talk about the mandate and the ruling. If you're going to say that the mandate could be upheld as a tax, then you don't have to even get to the mandate, constitutionally, you don't have to talk about it. You don't have to rule it unconstitutional.
The four libs wanted this case on the mandate, not the tax increase. They wanted the Commerce Clause to be stretched to include unlimited government power. And they were ticked off at Roberts for limiting that. They say if you're going to find this as a tax case, leave it at that. So when I found that out, that really aroused my curiosity, because they thought Roberts then started answering an unnecessary question. And that, according to Ginsburg and the left, makes Roberts an activist judge. You know, my head is swimming, because all of this is gobbledy gook.  All of this is total BS, folks. And yes, I'm going to explain this as the program unfolds, I'm just setting the table here.

Roberts did not say this in his opinion, but he knows it. Congress and the president insisted up and down this was not a tax. That the only power that they were relying on here was the Commerce Clause power. That's how the law was presented.  That's how it was enacted.  That's how it was intended.  Obama ran around telling everybody there were no taxes in this, it was not a tax increase. In fact, people's taxes are gonna get cut. The legal controversy was the Commerce Clause. And Justice Roberts thus had to address it, but is an utter travesty.  It is an utter travesty that a member of the court, I don't care if it's a chief or whoever decides, that it's up to him to save an unconstitutional piece of legislation under the guise of not being an activist judge.

The Supreme Court wrote legislation, they rewrote this legislation to save it. In the real world, Realville, what used to be, what everybody thought they could count on, what everybody thought and hoped one more time they could depend on, even though we know we really can't, we learned it in Kelo, we learned it in McCain Feingold, we've learned it a lot. We can't count on the Supreme Court to uphold the Constitution, and that's why I'm sick. If we can't count on the Constitution being upheld in the Supreme Court, and furthermore, if the Supreme Court is going to take over the duties of the legislative branch and write legislation in order to save incompetent, unconstitutional, faulty work, then we've got pure fraud right before our very eyes.

Byron York went and looked at the first day of oral argument. When you hear this, you are going to be angrier than you even are right now. You're going to relive the first day of oral arguments where they talked about this as a tax. And the court allowed the government to argue both ways, that it was a tax one day, and they allowed the government to argue the next day that it wasn't a tax. First two days of oral arguments are where you find the answer to all the inexplicable questions here.

RUSH: Byron York wrote his piece at the DC Examiner yesterday: "No one knew it at the time, but the key moment in the Supreme Court Obamacare case came on March 26, the first day of oral arguments, when few people were paying close attention.  Before getting to the heart of the case, the justices first wanted to deal with what seemed to be a side issue: Was the penalty imposed by the individual mandate in Obamacare a tax?"

The first question the justices had for the lawyers: Is this a tax?

"If it was, the case would run afoul of a 19th century-law known as the Anti-Injunction Act, which said a tax cannot be challenged in court until someone has actually been forced to pay it." Well, the Obamacare taxes don't implement until 2014. So on the first day of oral arguments, if Obamacare is a tax, the court would have to throw it out because nobody had paid the tax yet. So the first day of oral arguments, the justices want to know, they asked the government, is this a tax? The government said no. Because everybody wanted the case tried, everybody wanted it adjudicated and they wanted it adjudicated now.

"Since the Obamacare mandate wouldn't go into effect until 2014, that would mean there could be no court case until then." So on the first day of oral arguments, the government said no, it's not a tax. Well, we could stop right there if we wanted to. We could stop after the first 30 minutes of oral argument, back on March 26th, skip everything that happened between then and yesterday, and then go to Justice Roberts' ruling, where he found it to be a tax.

That, of course, is not what happened. They kept arguing. "No one had challenged Obamacare on that basis; the challengers wanted the case to go forward now. The White House, having argued strenuously during the Obamacare debate that the penalty wasn't a tax, wanted to go ahead as well. So the court, on its own, tapped a Washington attorney to make the argument that the penalty was a tax," just to cover their bases.  The government wouldn't say it was a tax. The anti-Obama lawyers would not say it was a tax. So the Supreme Court went out and they brought in, they hired their own lawyer to argue that it was a tax. The court on its own tapped a Washington attorney to make the argument the penalty was a tax, and, therefore, the case should not go ahead.

"'The Anti-Injunction Act imposes a "pay first, litigate later" rule that is central to federal tax assessment and collection,' said the lawyer, Robert A. Long, on that first day of oral arguments. 'The Act applies to essentially every tax penalty in the Internal Revenue Code. There is no reason to think that Congress made a special exception for the penalty imposed by [Obamacare].'"  So the lawyer hired by the court affirmed it's not a tax. Nobody in the regime thought it was a tax. Nobody in Congress thought it was a tax. And nobody in Congress made a special exception for the penalty imposed by Obamacare as a tax. It was all in the Commerce Clause.

"After Long made his case, it fell to the administration's lawyer, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, to argue that no, the mandate was not a tax, and therefore the case was not subject to the Anti-Injunction Act." And that's what happened on the first day. The government hired a lawyer to make the case it was a tax; and Verrilli, the Obama lawyer, made the case that it wasn't. This is just so the justices could have arguments on the table that they could then decide.

"At the same time, everyone knew that the next day, when Verrilli planned to argue that the mandate was justified under the Constitution's Commerce Clause, he had as a backup the argument that it was also justified by Congress' power to levy taxes -- in other words, that it was a tax.  Justice Samuel Alito saw the conflict right away.  'General Verrilli, today you are arguing that the penalty is not a tax,' Alito said. 'Tomorrow you are going to be back, and you will be arguing that the penalty is a tax. Has the court ever held that something that is a tax for the purposes of the taxing power under the Constitution is not a tax under the Anti-Injunction Act?'  'No,' answered Verrilli.  At the time, some observers found the whole thing a little boring; the real action would come the next day, when the court got to the question of whether the Commerce Clause could be stretched to include the individual mandate."

But the first day is where the fraud happened. The first day the government says it isn't a tax. The second day, the government, as a backup, said, "If you don't like the Commerce Clause, we also think it's a tax." The government was allowed to argue this both ways. The first way they were allowed to argue that it wasn't a tax so that the case would go on. The next day they were allowed to argue as a back stop, if the commerce part of it fell apart, that it was a tax. But a lot of these observers who were bored on the first and second days of oral arguments were then shocked yesterday when the chief justice rejected the Commerce Clause argument and ended up "agreeing with Verrilli that the mandate simultaneously was and was not a tax, and that therefore Obamacare would stand. Roberts joined the court's four liberal justices, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan, who seemed prepared to uphold Obamacare under any circumstances.

"Roberts' sleight of hand drove his conservative colleagues nuts. 'The government and those who support its position on this point make the remarkable argument that [the mandate] is not a tax for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act, but is a tax for constitutional purposes,' wrote dissenters Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. 'That carries verbal wizardry too far, deep into the forbidden land of the sophists.'"

So from the get-go, this case was allowed to be sloppy, bent, shaped, flaked, and formed, however ultimately the left wanted it to be in order for it to be found constitutional or good. And, by the way, on this Commerce Clause business, folks, they didn't limit anything. They said Obamacare is not permissible under the Commerce Clause. But they didn't limit the Commerce Clause per se here. The anti-injunction act says that you cannot do a court case over a tax until it's been collected, levied and collected. Well, the tax hasn't been levied and collected. And by gosh, if the chief justice himself didn't find that the whole thing is kosher as a tax increase, a tax increase on what we don't buy, and a point that I made yesterday that I want to make again, when you pay taxes, where do you pay the money? Government gets the money. These taxes are gonna be paid to insurance companies. Is that even a tax?

You have to buy health insurance. If you don't, there's a fine. So the money that you're spending that you otherwise wouldn't, the tax, being spent with insurance companies. The tax anti-injunction act was codified title 26 US code. It was enacted in 1867. It is the law. It's never been found to be unconstitutional. The Obama administration was allowed to argue it both ways. So that however it ended up being most beneficial to them was the way the court was going to decide.

So we, who cannot be protected from the political choices we make, spend all this time debating and arguing against a piece of legislation based on the Commerce Clause. The court admits they can't find it constitutional, so guess what? We're gonna make this thing legal by calling it a tax increase. Government can do that. There's a reason nobody predicted this outcome. And the reason is nobody was thinking outside the boundaries of the law.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: My friend, Andy McCarthy, has a piece on this at PJMedia.com. His headline is: "Obamacare Ruling: Pure Fraud and No Due Process." Here's how he opens: "Led by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court decided that Americans have no right to due process. Indeed, the court not only upheld a fraud perpetrated on the public -- it became a willing participant." That's exactly right! This whole law has been presented fraudulently. The whole thing was a fraud.

Obamacare passed in Congress through trickery.

 

They used reconciliation.

They tried all kinds of tricks.

They were even thinking of "deeming" it to pass.

There was the Cornhusker Kickback.

They tried all kinds of things that ultimately didn't work because the people weren't gonna put up with it. It was upheld by the Supreme Court through trickery. "Had Obamacare..." This is Andy writing. "Had Obamacare been honestly presented as a tax, or had the court acted properly by striking it down as an illegitimate use of the commerce power and telling Congress that if it wanted to pass the bill as a tax it would have to pass the bill as a tax, our dire financial straits might have forced this much-needed debate about the limits of congressional welfare power.

"We have now lost that opportunity through fraud: Fraud in the legislative action, and fraud in the judicial review. Due process would not allow this to be done to a criminal, but the Supreme Court has decided that Americans will have to live with it." The administration presents a case to the Supreme Court that is based entirely on an individual mandate that is said to be legal because of the Commerce Cause. If Congress had wanted to pass a bill that got the same thing done with taxes, it would have done that.

It didn't do that on purpose!

They didn't want to go anywhere near tax increases on this.

Obama was out promising tax cuts to everybody. He promised lower premiums, greater health care coverage and treatment. There was no way that they wanted to talk about this as a tax, a tax increase, or anything of the sort. So the court should have adjudicated this on the basis of what was in the bill -- period -- and they didn't. Again, the chief justice wrote what I'm gonna read to you here: "Under my theory, the mandate is not a legal command to buy insurance. Rather, it makes going without insurance just another thing the government taxes, like buying gasoline or earning income."

"Under my theory, the mandate's not a legal command to buy insurance."

That's the stretch that he had to make in order to get to where he ended up. "Under my theory, the mandate's not a legal command to buy insurance." It most certainly the hell was! And that's all it was. And that's not constitutional. It was a "command" by the federal government that we buy something. They don't have that power! The chief said, "Eh, it's not a legal command. It just makes going without insurance another thing the government taxes, which the government can do, like buying gasoline or earning income."

(sigh)

It makes you sick.

It just makes me sick.

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RUSH: Roberts says that he thought it was his duty to save the Act no matter what. It was his duty to save the Act no matter how bad it was. He had to write it to make it legal. Sorry. I feel like the police chief in my town just had a press conference and has announced that the police force will now be assisting criminals in breaking into my property. That is how I feel.

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Link:

• I Am Literally Sick Over This Obamacare Travesty

Related:

• Mark Levin Eviscerates the Obamacare Ruling
• What Happened to John Roberts?

Mark Levin Eviscerates the Obamacare Ruling

“This decision I would go as far to say is lawless. Absolutely lawless!” Listen to his First Segment from June 28’s Show

Click below to hear:

What Happened to John Roberts?

By Rush Limbaugh

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  I want to go back to the Grooveyard of Forgotten Favorites.  Our archives.  By the way, I think this is important.  Doesn't mean anything now.  It does not have the force power, but the four judges, justices who dissented -- Scalia, Alito, Thomas, Kennedy -- made it plain in their dissent that this was nothing constitutional about this act.  They found nothing in it.  They plainly said, in their dissent, the whole thing should have been tossed out.  You can't have a greater divide than what we had.  You've got the four libs, who, it's never even considered that they might change their tune.  And the chief justice, who we know now I think is a creature of the Washington establishment, a creature of the notion that government is the center of the universe.  It's pretty obvious.  But the four justices who dissented, they didn't even want to get into the idiosyncrasies of the majority opinion.  They found the whole thing tossable.
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RUSH: Now, a lot of court experts are saying that the dissent actually reads like a majority opinion but with criticism of the actual majority tacked on at the last minute. In other words, the dissent is just... Again, this is speculation. These so-called court experts are looking. They are now reading both opinions and they say, "This dissent sounds like it was the majority opinion, like it started out as the majority opinion." And some of these Court Watchers are now saying, "It looks like Roberts was somehow convinced to switch sides along the way."

Ah, this is just gossip. It's interesting for the sake of it. But back in May, there were rumors floating around relevant legal circles that a key vote was taking place and that Roberts was feeling tremendous pressure from unidentified circles to vote to uphold the mandate. And that's all they were. They were just rumors. I don't know who was applying the pressure and don't even know if it's true. It's just gossip. This is the kind of stuff you can expect a lot of in the aftermath. (interruption)

What do you mean, "No"? (interruption) Well, okay. Snerdley reminds me... (interruption) You're talking about Leahy? Senator Leahy went to the floor of the Senate and did... Eh, you might say he threatened Justice Roberts. There were senators that went to the floor. It was unprecedented. There were really intimidating things said. We reported on it this week, in fact. There were intimidating things said about and to Justice Roberts. And I remember the reaction, "Ah, he's not gonna care about that, Rush! Come on, now. He's the chief justice Supreme Court. That stuff happens all the time."

You're gonna be reading about this kind of gossip. You probably will see it intensify as the afternoon and evening wear on that Roberts switched. This is a theory. Remember, now: Everybody, everybody thought the mandate was going down. Everybody did! The media was sure. In fact, the media was writing stories on what a worthless court this was. Roger Simon of Politico. It was really intense. All last week and early in this week, everybody thought it was history. That's why there was utter shock.

By the way, this wasn't the only decision. Are you ready for this? The Supreme Court struck down the Stolen Valor Act today. Do you know what the Stolen Valor Act is? Essentially the Supreme Court just said it's perfectly fine to lie about medals and awards that you receive in combat. "The Supreme Court struck down the Stolen Valor Act on Thursday, saying that the First Amendment defends a person's right to lie -- even if that person is lying about awards and medals won through military service. ...

"In its 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court justices said [today] that as written, the act is too broad and ignores whether the liar is trying to materially gain anything through his or her false statement, which would be more akin to fraud." So, if your neighbor starts running around saying he got the Medal of Freedom, Medal of Honor, the Purple Heart, whatever, it's perfectly fine. He can go make a fake medal and he can hang it around his neck. It's perfectly fine. No problem. Now, if he tries to make money off it...

Well, no. He can still do it. Justices said that only if these liars were trying to profit materially would they have struck down the law. But the First Amendment gives them the total right, the freedom to lie about it.

(interruption) I know. You CAN make it up! You can literally go out and you can make it up. Purple Heart, Medal of Freedom, Medal of Honor, whatever. (interruption) See, if you go out... (interruption) I don't know. There might be "hope for Sandusky." It depends. I don't know if they'll legalize pedophilia or not.

We'll have to wait and see if it's in the health care bill.

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RUSH: When I said "court watchers" earlier, I should have cited it's a blog. The Volokh Conspiracy. There's a blogger who is talking about the pressures that were put on John Roberts to change his vote. They're analyzing this, and through much of the dissent, they've got Scalia referring to "the dissent," and there were notes that Ginsburg was writing the dissent. I remember reading earlier in the week that Justice Ginsburg was writing the dissent. The clear impression from court watchers was that the mandate was struck down.

And now there's a theory that somebody got to John Roberts. I really hate even passing this on. When I say, "Somebody got to John Roberts," one of the guesses is Obama's public assertions that the court was going to marginalize itself and become irrelevant is something people were speculating might have influenced Roberts. Not that somebody threatened him. I don't want anybody putting words in my mouth. It's just going around a blog and it will probably be amplified on as the day goes on.

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RUSH: It doesn't matter as to the outcome whether or not Chief Justice Roberts was intimidated and threatened, but it does matter. Finding out conclusively won't change anything, but it will be quite eye-opening for people if it is established that the public intimidation of the chief justice by Obama and senators and so forth resulted in a changed vote. That will de-validate the court in terms of people's respect more than any decision could, whatever it would be.

Time will tell.

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RUSH: I mentioned earlier the Volokh Conspiracy.  It's a blog that circulates in legal circles, and apparently, ladies and gentlemen, a lot of people are doing what you and I are doing.  "What in the name of Sam Hill happened here?"  It was thought, and nobody knew for sure, but there were tea leaves, and I'm an expert now in the tea business.  I know tea leaves, and there were tea leaves out there that the mandate was going down. The White House thought it was going down.  The media thought it was going down.  And, in fact, the first announcement today was the mandate was ruled unconstitutional.  That was the first thing that got reported.

And then it was a few short seconds later that the first "uh-oh" came.  Wait a minute, the mandate's unconstitutional, but the whole thing stands because Chief Justice Roberts is calling it a tax?  So after the shock wore off, people started trying to figure out what in the heck happened.  And all the news networks, even CNN got it right, reported that the mandate was struck down.  Fox reported it was struck down. AP reported it struck down. Washington Post reported the mandate was struck down.  It was a cruel trick to play on the American people.  Mandate struck down, and mere seconds later, "uh-oh."

Now, the Volokh Conspiracy.  It's a post by gentleman named David Bernstein.  Scalia’s dissent, at least on first quick perusal, reads like it was originally written as a majority opinion (in particular, he consistently refers to Justice Ginsburg’s opinion as 'The Dissent')."  Earlier this week there were stories that Ruth "Buzzi" Ginsburg was writing the dissent.  That did leak.  And these guys are referencing it here at the Volokh Conspiracy blog, and they say that in his dissent, Scalia consistently refers to Justice Ginsburg's opinion as the dissent.

"Back in May, there were rumors floating around relevant legal circles that a key vote was taking place, and that Roberts was feeling tremendous pressure from unidentified circles to vote to uphold the mandate. Did Roberts originally vote to invalidate the mandate on Commerce Clause grounds, and to invalidate the Medicaid expansion, and then decide later to accept the tax argument and essentially rewrite the Medicaid expansion to preserve it? If so, was he responding to the heat from President Obama and others, preemptively threatening to delegitimize the Court if it invalidated the ACA? The dissent, along with the surprising way that Roberts chose to uphold both the mandate and the Medicaid expansion, will inevitably feed the rumor mill," which it is doing.

Now, I want to be very careful, 'cause none of this matters in terms of the outcome today.  If people found out, if they could prove that Roberts changed his vote because of intimidation, it won't change anything about this outcome.  And I don't think anybody is ever gonna be able to firmly establish that this happened.  So I don't want to be misunderstood here.  But this decision is so shocking to people.  Folks, there's nothing constitutional about this law.  It is utterly shocking.  What happened today is disgraceful, and that's why the rumor mill is ginning up, because people are trying to find a logical explanation because the Constitution effectively didn't exist today when this decision was announced.

And the people trying to figure this out are obviously going to look into the rumor mill and try to find some way of explaining it.  It's not gonna change anything.  So you might say it's pointless to focus on it, other than it being gossipy and interesting in that regard.  However, if it were ever confirmed as true that a chief justice, any justice, was motivated by virtue of threat and intimidation to change a vote, if the threat of intimidation and whatever else can result in vote changing or a vote, period, then of course you'd have to conclude that essentially you got organized crime running the show, not the Constitution.  Organized crime definitionally, not literally.

There's another blog out there that is rolling with the same theory.  It's called Legal Theory Blog, and they've come up with the same thought.  And they've got an article: "Evidence that the Votes Shifted After Conference (Initial Vote to Declare Mandate Unconstitutional)." They're looking at this.  And, by the way, all of this is permissible.  They can vote, change their votes whenever they want, up until the time of announcement, or whatever limit they place on themselves.  The justices in the court are not bound by their first votes, by their original votes.  It has a larger meaning, obviously, and it takes me back to Artur Davis.  I'll read you the second paragraph of Artur Davis' e-mail today.

"But there is a larger story: this result shows the left’s continuing capacity to shape elite opinion by marginalizing positions that roughly half the country holds."  What he means, conservatism has been marginalized to be kookville.  "Just as the left has caricatured opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion as retrograde and extreme, it just pulled off the same feat in the context of Obamacare: the case was made, and Roberts bought it, that a Court that has struck down 169 congressional statutes would somehow be dangerously activist if it added a 170th one to the mix. Its an undemocratic, disingenuous sleight of hand that the left is practicing, but it is winning: the cost is that it only widens the gap between Middle America and the elite."

So his point here, is that whatever intimidation was used on Roberts, it was, "Hey, Judge, do you really want to be thought of as a nutcase kook right-wing extremist?"  And that's what Artur Davis said, whatever the pressure was, and if there was such pressure, that's how it manifested itself.  Anyway, folks, I feel nervous even mentioning all this stuff to you because it gets into the area of pure speculation and gossip, and I want you to understand that that's what it is.  And there's a reason for it.  This is inexplicable to people, and they're trying to understand it.  What in the hell happened here?  What happened to the Constitution?  That's why all of this is being visited the way it is.  But no matter what the speculators come up with, it's not gonna change the outcome today.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay. Look, let's cut to the chase here, folks. The reason that I'm nervous with all this speculation that Chief Justice Roberts "caved" and who "got to him" and who intimated him is simple. The reason I'm having trouble with this is that I don't think that's what happened. I believe I mentioned earlier this week (it might have been yesterday or the day before) that I had been warned years ago. I was in a conversation about justices on the court and how they respond to public pressure in the Washington Post Style Section.

You know, the usual obligatory way you go and discuss the way that the media tries to influence outcome of votes on the Supreme Court. And all those conversations centered around Justice Kennedy as the swing vote. And I was warned, "It's not Kennedy you have to look out for. It's Justice Roberts." I can't tell you who told me. No, no! I know who it is. It's not that I've forgotten. It's that I can't mention it. I think really what happened here is not a cave. I don't think there was a cave, folks.

I think Chief Justice Roberts is establishing his legacy. I think it's what he wanted to do. I think this is his imprimatur. This is The Roberts Court, like we had The Warren Court and we had The Rehnquist Court.

This is The Roberts Court. This is his stamp on it. I know it's fun to think about the intimidation that might have occurred and who succeeded with it and so forth. There's also... I don't want to mention any names on this, either, because I don't mean to embarrass anybody. But the other thing going on that you might have seen or heard yourself is this:

"Hey, wait a minute, Rush! Rush, wait a minute! Didn't this tax increase originate in the Senate? Aren't the taxes in the Obamacare from the Senate and therefore they're unconstitutional?" Well, where are we gonna go on that? We gotta go back to where? The very same court that just said it's okay! So what do we do? Okay, even if that's a valid point. I understand this kind of stuff is gonna happen on a day like this. People are grasping at straws. They're trying to look at something, anything they can grab onto to explain this and to give us some hope that we can reverse this.

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RUSH: I have my wits about me, folks.  I always do.  I am not sidetracked. I am not diverted. I am not distracted, nor am I intimidated.  I'm gonna tell you exactly what happened here, and it's not what the rumor, speculation is.  I understand that.  This decision's inexplicable to people.  They're desperately trying to come up with an explanation that would fit in their minds.  "My gosh, what happened here?"

Here's what happened.  The Supreme Court, a majority of the Supreme Court, found Obamacare unconstitutional.  They found the mandate unconstitutional.  The chief justice, John Roberts, kicked into activist mode and found a way around that.  I don't care if he found a way around it because he was intimidated by Obama, or Patrick Leahy, or somebody in the media.  I don't care.  Because I don't think he was.  I think he did what he wanted to do.  He has sided with the liberal justices more often than not in previous decisions.  I just throw that out as a statistic, not as evidence.  I think he's building a legacy.  This is what he wanted to happen.  He found a way for it to happen.  And so now, folks, it's game on.  And I know some of you may get sick and tired of always being in this position. Why is it always game on?  Why is it always us that have to do -- well, it's the way of the world. It's simply the reality we face today.

We are up against people who believe in tyranny.  We are up against people who do not want there to be individual freedom and liberty in this country.  That's what we face.  We don't face people who like a level playing field with the will of the people being the determining factor.  It's not the people we're up against.  We're up against people who do not like the US Constitution. We're up against people who do not like this country as founded.  We're up against people who want to change it.  They have not liked it for a long time or they've never liked it.  We don't have time to try to analyze why.  We don't have time to try to figure out how they ended up being this way.

We now are governed by a monstrous assault on our personal liberty and freedom.  We are governed by it.  We are living under its thumb.  Jackboot.  And it is now time to wrap this monstrosity around Obama's head.  He will not tell anybody what this bill means.  It's up to us.  And we can't even count on Romney to do this.  All we can do is hope that he gets it right.  We have to tell people what this bill is, and we have to be able to show them and tell them that's what this bill is and explain it.  This bill is death panels.  This bill is massive taxes on our behavior.  We have to be able to explain that what happened today does not mean free health care for the poor.  If anything, it means the poor will lose their health care, what with this Medicaid expansion.

We have death panels now.  We have massive taxes, tax increases.  We have taxes on our behavior.  We have a tax if we choose not to have health insurance.  You young people who don't want to buy health insurance because you don't need it yet.  Too bad.  If you don't, you pay a fine, and there are 16,000 IRS agents newly hired who are going to be enforcing this thing.  There are 2700 pages in this monstrosity.  There are going to be regulations that haven't even been dreamed up yet because, as the bill states countless times, "As the secretary shall determine."  The secretary of Health and Human Services can pretty much write the law as he or she goes.

There will be denial of care.  Not everybody's gonna get health care, whether they're insured or not.  It's gonna be determined that some people's health care is not worth the cost, either the disease is too far advanced or the disease is too far advanced and they're too old, or perhaps they're not of the right political party.  Don't you dare discount that.  We are up against people who want us -- Artur Davis is exactly right -- marginalized.  Half of this country they want marginalized as extreme wacko alien kooks.  These are people that would be happy to deny your grandmother health coverage if you didn't vote for Obama, and I am not exaggerating.  These are people who itch, bureaucrats and so forth, who itch for that kind of power over people.  This law provides it.

Rationing, it's all part of the mix.  We're $16 trillion in debt.  Not everybody's gonna get health care.  And I don't care what Obama says, not everybody's gonna get the best health care.  Not everybody's gonna get equal health care.  Not everybody's gonna get equal insurance.  Nothing Obama says about this has very much relationship to the truth.  You're not gonna hear about any of this stuff that I'm telling you.  But it is game on.  We're gonna have price controls, because premiums and things, prices of health care are going to skyrocket.  And these experts, these statists, the people who want total dominion and control over your life are gonna be shocked, because some of these people are true believers and they really believe all the propaganda.

They believe it's gonna be cheaper. They believe it's gonna get more plentiful, and when it doesn't they are going to be shocked and stunned and they're not going to understand it, just like when every other program of theirs fails, they're clueless.  All they want is credit for their good intentions.  But they're gonna have to deal with the failure. They're gonna have to deal with the problems this bill creates.  So there will be rationing.  There will be price controls.  There will be massive deficits.  And all of this needs to be wrapped around the head of Barack Obama and every Democrat running for reelection who supported this thing, which is every one of 'em.  That's where we are.  That's what this is, and now this precedent, set by this ruling today, where the government can tax behavior, not just your income, not just your user fee at a public park or a federal park, or not just your gasoline tax.  Now sky's the limit.  Whatever they want to tax, they can.  That was just affirmed via this decision today.

Now, I must say there are some people out there... It doesn't matter who. And this is quite natural, too. I understand this psychologically. There are people who are trying to point out positive aspects in the Roberts ruling. There are people who are saying, "We gotta be very careful, Rush! John Roberts is a George Bush appointee. We don't want to dump on John Roberts." Um, sorry. This is an appalling, disgraceful decision -- and it's going to be remembered as such.

This decision, this ruling originally was found to be unconstitutional. According to the Commerce Clause, it was unconstitutional. And what happened was the chief judge found a way, going activist, to make sure this bill survived. And it was the chief justice who accepted a very little used administration argument that, "Hey, it's tax," even though we played the tape where Obama said it wasn't a tax. He went to the mat telling George Stephanopoulos in 2009, "It's not a tax increase, George."

They knew that if this bill were sold as a tax increase, it'd fail.

Obama was out there saying, "Nobody who makes under $200,000 a year will see their taxes go up as long as I'm president." Everybody's taxes go up and sometimes monstrously high here. Obama went to the end of the world trying to convince people this is not a tax increase. And when the mandate was running into trouble, then they tried to say, "Well, maybe it is a tax." They sent their little Verrilli up to the court to argue, "It could be a tax." They weren't excited about it. They didn't want to sell it that way.

It turns out they didn't have to. The chief judge found it! He said (summarized), "You know what? I'm just gonna call it a tax. The government can do that. They can't make everybody buy health insurance with the mandate, but they can with the tax code." That's what happened today. It's an appalling, disgraceful decision.

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Link:

• What Happened to John Roberts?

Supreme Court delivers a knockout punch to the White House (Ministerial Exemption)

By Peter Johnson Jr.

(Fox News) Wednesday the United States Supreme Court delivered a knockout blow to the White House in the cause of religious liberty.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a unanimous court swatted away the government’s claim that the Lutheran Church did not have the right to fire a “minister of religion” who, after six years of Lutheran religious training had been commissioned as a minister, upon election by her congregation.

The fired minister -- who also taught secular subjects -- claimed discrimination in employment. The Obama administration, always looking for opportunities to undermine the bedrock of First Amendment religious liberty, eagerly agreed.

There was just one big problem standing in the way of the government's plan: the U.S. Constitution. For a long time American courts have recognized the existence of a "ministerial exemption" which keeps government’s hands off the employment relationship between a religious institution and its ministers or clergy.

Here, in this case, the Department of Justice had the nerve to not only challenge the exemption’s application but also its very existence.

But, Chief Justice Roberts pushed back hard, telling the government essentially to butt out:

“Requiring a church to accept or retain an unwanted minister, or punishing a church for failing to do so, intrudes upon more than a mere employment decision. Such action interferes with the internal governance of the church, depriving the church of control over the selection of those who will personify its beliefs. By imposing an unwanted minister, the state infringes the free exercise clause, which protects a religious group’s right to shape its own faith and mission through its appointments. According the state the power to determine which individuals will minister to the faithful also violates the establishment clause, which prohibits government involvement in such ecclesiastical decisions.”

Citing well-known legal precedent dating as far back as Reconstruction, the court made it clear that it is not up to the government to contradict a faith’s determination as to who should -- and should not -- be performing religious functions...

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