Rush on the terrible spending bill: "Why is anybody voting Republican, if this is what happens when we win?"

It’s a fair question.

I know the headline makes it sound like he’s criticizing Trump, but after a year and a half of Rush applauding him at every turn, you should know better than that by now. He sort of criticizes him. It’s the special interests who are responsible for this garbage spending bill, he insists, aided and abetted by the corrupt Republican establishment. All true enough, but how about the superhero whom America elected to impose his will on Washington and to drain the swamp? Does he bear any blame? Would Obama bear any blame on conservative talk radio if Democrats controlled Congress during his presidency and produced a bill like this?

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Limbaugh concedes that Trump should be more proactive, writing his own legislation and sending it to the Hill. But what if, and bear with me here, what if Trump … just doesn’t care much about the details of legislation? That might explain why we ended up with a bizarrely anti-populist health-care bill and a series of surreal reversals on core campaign points like NATO’s obsolescence and China’s currency manipulation. What if his main concern is popularity, in the form of averting any shutdowns for which he might be blamed, instead of major policy gains?

But the dirty little secret is that there isn’t any evidence that anywhere in Washington is there any aspect of the Trump agenda on display. It doesn’t seem to be that in the House of Representatives that there is a desire to implement any of the Trump agenda. It doesn’t seem in the Senate that there is a desire to implement any of the Trump agenda. It does seem in the House that there is a lot of energy devoted to stopping a Trump agenda. Ditto in the Senate…

This budget is a direct slap in the face. This budget is a stop sign. And it’s throwing down the gauntlet. “You may be elected president, but you’re not getting anything. Nothing’s gonna happen here.” And if Donald Trump cannot rely on the members of his own party — are you really telling me we can’t get a replace and repeal Obamacare bill after all this time? And I don’t mean since Trump won the election; I’m talking about since it was passed seven years ago, six, whatever it is now…

I’m telling you, folks, the will isn’t there. The establishment, whatever you want to call this bunch of people, the ruling class, the establishment, the donors, whatever you want to call ’em, they’re not just gonna roll over and let Trump implement those things that he campaigned on just because he won the office, just because he won the presidency. And he’s going to have to overcome this if he’s going to be successful. And the way he’s going to have overcome it, he’s going to have to have his own staff, legislative staff in the White House that writes this legislation and muscles its way through…

I have to think he knows better than I do, better than anybody else does, ’cause he’s living it. I don’t know what his expectations were. I can believe that he expected the Republicans were gonna be deliriously happy at his victory and deliriously happy to work with him, and I fully think that he expected the Republicans to be on his team and that they would be working together to get a whole lot of this stuff done to fix and repair America and stop this descending trend that our country is in.

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It’s almost as if he’s been stabbed in the back. If only there was some way the executive could block a terrible bill from becoming law. Any ideas?

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