Friday on his nationally syndicated radio show, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh warned of a coming constitutional crisis should the certain federal judges continue to deny President Donald Trump the ability to institute his policies.
Limbaugh pointed to the precedent set by the federal judiciary’s effort to deny Trump’s travel ban and argued it could lead to other limits on the president’s powers down the road.
Partial transcript as follows (courtesy of RushLimbaugh.com):
We are on the verge of a genuine constitutional crisis because of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals opening the door for this Hawaii Obama-appointed judge to deny Trump’s travel ban the second time going, and I want to get into detail as to what this really means and what the left is really doing here.
It’s not a legal dispute. This is, as I said yesterday, is a silent coup that is taking place that I’m sure has been strategized since before Trump was inaugurated. But the profound, devastating possibilities that result from this in terms of a president losing all constitutional — do you realize with this judge’s ruling, I’ll tell you where this is going.
Let’s say that Donald Trump decides at any time in the near future that he needs to deploy troops, and so he does, and so a leftist activist goes to a court, shops and finds a judge, like the guy in Hawaii, and claims that Trump said during the campaign that he was gonna do X Y, or Z, whatever, and the deployment of troops is not really for the stated purpose, and the judge could shut it down!
This judge’s ruling has — if the guy’s not stopped, if the Supreme Court doesn’t overturn this, or if Trump doesn’t just ignore it like Andrew Jackson did, then we’re getting to the point where the president, because of the judiciary, will have totally lost constitutional authority to defend the country because of this little ruling in Hawaii that was made possible by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. And it’s all about this idiotic notion that a presidential candidate on the campaign trial making statements is the equivalent of an inaugurated president stating policy.
But even at that the judge doesn’t have the right to do what he did! He doesn’t have the congressional right, he doesn’t have the statutory right to do what he did, because basically this judge shut Trump down because, in this judge’s opinion, Trump is a bigot. And anti-Muslim means bigot, and we are not going to allow our president to represent us this way is essentially what this judge was saying.
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