Talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh excoriated Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on Thursday after Roberts joined the court’s left wing in ruling the Trump administration failed to use proper procedures to eliminate the DACA program.
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program established by executive order by President Obama allowed children who came to the country with illegal-alien parents to defer deportation.
The decision was stunning for several reasons, Limbaugh said.
“I think Roberts, and because of some things that I have been told over the years, Roberts is a guy that thinks the Washington establishment, as the ruling force of American life and politics, is inviolate. And he is not going to participate in any effort to undermine it or allow it to be disempowered,” he said.
“And so since that’s Trump’s agenda, Trump’s objective, Roberts just isn’t gonna let it happen. It’s not a mystery, and I’m probably again get shellacked for saying this, because the media and the Democrats want you to believe that Roberts is ruling with a steady devotion to the law. He’s not doing that in this case. There was nothing constitutional about DACA in the first place.”
Limbaugh said the ruling means “one president can create policy with an executive order, but another president can’t eliminate it.”
“Now, that’s just absurd. Obama couldn’t get legislation passed. He couldn’t get Congress to pass anything he wanted on DACA, on these DREAMer kids, so he did it all with executive order,” Limbaugh said.
“So, because he did, the Trump administration chose the executive order to eliminate the Obama policy via executive order. But the chief justice, John Roberts, said, ‘No, no, no, no, no! You can’t do it this way. You gotta come back and do it another way. No, no, no!’ So now an executive order from one administration lives to another administration if you have a chief justice from the deep state who is intent on sabotaging a president like (in this case) Donald Trump, and that’s what’s happening.”
Limbaugh pointed out Roberts also was the vote that saved the Obamacare mandate from total disintegration.
“It was not constitutional as it was written. It contained a federal government mandate that people buy a product. The federal government cannot do that. It’s clear as a bell in the Constitution, Fourth Amendment. The chief justice rewrote the bill and allowed that government mandate to be called a tax, which the government can do. The government can tax anybody for anything, any time, anywhere,” he said. “He was not gonna do down in history, he was not gonna go down on the pages of the Washington Post as the Supreme Court chief justice who denied the first African-American president his signature legislation. He wanted to be the chief justice of the Supreme Court who was presiding when it happened. It is abundantly clear to me that the chief justice may as well be deep state.”
Limbaugh argued that all Trump was doing, by executive order, was reversing the program Obama created by another executive order.
“So Obama’s executive order was landmark. Trump’s erasing it and canceling it, arbitrary and capricious. It’s thoughtless and it’s inhumane and has no compassion.”
Limbaugh noted the court ruling was based on procedure — on how the Trump administration attempted to remove Obama’s program — not on the program itself.
“This is the beauty. The chief judge has to say, ‘By the way, this decision is not on the merits.’ You know what that means? This decision is not on the law. We’re not saying that the president can’t do what he wants to do here. We’re just saying we’re not gonna let it happen. It’s supposed to mollify Trump a bit. It’s supposed to, ‘Well, it’s not that you’re wrong, sir. It’s just that we don’t like that you’re doing it. And we don’t like how you’re doing it, and so you can’t do it.'”
He said the court has “decided to rule on this without considering the law.”
President Trump immediately announced he would generate a new list of conservative court nominees from which to draw should he be re-elected. He described the Roberts’ opinion as “shotgun blasts into the face” of conservatives.
Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., said: “By ruling that President Obama can usurp the legislative branch’s authority to unilaterally create law but President Trump can’t undo his unconstitutional actions, the court is setting a dangerous precedent and a double standard that should concern every American. President Obama said himself that his decision to disregard the law and circumvent the legislative process went far beyond his constitutional power, and it’s disturbing that the Supreme Court chose to uphold his unlawful move. ”
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said: “Chief Justice Roberts does it again, convoluting the law to appease the D.C. establishment. By ruling that President Trump cannot terminate DACA in the same manner that President Obama used to start it, the court’s decision creates two standards of executive power: one for President Obama and another for President Trump. Today’s decision binds the Trump Administration to the politically expedient policy decisions of President Obama, and hampers efforts to meaningfully restore sanity to our immigration system.”
