The Paul Ryan Delusion
There are essentially two Republican parties right now: the Party of Donald J. Trump and the Party of House Speaker Paul Ryan—who has, nonetheless, endorsed Trump for President. One of the ways in which members of the Ryan faction delude themselves is by believing that Ryan’s policies would dominate if Trump were President and Ryan remained Speaker of the House.
.. Ryan noted that when he took over as Speaker, last fall, his top priority was to fashion a detailed Republican policy agenda. The idea was to ignore the circus of the Republican Presidential primaries, which was sure to push the candidates into making reckless statements, and instead to have waiting at the end of the process a sober general-election platform that the Republican nominee could embrace.
.. This instrumental view of the Presidency—that a Republican in the White House would serve more or less as an Autopen for Ryan’s ideas—rested, even apart from Trump, on two shaky assumptions.
The first was that Ryan could do a better job forging consensus than John Boehner, his predecessor
.. Ryan’s second assumption was that any new Republican President would respect a historical shift in the way that Republicans think about the balance of power between the executive and legislative branches.
.. But in the Obama years, when Republicans’ base of power became more firmly rooted in Congress and, in their view, Barack Obama expanded the powers of the Presidency, Republicans became loud advocates of the primacy of the legislative branch.
.. But it’s an especially absurd assumption when it comes to Trump, who has displayed authoritarian instincts and has argued that he will exceed Obama in using the powers of the executive branch.
.. Ryan called for “a security test and not a religious test,” and pointed to a report on national security with sixty-seven recommendations that he had released just last Thursday.