The Meaning of Ryan’s Departure

Paul Ryan’s fate over the past several years is as good an indication as any of how far our politics have fallen.

.. Though the anti-Ryan vitriol faded after Steve Bannon’s defenestration, he continued to be viewed with suspicion by the talk-radio crowd and other arms of Trump Inc.

This was his reward for attempting to drag his party, and the country, toward a grown-up reckoning with our debt. Nearly singlehandedly, Paul Ryan had managed to put tackling entitlements on the national agenda.

.. making incremental reforms now—with no changes for current beneficiaries or those in their 50s—can prevent drastic shortfalls and extreme benefit cuts that will be necessary in just 16 years when Social Security is depleted. The outlook is even worse for Medicare and Medicaid.

But Donald Trump arrived on scene with the supposedly blinding insight that changes to entitlements are unpopular. Well, no kidding. He promised never to touch Medicare and Social Security—not even to ensure their future solvency. And so, the responsible, future-oriented Paul Ryan found himself governing with a backward-looking, whistling past the graveyard president.

.. Ryan and the party he helped to lead also lost its compass on Ryan’s own signature issue—fiscal responsibility.

.. it would have been nice if the party that fulminated about the dangers of deficits in the Obama years had found anything at all to cut—particularly when the economy is growing and unemployment is low.

.. Under Republican guidance, the federal deficit will be roughly double what it was in the final year of the Obama administration.

.. What has Trump taught? That trade wars are the way to improve the lives of the working class? They are popular, at least with Republicans.

.. 65 percent of Republicans favored Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs.

.. We are not behaving as responsible adults. Our greatest political challenge is out of control debt. Our greatest social challenges are declining families, increasing dependency, and eroding social cohesion. The debt could have been addressed by government.

This one trick explains the pattern of conservative praise for Trump’s first year

Ramesh Ponnuru is one of the best conservative writers out there, and is no one’s toady. Last month he praised Trump’s productive first year on policy:

Conservatives of various types have thus seen progress on their agenda in 2017. Economic conservatives got tax cuts and some deregulation. Legal conservatives got judicial appointments and an executive branch more mindful of the limits of its policymaking authority. Social conservatives also benefited from the judicial appointments and welcomed Trump’s policy of blocking international family-planning funding from going to organizations that promote or perform abortions.

.. Interesting to see a lot of conservative culture warriors defend Trump’s first year on policy grounds (taxes, judges, dereg, etc) and conservative wonks criticize it on cultural/institutional grounds

.. But praise for tax cuts and deregulation does not really come from conservative policy wonks.

.. As Peter Suderman wrote at Reason when the bill was passed:

The Republican bill, and the GOP’s evidence-free assertions about its likely budgetary effects, have all but ensured a future in which politicians do not feel obligated to even engage in the pretense of fiscal responsibility. Republicans complained endlessly about the opaque process by which Obamacare was passed. But now they have escalated the gimmick wars, and there may be no going back.

 

.. While the president has succeeded in undoing some major environmental and financial industry rules, a Bloomberg News review of the administration’s list found almost a third of them actually were begun under earlier presidents. Others strain the definition of lessening the burden of regulation or were relatively inconsequential, the kind of actions government implements routinely.

“They are really undercutting their own credibility by putting out numbers that are not, quite frankly, very believable,” said Cary Coglianese, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who is also director of the Penn Program on Regulation.

 

.. The vast majority of that $8.1 billion in [regulatory] savings came from the repeal of a single federal contracting rule. The dramatic sounding “22-to-1” [deregulation-to-regulation] statistic is an apples-and-oranges comparison, weighing all deregulatory actions against just a small subset of new rules. And much of the deregulation was done not by Trump himself, but with the help of Congress, which used an obscure law early in his term to repeal 14 late-term Obama regulations. …

So far, agencies haven’t found a ton of expensive rules to roll back.

.. The only aspect of foreign policy this president has excelled at has been the globalization of America’s cultural fissures. Which is another thing that likely pleases social conservatives but puts off actual foreign policy wonks.

.. What Trump has been great at is venting his spleen. When he does so on issues near and dear to social conservatives, they are understandably happy. And to some extent they should be: Trump has governed as the most conservative president in modern history. Beyond that base, however, no one is terribly impressed with the president’s first year in office.

.. Evangelical leader Tony Perkins: President Trump gets a “mulligan” on an alleged affair because it was 10 years ago and “evangelicals understand what a second chance means”

.. The level of cynicism here is startling. Some Christian leaders are surrendering the idea that character matters in public life in direct exchange for political benefits to Christians themselves. It is a political maneuver indistinguishable from those performed by business or union lobbyists every day. Only seedier. You scratch my back, I’ll wink at dehumanization and Stormy Daniels. The gag reflex is entirely gone.

From a purely political perspective, the Trump evangelicals are out of their depth.

.. Evangelical leader Tony Perkins: President Trump gets a “mulligan” on an alleged affair because it was 10 years ago and “evangelicals understand what a second chance means”

When I was an Evangelical, forgiveness required both repentance (a pledge to not do it again) and remorse, neither of which POTUS seems to have remotely expressed here. Without those two things, forgiveness is not theologically possible.

 

.. “evangelicals understand what a second chance means”

Um… By his own admission, this is at least his 3rd chance… He cheated on his first two wives with his second and third wives… Evangelicals apparently understand what endless chances are, unless you are not one of “them”…

 .. When white evangelicals wanted to pick a candidate who upheld their “Christian values” they had a choice among
17 Republican candidates, all with the EXACT SAME stance on all the issues – border security, Islamic terrorism, Supreme Court, abortion, etc.

John Kasich
Jeb Bush
Chris Christie
Jim Gilmore
George Pataki
Bobby Jindal
Scott Walker
Rick Perry
Mike Huckabee

Ted Cruz
Marco Rubio
Rick Santorum
Rand Paul
Lindsey Graham

Ben Carson
Carly Fiorina

 

.. I saw Mr. Graham last night on CNN basically state that Trump’s moral failing is excusable because the stock market is roaring. That is how far adrift white evangelicals are: “We’ll overlook spiritual decay if we obtain material wealth.” All of Mr. Graham’s veils have been removed.