while he was part of the leadership team that negotiated the mostly successful sequester in 2011 (really the only instance of a successful negotiation with President Obama), he disdained fights on smaller spending priorities.
.. Ryan never had the party’s broader support for tackling entitlements. Not only was he saddled with a president, in Donald Trump, who had campaigned against entitlement reform, but — forgotten now — his 2012 running mate, Mitt Romney, had savaged Rick Perry in 2012 for having written favorably about such reforms. Ryan himself had also voted for Medicare Part D back in 2003.
.. So, while Ryan was right on the merits about the biggest fiscal problem, he was never able to mount an effective campaign either legislatively or in the public arena to solve the problem.
.. As a more junior congressman he went along with a lot of bad spending ideas during the Bush years, and as a leader he never picked fights that could be translated into a tangible result to report home .. as opposed to more nebulous arguments about bending the overall rate of spending
.. The failure to zero out federal support for Planned Parenthood when the GOP controlled the House, then the House and Senate, and then even the House, Senate, and White House, was the most indefensible example of this.
Cincinnatus Lays Down the PowerPoint
In a normal time, the announcement that the Republican speaker of the House is retiring to spend more time with his family — after just a few years on the job — at a moment when Republicans control the federal government and have more officeholders nationwide than at any time in almost a century and the economy is roaring would be almost unimaginable.
Most politicians are actually pretty boring
Many are conniving and needy
Very few of them are intellectually interesting
.. I’ve long argued, friendship can be far more corrupting than money
.. if you personally hate Paul Ryan, that’s an indicator to me that you’re an unreasonable person.
.. But if you buy the claptrap from the Krugmanite Left or the Bannonite Right about Ryan, if you think he’s evil or a fraud, I’m going to assume you’re part of the problem in our politics.
.. boils down to simply two things: The idea that character matters and the idea that ideas matter.
.. The fact that Paul Ryan was a man out of place in his own party says far more about the state of the GOP than it does about the man.
Consider this week alone:
- A president who cheated on his first wife with his second and “allegedly” cheated on his third with a porn star is tweeting that Jim Comey is a “slimeball.”
- The president’s personal PR team over at Hannity HQ is calling Robert Mueller the head of a crime family.
- The CBO just announced that we’re in store for trillion-dollar deficits for as far as the eye can see.
- The president is tweeting taunts about how his missiles are shinier toys than Putin’s.
- The president’s nominee for secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, a once passionate and thoughtful defender of Congress’s sole right to authorize war, is now invoking law-review articles as justification for a president’s right to wage war on a whim.
- The president’s lawyer’s office was raided by the FBI (not Bob Mueller’s team, by the way) after getting a warrant from a judge and following all of the onerous protocols of the Justice Department, and the former speaker of the House — and avowed historian — is insisting that the Cohen and Manafort raids are morally equivalent to the tactics of Stalin and Hitler. I’m pretty sure the Gestapo didn’t have “clean teams” to protect attorney-client privilege (particularly of dudes named “Cohen”), and last I checked the KGB wasn’t big on warrants.
- On Monday evening, the president convened a televised war council and spent the first ten minutes sputtering about how outraged he was by an inquiry into a pay-off of his porn-star paramour.
The Paul Ryan Difference
The Speaker’s career shows the power of ideas in politics.
His policy chops and listening skills helped rally the fractious GOP House into a governing majority rather than merely an opposition to Barack Obama. They developed the “Better Way” reform platform in 2016, and in this Congress they’ve passed most of it through the House and much into law.
.. The irony is that Mr. Ryan has become a target of the populist and Trump right though few in Congress have fought harder or longer for conservative reform.
.. The reason the New York Times and Washington Post loathe him is precisely because he takes ideas seriously and can persuade his colleagues. That makes him far more of a threat to the left than is any talk-radio host.
.. But entitlement reform is inevitable given the fiscal realities, and Mr. Ryan’s ideas are still a roadmap for the future.
.. They have railed against Mr. Ryan as a totem of “the establishment,” which was always more epithet than argument. Mr. Ryan knows that the point of politics is to win power to pass your agenda, not remain in feckless opposition to the supposedly unreformable entitlement state.
.. Mr. Ryan has already raised $54 million in campaign cash for his fellow Members this Congress, and their fate is tied far more to Donald Trump’s approval rating than to Mr. Ryan’s candidacy.
.. Win or lose in November, Republicans will have to find a leader who can lead their conference. Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and whip Steve Scalise are the main early contenders. Both are known more for their electoral skills than policy knowledge.
Saving Paul Ryan
You say you’ve been given assurances that the president doesn’t intend to fire law-enforcement officials who are investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. So you’re clearly worried about that possibility. Why not take steps to ensure your fellow citizens won’t have to suffer the constitutional crisis that a step like that would precipitate?
.. You can use your remaining authority and credibility with your colleagues to pass legislation to make it harder for the president to fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and other officials at the Department of Justice. On your way out the door, on that crucial question, you still have a chance to put yourself on the right side of history.
.. we know you’ve also talked about good government and transparency, about the critical role of Congress as a check on the executive. So step up. Exercise Congress’s constitutional responsibility to authorize the use of force in places like Syria. Have House committees hold hearings on the conflicts of interests that pervade the Trump administration. Demand that the president release his tax returns. Get outraged when Mr. Trump tosses aside ethical practices like releasing the logs of the visitors to the White House
.. You’re only 48 years old, and you have a long career ahead of you, but how you handle Donald Trump will surely decide how history sees you.