Evidently realizing that he might drown in the blue wave that is inundating Wisconsin, Paul Ryan announced his retirement today.
He has suggested that he might quit before, but now the Speaker faces the real prospect of involuntary ejection from Congress. He is showing the white feather, running from a midterm fight that his party appears increasingly likely to lose.
Ryan always got much better media coverage than he deserved — as a reputed policy wonk, although his numbers never added up, and as a supposed compassionate conservative, although he thrilled at cutting Medicaid. He reportedly has proclaimed himself satisfied with the legacy of last year’s Trump tax cut, whose massive tilt toward the wealthiest in society reflects his career perfectly.
The timing of the announcement was perfect in a different way. Ryan has always styled himself a fiscal conservative, but yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office revealed the deep fraudulence of that image with a report showing that the federal deficit will break one trillion dollars within the next two years, and that the Trump-Ryan tax bill will add almost $2 trillion to the cumulative deficit over the coming decade. Math was never his best subject.
Enamored with ultra-libertarian kookoo Ayn Rand at an early age, Ryan never outgrew her “virtue of selfishness” philosophy, which inspired his enduring hostility to Medicare and Social Security as well as Medicaid. He adopted that attitude during his college years, even while he received survivor benefits from his late father’s Social Security account — as stark an example of Republican hypocrisy as any in national politics.
Despite his determination to slash “entitlements,” Ryan was never able to achieve that objective. He succeeded only in making his party synonymous with efforts by the rich to destroy the government’s most popular and effective programs — which has proved ruinous politically and will remain an albatross for Republicans long after he is gone.
Much credit for driving Ryan from the national scene may very well belong to his Democratic opponent Randy Bryce, who is raising millions and demonstrating great determination as a candidate. And much credit for recruiting Bryce — an outspoken ironworker known as #IronStache — is owed to the Wisconsin Working Families Party.
But #IronStache isn’t the Republicans’ only headache in Wisconsin’s First Congressional District. At the moment, the leading candidate for their nomination to succeed Ryan is a neo-Nazi.
Randy Bryce
✔@IronStache
Paul Ryan passed a 1.5 trillion dollar tax bill that takes from working people to give to the super rich.
Days later, he got $500,000 in Koch contributions.https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/koch-paysout-to-ryan-after-taxlaw_us_5a63ce41e4b0dc592a09697c …
Paul Ryan Collected $500,000 In Koch Contributions Days After House Passed Tax Law
That’s peanuts compared with what the Koch brothers will save.
huffingtonpost.com
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Ryan would be hard-pressed to claim that these donations had nothing at all to do with the passage of the bill, considering the Koch brothers spent millions on the effort to sell the scam to the American people.
Bryce has been taking Ryan to task from the beginning for the GOP’s inability to actually get anything substantive done that benefits everyday Americans and for refusing to defend the nation from Donald Trump’s dangerous rhetoric around North Korea and potential use of nuclear weapons.
It’s no wonder Ryan, who has held his House seat since 1999, is embarrassingly close to the relatively unknown Bryce in early polling, and why he may even be considering retiring after this year.
Accepting massive donations from the super-rich just days after inflicting the tax scam bill on working Americans is unlikely to widen that gap in Ryan’s favor.