Photo credit: Starley Shelton
Photo Courtesy Starley Shelton, Flickr CC
You would think the wildest dream of a nakedly ambitious politician such as Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan would be to have his fellow Republicans begging him to take one of the nation’s most powerful political positions.
Speaker of the House of Representatives is a career achievement in politics that also places its occupant second in line after the vice president to become president if a vacancy occurs.
But it shows the success of right-wing Republican extremists in sabotaging U.S. government that Ryan says he doesn’t want the promotion and some colleagues say he’d be crazy to take what they now call the worst job in Washington.
Mathematically, there’s actually no reason why a Republican Speaker can’t succeed. But there are a whole lot of questions about whether Ryan is really the mythical Republican savior that his fawning supporters claim him to be. Ryan looks a lot more like part of the problem than part of the solution.
The vicious right-wing House budgets Ryan created to start dismantling Social Security, Medicare and other basic government services actually helped feed the mean-spirited fantasies of the Republican far right.
Speaker John Boehner didn’t really resign because a radical minority of far-right, anti-government extremists was blocking him from accomplishing anything. Boehner had plenty of votes from both Republicans and Democrats to pass important legislation to keep government running and prevent an economically devastating default on U.S. debt.
Boehner could even have passed the historic, bipartisan Senate immigration reform that would have benefitted the entire nation and also improved Republican chances among Latinos in future elections. What Boehner lacked was the political courage to smack down an obnoxious minority within his own party that keeps threatening to destroy the nation’s economy and wreck government unless it gets its way. He wouldn’t even schedule bills for a vote if the tea party objected.
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Do the math. There are fewer than 40 extreme right-wing members of a so-called Freedom Caucus who make incendiary threats about burning down the House unless leadership meets their increasingly irrational demands.
With 247 seats, Republicans have a majority in the House, compared to 188 for Democrats. That’s the largest Republican majority since the 1920s. Subtract 40 votes and Republicans still prevail.
On common-sense legislation where Republicans and Democrats can reach compromises—that old-fashioned idea of democracy representing everyone’s interests—the majority votes would be overwhelming.
House Needs a True Leader
The correct word for the kind of leadership the House needs to deal with its ugly minority is “leadership.”
The next question: Is Paul Ryan really the right person to provide that kind of leadership? It’s difficult to see how.
Supporters claim Ryan can appeal to both establishment Republicans and the tea party extremists. Where have we heard that one before? Oh, yeah. That was another fresh-faced Wisconsin politician with big, brown puppy dog eyes who was running for president. Whatever happened to him?
Anyone familiar with Ryan’s own extreme views knows he isn’t really the bright, young, conservative Republican fiscal expert the media would have you believe. He just plays one on TV.
Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and The New York Times columnist, sees right through Ryan. Krugman calls Ryan a flimflam man, “a hard-core conservative with a voting record as far right as Michele Bachmann’s who has shown no competence at all on the numbers thing.”
Ryan’s extreme right-wing budgets were designed to appeal to right-wing extremists for their votes. Today the Republican Party is being blackmailed and slowly destroyed by those same extremists.
That’s why the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination is an openly racist billionaire who wants to cut taxes for billionaires while wasting billions more by deporting 11 million immigrants and constructing a border wall.
That’s why hate groups who condemn Muslims are trying to write their own religious beliefs into Republican laws denying women access not only to abortion, but also to contraception and even cancer screenings.
Bigotry based on race, religion and bombastic ignorance are turning the Republican Party into a dysfunctional loony bin that will continue to drive away intelligent voters who want their government to work. That won’t change until Republicans develop the political courage to reject the racist, ignorant haters who are destroying their party from within. Ryan has done far more to appease those radical extremists than to stop them.
That won’t prevent those who are way out there where the buses don’t run from opposing Ryan as speaker.
Erick Erickson, a far-right blogger and Fox News contributor, feverishly warns Ryan’s right-wing credentials could expose just how crazy some House Republicans really are.
“Everyone calls Paul Ryan a conservative and you are a loon if you think otherwise,” Erickson wrote. “In other words, House conservatives who might take issue with Ryan in the future will immediately be labeled as fascist totalitarians. . .willing to set everything on fire.”
Especially when that’s who they really are.
