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Paul Ryan’s Detractors Have Zero Leverage
Years ago, I was offered a lousy middle-management job at a horrible company. I repeatedly told the recruiter that I wasn’t interested, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“I can increase the salary!” No, not interested.
“What if you can set your own hours?” No thanks.
“Look, I’ll start you off with a month’s vacation and…” NO.
After several annoying calls over a couple of days, I finally said, “Look, I’ll take the job on one condition: Starting salary of a million dollars.”
Several seconds of silence followed before the recruiter said, “um … but, really, what salary are you thinking of?” I repeated my demand, trying to suppress a Dr. Evil voice. That recruiter never called me again, having finally understood my real demand: I don’t want the job.
Rep. Paul Ryan has been repeatedly asked, encouraged, cajoled, and begged to take over the Speaker’s gavel when Boehner drops it. Ryan’s answers have been no, no, no, and hell no. But after another week of Republicans insisting that Ryan is the only human being in existence who can unite conservatives and RINOs, Tea Partiers and country clubbers, young reformers and Hill lifers, Ryan had enough.
He finally relented and said, sure, I’ll take the job … on three conditions:
- The House Freedom Caucus, the Republican Study Committee, and the moderate Tuesday Group all need to support me.
- Change the House rules so disgruntled congressmen can’t toss me out so easily.
- This better not cut into my family time.
Some members were outraged, as were many on talk radio, and (natch) the Internet. How dare he make demands on the people’s representatives! Never before has a Speaker ordered he not be ousted! He wants time with his family … he should be working 24/7!
How many times does Ryan have to tell you that he doesn’t want the damn job? His detractors should be thankful he didn’t demand a million dollars like one smart aleck I know.
Since modern politics runs on outrage, the fact that Ryan doesn’t want to be Speaker has made the anti-Ryan caucus even angrier. Apparently it hasn’t yet dawned on them that they have zero leverage over the Wisconsin representative. If the grumblers lose, it’s Speaker of the House Paul Ryan; if they win, it’s a much happier Ways and Means Chair Paul Ryan.
So, in their impotence, talk radio complains that Ryan loves his family more than he loves government, and websites scream that Ryan has insufficient interest in amassing political power. Both of those complaints only highlight his conservativism.
Here’s the deal, haters: You don’t want Paul Ryan to be Speaker. Paul Ryan doesn’t want to be Speaker. Since you both agree, why are you yelling at him?
Published in Politics
It was tongue-in-cheek and I believe that was perfectly fair and reasonably obvious. Perhaps an emoticon would be in order.
I also think it’s remotely possible that some of them did foresee exactly that. Unlikely, but plausible. Everything that has happened thus far was reasonably predictable (save perhaps Ryan agreeing to take the job).
Which is why it was foolish to be unprepared. I do believe that if someone sets out to “force a change” you need to have a strategy for how to accomplish the change you want, lest the change end worse than where you begin. And an alternative strategy or three for when things change in unexpected ways. We simply disagree.
If you think it ended well for them let’s agree on that point, disagree on the other, and leave it at that.
No sweat. Just noticed that people seem awfully touchy.
Do we have to fight? If not for the House GOP (Freedom Caucus, Tea Party and all) I might not even be in the U.S. today. I think I’ve said this before, but I planned to leave in 2010, only Europe went into a recession. At that time I had a lot more European professional connections than American ones.
But then the GOP won the House. The Tea Party was unruly and chaotic, but it was also free of the petty prejudices of the rest of our elite. We can thank the House GOP for shrinking the deficit; blocking immigration reform, cap and trade, and the Orwellian-named ’employee free choice act’; and lots of other bad legislation. They did all of this in a totally dysfunctional manner, but at least they did it.
You can find a lot to criticize in the Tea Party, and a lot to criticize in the Establishment. But what I find amazing is that their flaws seemed to cancel each other out.
OK, so you do realize calling people “Rage Caucus” members is likely to enrage them further? ;-)
Good question!
Resistance movements do not have the luxury of an endgame at all times, other than continue to gain support by their actions.
Politics is a game of influence ground out over time and never one of clear win/lose. To obstruct, make some gains and still not get all your goals is how the Democrats play it. It works. Some folks here seem to require that all actions be flat out win or lose with all resistance silly to pursue without the magical ‘end game’.
The GOP leadership refuses to resist Obama because they ‘cannot win’, but by not playing are losing support and still being painted in the media as obstructionist. Lose /lose over time. It is almost as if keeping the status quo was the most important thing to them.
Here’s my thing: I’d just like the “opposition” party to refuse to lie down on the tracks. Can we start there? I don’t see it as asking too much.
I just wish you would hear Republican leaders state this better for all the crazies that want INS running around IDing everyone and detaining them if they can’t prove their ID. (Yes I know they don’t state this but that is because they refuse to understand the end game and destruction of constitutional liberty of American citizens to implement their policy of detain and deport 5% of the population. They are stating Communist policies and somehow think they are conservative limited government ideas.)
Please explain what other country, when a person is caught in the commission of a crime, or applying for aid and it is determined by their own actions that they are in that country illegally does not deport them. This idea of INS agents checking IDs at random has never been seriously proposed. It is a canard to paint opponents of enforcing existing laws as cruel and inhumane.
Yes, if ‘lying down on the tracks’ means real hurt as opposed to “CNN said something nasty about me”. Some people take real bullets for our freedom, Congress seems to have a much lower threshold of pain.
If they want to gain support then they have to prove that they can be trusted to follow through on the things they start. If you keep picking fights with no plan on how to win, then you come off looking incompetent, as the Freedom Caucus did here. If a boxer has an 0-15 record, people don’t praise him for being a fighter, they dismiss him as a loser.
And we call anyone who wants to deport illegals already here “crazies and communists”. Excellent job.
This is sortof a false distinction. What’s important is having an end vision, not and endgame per se. There was literally no foreseeable ‘endgame’ for my life when I was in my early 20s. So what I did was to concentrate on the sort of life I wanted and then make the choices that seemed most likely to lead to it.
Right now, there is no ‘endgame’ for America’s future. This is just a fact of life; we can’t predict how technology and society are going to evolve over the next few decades. But we can still try to formulate a vision of the sort of future we want, and work towards it.
It’s not a false distinction because you are talking about different things. You are right in a broad strategic sense. But the Freedom Caucus tripped up over a matter of short-term tactics, and it’s not the first time for this basic group of congressmen.
The FC members (more or less) often vote against the Republican version of a bill (the inevitable ones like the debt ceiling) protesting they don’t go far enough. In practice, this tends to give Democrats more influence.
These congressmen would be more effective for conservatism if they were more effective in persuading their colleagues, in developing and pushing effective tactics they could bring more of them to support, and then in backing the final arrangement as a team.
I’m pretty sure the Freedom Caucus’s MO is whatever passes, by definition, doesn’t go far enough. If it passed something must have been left on the table. It’s pretty intellectually lazy.
Well, in one sense I usually agree with them, when I have looked at it in any detail. As a matter of abstract policy, their preference is usually the right one, I believe.
But politics isn’t about abstract policy. In the matter of actual applied conservatism and operating as part of a less-conservative coalition, their tactics tend to result in worse policy.
That said, while I don’t pretend to understand the sausage-making process, I think part of the difficulty is that they feel they’ve been denied the opportunity to push to make the bill as conservative as the rest of the party will accept in the first place. So this latest throw was an effort to change that. Maybe, if they can win support to change some of those rules, and if they feel that under Ryan they are part of the team and at the table, they will act as part of the team even when they do not get all they want. Maybe.
Be interesting to see how the politics play out.