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The Meaning of Ryan’s Departure
I’ve always felt a kinship with Paul Ryan. Maybe it’s the fact that we are both Jack Kemp acolytes. Maybe I have a soft spot for upright family men who are attracted to public policy by the desire to do good. Maybe I love conservative wonks. But Paul Ryan’s fate over the past several years is as good an indication as any of how far our politics has fallen.
Ryan’s departure will be not be mourned by Democrats or Trump loyalists. The Democrats caricatured Ryan as the goon throwing granny in her wheelchair off a cliff. They actually ran TV ads with a Ryan lookalike. Barack Obama singled him out for scorn at a White House meeting, claiming later that he was unaware Ryan was in the front row.
You might suppose that that would be enough to make Ryan a conservative hero, but life is often unjust, and when Trump came along, Ryan found himself a sudden symbol of the reviled “Republican establishment.” 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 single-handedly, Paul Ryan had managed to put tackling entitlements on the national agenda. As chairman of the budget committee, he convinced his colleagues to endorse modest entitlement reform. As he kept trying to explain, 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.
Even leaving aside the moral compromises that an alliance with Donald Trump necessitated, Ryan and the party he helped to lead also lost its compass on Ryan’s own signature issue – fiscal responsibility.
Tax reform may have been overdue, but 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. Instead, the budget and the tax bill combined will leave us with a federal budget deficit in excess of $1 trillion in 2020 and beyond. CBO budget director Keith Hall said that “Federal debt is projected to be on a steadily rising trajectory throughout the decade.” Under Republican guidance, the federal deficit will be roughly double what is was in the final year of the Obama administration. That is the reality of Speaker Ryan’s tenure in the age of Trump.
It is often suggested that Trump has much to teach the Republican Party about the importance of the white, working class and about the centrality of nationalism to Republican success.
But just as with entitlement reform, it’s one thing to say a thing is popular and quite another to say that it’s right.
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. A Politico/Morning Consult poll found that 65 percent of Republicans favored Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs. But if Republicans believe, as the overwhelming majority do, that tariffs are stupid and dangerous, then it would seem obvious that they have something to teach the president rather than the other way around.
I can’t say for sure, but I suspect that Paul Ryan’s diagnosis of what ails America is pretty similar to my own. 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. The other trends continue to degrade our culture, our economy, and our personal lives. And the ascension of Trumpian politics – slashing, mendacious, corrupt, and polarizing – aggravates everything that was already going wrong.
Paul Ryan didn’t belong in Trump world. So much for worse for us.
Published in Politics
Between the Obamacare repeal debacle and the omnibus debacle, it might make everyone suspicious Republicans want to be drowned in a Blue wave this year… Trump won his election.
I get it. Trump is awesome, every other Republican is evil. We need to destroy the Republican Party to remake it in Trump’s image.
BRT.
Not what I said. And, no, you don’t get it. The only people who disapprove of Congress more than Trump voters are Clinton voters (according to Frank Luntz). Somehow it’s okay — honorable, even — to criticize Trump for his personal failings despite his stellar personnel choices and policy successes, but it’s not okay to criticize congressional Republicans for their policy failures because of their personal integrity.
I don’t believe you get it at all.
I’m a pox on everyone’s house. I hate them all. I just don’t think Ryan is the core of the problem.
I like to criticize everybody. What I dislike are the people who refuse to criticize Trump and blame every shortcoming on every other Republican.
You and I will never agree that everyone is worthy of criticism. So we will have to agree to disagree.
No, just no. As a Trump “supporter”, Trump is not awesome. He is the available tool to sign Republican legislation. All other Republicans are not evil, but many have been lying to their voters. If we need to destroy the Republican Party, it is to remake it in the “Republican” image.
Republicans used to care about lower taxes, smaller government, and less spending. Republicans promised for years to repeal ObamaCare and return to regular order budgeting. Out of all this they have done some deregulation and tax cuts. Then they pass a deficit exploding spending package.
What we need is a Republican Party that governs the way it campaigns. If an issue is in your stump speech you should vote for it once elected. If you have spent years talking about the need to restrain spending, don’t vote to increase spending.
Awesome would be Paul Ryan the budget hawk, fighting in the Press and in the Chamber for regular order budgeting and reduced spending, frankly reduced spending on anything. That is not what happened.
You and I can agree, everyone is worthy of criticism. Trump was erratic during the Obama Care discussion. He signed on to the budget deal. His hands are not clean in these matters.
Republicans in Congress have had years to plan their Obama Care repeal. Trump would have signed what ever they gave him. They gave him nothing. This failure is not a result of the “age of Trump” it is a failure of elected Republicans to do the hard work and find a deal that they could all support.
Paul Ryan is not the core of any problem. Paul Ryan apparently gave up. He could not get Trump to agree to major entitlement reform so he agreed to increase spending on everything else. Neither the content nor process of this budget deal were what Paul Ryan had promised for years. Republicans need to stop saying they support smaller government or responsible spending, if this is how they were going to vote.
Sure. But Trump campaigned on not touching entitlements and increasing spending on the military and infrastructure. And much of the blowout in what passed is hurricane relief that Trump also wanted.
So basically, you are saying Ryan should have fought Trump on his priorities. I don’t think you actually want that.
Neither congress or Trump knew what the hell they were doing. They should’ve taken a year off for analysis and communicating with the public.
I tend to agree but I will point out that the House Freedom Caucus is the one reliably small government faction in the entire legislative and executive branch.
Trump doesn’t want to cut spending. He wants to seem to be against it while actually supporting it so he can take credit for it with the people that like spending and have the people against spending think he is on their side. Scott Adams called this strategic ambiguity.
My other point is, we have big government spending because the electorate wants it.
Obamacare didn’t get repealed because the electorate wanted to keep the parts they liked. They couldn’t do that if it got repealed, so it didn’t get repealed.
Yes they do.
The way I would put it, in addition, is that the old system needed to be overhauled a lot more beyond just the new dependency that was created.
The ACA is basically stealth-ish redistribution and the commandeering of health resources as it destroys employer-based insurance with the Cadillac tax. It made everything worse on purpose with lies. Cloward and Piven.
If he had done that, he’d be called a NeverTrump and driven out of office by the angry mob.
Ryan was in a no-win situation. Everything good is to Trump’s credit, and everything bad is Ryan’s fault. I wouldn’t want to stay in a situation like that either.
I’ll just point out that Republican congress-critters ran for years on repealing Obamacare. They had years to get ready for the moment. When the moment came, they showed they were complete and utter failures and liars. Hell, McCain ran in 2016 on repealing Obamacare; when the vote came, he failed.
It’s outrageous. The Democrat party passed the ACA with a parliamentary trick and lies, so now we will get single payer.
Centralized power is killing this country. It’s unworkable. Fortunately my side has the guns.
So do you think they just didn’t prepare for when they had power or they were just using the issue for votes?
Embrace the power of “and.”
Why do many of your comments lately seem to end in declaring what other people will or will never do? Sometimes you are right, but many times, including this one, you’re wrong because you refuse to let go of your preferred Trump prism for viewing the world. Of course everyone is worthy of criticism including President Trump, but this post is about Paul Ryan and no matter the personal character and integrity perception most of us share of him he has failed where he could have succeeded. And I mean that in those areas directly under his purview: budgeting, bills that pass the house, bills that don’t pass the house, selling to the public. For the rest, I’m of the opinion that things like passing the house and failing in the senate needs to happen more, not less. Lay down some markers, some differentiators. Use those as the basis to sell an agenda.
It’s not that simple–because the voters elected a mostly non- or anti-Trump congress at the same time they were electing Trump. There are lots of mandates out there, and they clash.
I really admire Paul Ryan, but he really threw away an opportunity. Did he decide to take the safe way out due to ambitions for future office? Does he want to be governor, or something? Because he could have gone the suicide bomber route on the issue of budget reform–he could have threatened to resign if spending didn’t get under control–to force the GOP’s hand. But he didn’t. I don’t understand why. What good did he accomplish by continuing to work within the system? And in a job he hated. I don’t get it.
Then why is it so hard for some people on here to do so?
Part, not all, of the answer is one’s view on the nature of “the system” right now. It’s not what it was 30 years ago, and the tea party didn’t really accomplish that much because criminals rule D.C. I basically subscribe to everything that David Stockman, Angelo Codivilla, and David Horowitz say. Trump still definitely makes me very nervous on some things.
No, Ryan has been failing in the ways being discussed on this thread since before President Trump took office. As did Hastert and Boehner before him. It also depends on which priorities are being fought/slow-walked and it depends on how the fight is carried out.
Part of the discontent that produced a President Trump is that the Republicans never practice what they campaign on when they can actually do something about it. Never. Why would discontented conservatives fault Ryan for championing a cause they’ve been clamoring for and on which they knew President Trump was weak and on which they thought President Trump could be moved in the right direction?
I don’t think it is hard. I never liked the Keynesian nature of Trump’s campaign or policy mix. Many (most?) people here agree with that sentiment. We tolerated it because we liked other things more that no one else was offering; we tolerated it because in practice all Republicans operate as Keynesians anyway so it’s not like it would have been a unique downside to President Trump. Which is why most of us fault Ryan so much on this and President Trump hardly at all: President Trump isn’t going back on his statements while Ryan and the rest are showing themselves to have never been serious about the platform; Ryan could have made some progress in the right direction without major fights with President Trump.
100% of the Democrats and 80% of the GOP are effectively Keynesian. People want their cut of this stupidity or they want it fixed. It’s a bad spot that we are in. Who has the political capital or the brains or the integrity to do anything about it? Tell me.
I don’t know what to do with this. You would criticize any comment I made summarizing this as not being accurate, so I won’t bother.
Let’s just agree to disagree.
You could take it at face value. You could disagree with specific parts of it. I could respond. We could have a discussion.
To the extent you disregard what i wrotr and substitute some other argument you i agine is being made, ti the extent you tell me what I think instead of telling me what you think, sure I would probably criticize that as not accurate.
People blame Ryan when his chamber has consistently passed conservative bills that went on to die in the senate. The Senate majority is held hostage by 2 or 3 senators because the margin is so thin. Couple that with inconsistent or completely absent leadership from the head of the party and what exactly was Ryan supposed to do? He’s not a prime minister and yet so many conservatives act as if he is.
That’s not what people are blaming Ryan for.
Those two or three – at least – troublesome senators are no excuse for Ryan to send so many bad bills to teh senate. Personally, I would love it if Ryan had only sent conservative masterpieces to teh senate to die. Then we could compromise a little, send it to the senate to die, and do teh whole thing over again until it survives the senate. Then we can concentrate fire on the troublesome senators (that is a figure of speech of course!) and work to get them replaced. And maybe teh voters would actually believe the party in that case.