10/29/2015

Our New House Speaker


Paul Ryan, the former vice presidential candidate, is widely cited among many of his colleagues as a likable enough chap who is polite to his elders in the hierarchy of Congress, and this makes the more rabid bomb throwers seethe.

To them, that chummy, self-enlightened pragmatism as well as his past embrace of immigration reform qualify him as a so-called RINO, a Republican in Name Only, a "squish."

Time makes ancient good uncouth, as the poem goes, and in the words of Ed Kilgore at Washington Monthly's "Political Animal" blog, "Nowadays if you are guilty of having ever supported 'amnesty' your other heresies will be uncovered, however old they are.

The other way to look at it, of course, is that the GOP continues to drift to the Right, making yesterday's ideological heroes suspect."

The House Freedom Caucus, the fractious faction of radical right-wingers gerrymandered into a permanent demolition squad, successfully conspired to bring down House Speaker John Boehner and his designated successor Kevin McCarthy.

They have for the moment agreed to support Paul Ryan's speakership, but not with the unanimity that would constitute an official endorsement.

Further, it seems that for their support to continue once he takes the job Ryan must pledge to curtail some of his powers and enable the insurgents to continue to wreak havoc on the day-to-day business of the House without fear of punishment by the grown-ups.

There's a paradox to all this.

Despite his ideological kinship with the anti-government crowd, Paul Ryan is the embodiment of the troika of money, power, and politics that corrupts and controls the capital, the very thing the tea partiers detest.

Ryan is "a creature of Washington," Red State's Erick Erickson wrote. "He worked on Capitol Hill, worked in a think tank, then went back as a congressman. He speaks Washingtonese with the best of them."      Read more

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