Yeah, Paul Ryan is who we really needed to hear from. He gave a paid speech today and said that it was a bad idea to create all this doubt about the voting systems with no evidence. He said it was because of “democracy” but I’m reasonably sure it is really about not suppressing the Republican vote in Georgia next month (and beyond.)
And then there was this garbage:
“I personally think it’s in Joe Biden’s best interest — he obviously would not want to hear this — for us to win these Georgia Senate seats, because then he really does have divided government and he really does have to work with both sides of the aisle and you won’t have the building pressure from the left to try and jam the other side.
“And so assuming, and you cannot assume these things, we keep the Georgia Senate seats and we have divided government, Joe Biden knows how to work in divided government. He’s a good guy. He’s a very nice person. He keeps his word. Those of us who’ve worked with Joe, we disagree with each other but he’s not a disagreeable human being. So, he does know how to work in divided government. He does put deals together, and that will be made much, much easier for him to operate like that and bring sides together if we truly have divided government. If we don’t have divided government and they narrowly get the Senate, then frankly I think he’s going to be a much less successful president. I know that’s sort of contrary to conventional wisdom, but that’s just how I feel.”
Right. It’s for our own good to have Mitch McConnell dictate the agenda, which he will. I’m sure that there will be no problem whatsoever as long as Biden appoints Mitch’s choices for his government and nominates only federalist society clones for the bench. Needless to say there will be no major legislation except tax cuts. He didn’t do more than that even when the GOP had both houses of congress and Trump rubber stamping anything they did.
And the really good news is that when it comes to debt ceiling and appropriations negotiations, Mitch and his pals will insist that Democrats pay down their massive debts caused by tax cuts for the rich and insane military spending by creating even more suffering for ordinary people (which the Republicans will then blame on the Democrats.) It is going to be very ugly. Which is exactly what Paul Ryan and others like him are hoping for so they can point to Joe Biden and say how sad it was that he failed to bring people together like he promised.
Ryan is a slick operator who withdrew from the Trump years in order to create the impression that he was outside the maelstrom so he could preserve his viability for the future. But he is one of the architects of the modern obstructionist Republican party of scorched earth sabotage that made Donald Trump possible and nobody should forget that.