A wingnut email: Paul Ryan is Boehner-Lite
by digby
Conservatives: Don’t Get Suckered Into Backing A “Compromise” Speaker Who Is Boehner-Lite
The sudden implosion of the supposedly inevitable ascension of establishment Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy to the office of Speaker of the House, now occupied by his mentor John Boehner, has shown the Capitol Hill Republican establishment to be a fragile edifice ready to collapse.
Conservatives should not be suckered into propping it up any longer by abandoning their battle to elect principled conservatives to run the House of Representatives.
But that is exactly what is going on in Washington right now as those establishment politicians who stand to lose out if new leadership is elected and cleans house scramble desperately to hang on to their corner offices and their power to divide up the spoils the welfare state extorts from producers.
A number of names have been floated as potential “compromise” Speakers: Paul Ryan of Wisconsin is the candidate most often touted by the Washington political class as the ideal “compromise” Speaker, but Representatives Lyn Westmoreland, Mike Conaway, Jeff Miller, Tom Cole, Pete Sessions and Tom Price are also in the mix, according to our Capitol Hill sources.
Conservatives who fold and back a “compromise” Speaker will own the results of that Speaker’s policies and find that they are boxed-in and unable to effectively oppose a new anti-conservative leader they helped elect.
And this is particularly true of Paul Ryan, whom many conservatives once thought of as a rising conservative star, because of his image as being a pro-life family man and his “reform conservative” style budget ideas, but who has in reality abandoned conservative principles to push amnesty for illegal aliens, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, breaking the budget caps and many other anti-conservative policies.
As we explained in our article “Paul Ryan: Now the Ugly Face of the GOP Establishment,” the Paul Ryan of today is anything but a principled limited government constitutional conservative.
How Paul Ryan went from budget-balancing conservative wunderkind, to GOP vice presidential nominee, to channeling Nancy Pelosi when he snarled, “It’s declassified and made public once it’s agreed to,” as he tried to sell Obama’s Trade Promotion Authority and Trans-Pacific Partnership treaties to skeptical conservatives during a Rules Committee meeting is one of Washington’s saddest tales of how DC’s inside elite capture talent and bend it to their will.
As Ryan became more visible, first as Ranking Member and then as Chairman of the Budget Committee he became part of a group who styled themselves the “young guns” of the House Republican Conference.
Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy and Paul Ryan were visualized as a new generation of Republican leader who would challenge the older establishment-types.
Yet, after the 2010 Tea Party wave election that returned Republicans to the majority in the House, and vaulted Cantor, Ryan and McCarthy to leadership position in that new majority, what the conservative voters who turned-out to make that majority possible was a series of lies about the budget and spending, “me-too” Republicanism and not even a scaling back of the Democratic agenda.
Republicans, who had had promised $100 billion in real cuts during the campaign, compromised with the Democrats for $38.5 billion in future savings and claimed the deal would result in “the biggest annual spending cut in history,” as President Obama termed it.
Yet, as then-Senator Jim DeMint later noted, there was no actual reduction in spending. Here’s what really happened when the fiscal year ended on September 30, 2011: the Congressional Budget Office found that the April deal to avoid a government shutdown resulted in an increase of more than $170 billion in federal spending from 2010 to 2011.
Hailed by leaders of both political parties (and the establishment media) as a historic compromise that produced the “largest spending cut in history,” the deal negotiated by Paul Ryan ended up being a spending increase.
No one on the outside seemed to notice the lie upon which the spending deal was founded, because everyone on the inside, and especially Paul Ryan, knew there would be no decrease in spending. And the historic “budget cuts” would actually result in the federal government spending $3.6 trillion — a 4.2 percent increase in outlays that also ballooned the annual deficit to $1.298 trillion.
Yet Paul Ryan’s star continued to rise and when Mitt Romney chose him as his running mate in 2012 many conservatives embraced the Ryan choice as an opportunity to place one of their own in line for the presidency and in the near term have a key spokesman for the conservative agenda in the inner circle of the decidedly non-conservative Romney campaign.
What conservatives got from vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan was pretty much the same as they got from Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan – someone who out of the camera’s eye told them he was a “young gun,” but who failed to move the Romney campaign to the right, or to even get it to embrace his own ideas, while he readily went along and got along with Romney’s listless content-free establishment Republican ideas and campaign.
Why would conservatives “compromise” and hand the Speaker’s gavel to a younger, more aggressive, more articulate, more arrogant version of John Boehner?
It is the House Republican establishment who are blocking the will of the people, not conservatives, such as the House Freedom Caucus members, who are fighting to elect a transformational leader, like Daniel Webster of Florida, as Speaker.
Those conservatives who saw Paul Ryan and his fellow “young guns” as the vanguard of a new conservative House, or who think some “compromise” candidate for Speaker is a viable alternative to continuing the fight to elect a principled limited government constitutional conservative as Speaker, might profit from recalling the ending of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Just saying …