Shut It Down!
by digby
Paul Ryan showed himself to be remarkably thin-skinned and (dare I say it) shrill this past week as he came under some serious criticism for the first time in his charmed career. he was snappish when describing the President’s truthful characterization of his plan as being cruel to seniors and he got very, very peeved at the suggestion that he wasn’t so serious after all. It looks as though the man who wants an adult conversation is quite the whiner when someone doesn’t agree with him.
But this really takes the cake. John Nichols reports on the rugged, Randian individualist’s reversion to Big Brother tactics when the Democrats did an end run on the GOPs pathetic strategy to make his plan look “reasonable” by presenting one that’s even worse:
[T]oward the close of the vote on the RSC proposal, the Democrats started switching from “no” votes to simple declarations that they were “present.”
As a result, it looked for a few moments like the RSC proposal was going to pass—putting the House Republicans on record in support of the sort of sweeping cuts in government programs that the GOP’s more libertarian members imagine are necessary. That’s quite distinct from the scheme advanced by Ryan, a key backer of the 2008 bank bailout, to begin steering all that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid money to Wall Street, speculators and profiteers who are his political base.
Ultimately, 172 Democrats voted present.
That meant that the RSC plan had to be blocked by Republicans who claim to be anti-big government conservatives. And so it was, as key Republicans such as Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier, R-California, and Washington Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers, another member of GOP leadership team, led the race to switch votes.
When it was clear there were enough Republican votes to block the bill—at a point where 120 GOP memners have voted “no” to 119 who had voted “yes”—Ryan started screaming to the presiding officer: “Shut it down!”
Suddenly Paul Ryan became Big Brother.
The Budget Committee chair was desperate to close the vote before any more Democrats could switch from “no” votes to those declarations of “present.” (Sixteen Democrats were finally record as voting “no.” If just two of them had cast mischievous “yes” votes while the rest switched to present, the Republicans would have been stuck with a plan that made drastic cuts to government programs, but that did not so smoothly implement Ryan’s scheme for a further redistribution of the wealth upward.)
“Shut it down!” screeched Ryan. “Shut it down!”
The Wisconsin congressman was determined to stop the voting process immediately.
Big Brother was not about to lose control of the process he had rigged to deliver for his political benefactors.
He needed to prevent a bold act of dissent that exposed his hypocrisy.
And he succeeded.
But not without revealing himself as an authoritarian who was not about to let his best-laid plans be upset by an act of creative rebellion.
Ayn Rand once wrote: “Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.”
Of course, Rand herself had quite an authoritarian streak in her dealings with others so I don’t know that she would expect a Galtian he-man like Ryan to personally subscribe to such philosophical fine points either. Winners don’t need to follow the same rules as the parasites.
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