I Said From the First, He Was the Worst Kind of Guy

The requiem Paul Ryan deserves:

House Speaker Paul Ryan, who is announcing his retirement today, was not the most pernicious figure in American life during his era of prominence, but he was the biggest phony.

His Senate counterpart, Mitch McConnell, was always willing to wear the black hat, from his early rise to prominence as a lonely opponent of campaign finance reform to the cynical smirk with which he stole a Supreme Court seat from Merrick Garland. Ryan wanted something more. Power, yes. To improve the lives of the wealthy while reducing the living standards of the poor, of course.

But he also craved a certain form of respectability that’s led him to leave behind a staggering track record of broken promises and glowing press clips from journalists who were gullible enough to believe them.

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This award was completely at odds with Ryan’s actual record in Congress, which had featured support for multiple rounds of budget-busting Bush tax cuts, Bush’s deficit-financed 2003 Medicare bill, his wars, and his TARP bank bailout. But the new Ryan was said to be a deficit visionary thanks to his 2010 budget framework, which outlined a long-term plan to reduce the budget deficit. Except as Jonathan Cohn wrote at the time, the plan relied entirely on magic asterisks — an unspecified tax reform that would bring revenue to 19 percent of GDP while increasing economic growth, unspecified cuts to domestic discretionary spending, and a bare assertion that Medicare cost growth could be greatly reduced through privatization, with no plan to explain how that would work.

After being tapped as Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012 and losing, Ryan decided that his fake budget plan had landed him with a reputation as being too mean-spirited.

So by 2014, he was garnering gushing coverage from McKay Coppins and others for his newfound commitment to fighting poverty. Ryan’s newfound commitment to fighting poverty didn’t mean he disavowed his support for a large tax cut for the heirs to multimillion-dollar estates. Or his support for a large tax cut for the owners of businesses. Or his support for a large tax cut for high-income individuals. Or his support for reducing spending on poor children’s health care, housing, and nutrition assistance. Indeed, nothing about Ryan’s actual policy agenda of sharply lowering the material living standards of low-income people in order to finance regressive tax cuts had changed.

But he cared. A lot.

And Ryan is really good at caring. In January 2017, there was a truly heartrending moment at a CNN town hall when he promised a young mother who’d received protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that she had no need to fear deportation even in the coming Trump era. It was really great television.

Of course, Ryan’s reassurances were total bullshit, as Vox’s Dara Lind pointed out at the time. Trump didn’t need a new deportation force to change Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s instructions, and House Republicans have been happy to pony up more money for stepped-up enforcement activities. Trump himself, of course, canceled DACA later that year. In September, though, Ryan told DREAMers they could “rest easy” because Congress would soon step in with a fix.

They did not. Back during this past winter’s immigration debate, it was commonplace for Ryan’s tireless apologists in the press corps to note that he would be “risking his speakership” if he defied House backbenchers’ opposition to a DACA fix. This might not really have been such a high price to pay to avoid ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent young people, but regardless — the DREAMers for whom Ryan would not risk his speakership can know that at the end of the day, he was happy to throw it away anyway; he just forgot to help them.

Though in his defense, he mostly failed at the things he did try to do too.

The punchline is also correct. Ryan going all-in on Trump isn’t cowardice. It’s rationally following his interests:

This is sometimes described as cowardice on Ryan’s part, but I think it was actually all rather daring. To throw in so wholeheartedly with an unpopular and corrupt president in order to maximize your odds of enacting an unpopular legislative agenda is brave, not cowardly. Cowardice only entered into it lately, when, having led his caucus most of the way off the plank, Ryan chose to quit rather than jump with them.

That because of this his reputation, to the extent that he’s remembered at all, will be roughly aligned with Trump’s is what he deserves.