Earnest Policy Wonk Just Not Made For These Times
By 
I am up in yer Los Angeles Times about the legacy of Paul Ryan. My thesis, needless to say, is that he was an earnest, moderate advocate for the poor and fiscal discipline who mysteriously found himself on the margins as the GOP moved right:
In one of the more impressive cons in recent American political history, Ryan managed to generate a lot of fawning profiles portraying him as a humble wonk committed to bipartisan solutions on deficit spending. It was pure fiction. It is all too appropriate that Ryan announced his retirement the same week the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the federal deficit in 2020 would exceed almost a trillion dollars. It would be one thing if these deficits were being used for much-needed public investments, but instead the exploding deficits will largely be the product of the massive upper-class tax cut Ryan shepherded through Congress this year.
One could object that it’s unfair to blame Ryan for the compromises necessary to keep a relatively narrow majority together. But Ryan had the same priorities as an obscure House backbencher. He argued during this period that President George W. Bush’s debt-funded tax cuts should have cut deeper and his debt-funded defense spending increases should have been larger. Ryan has never cared about the deficit. His priorities have always matched the contemporary Republican priorities: relieving the financial burden on the rich and inflicting as much suffering on the poor as is politically possible.
Even more than the tax reform that Congress passed this year, the definitive Paul Ryan achievement was the American Health Care Act, the attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act that the House voted for and the Senate nixed. The AHCA was a reflection of Ryan’s worldview so pure it almost reached the level of self-parody. It cut healthcare savagely; the CBO estimated 23 million people would lose their health insurance. The money saved was transferred to, you guessed it, the well-to-do.
The AHCA bill reflected Ryan’s leadership in other ways too. It was rushed through an undemocratic process, with only three hours of debate and voted on before a public version of the bill was even made available.
This is Ryan’s legacy: a single-minded campaign of rich-on-poor class warfare. Worse, he aggressively covered up Trump’s unprecedented corruption and unfitness for office just to further that agenda.
In retrospect, my summary may not have been entirely accurate.