Paul Ryan Can't Be President Because Paul Ryan Ca
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Posted On: 04/13/2016 12:40:12 AM
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Paul Ryan Can't Be President Because Paul Ryan Can't Do the Job He Already Has
There is no more Republican party.
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Any whiff of compromise smells like the cronyism of politics as usual. Hence that sour "crap sandwich" stench of budget politics under divided government.
Speaker Ryan can't get a budget passed because the Republican Party he helped to build is now full of crazy people that nobody can control.
BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
APR 12, 2016
On the electric teevee machine last night, we had an interesting chat about Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, first runner-up in our most recent vice-presidential pageant, and reluctant quasi-demi-who-knows candidate for a prospective brokered Republican presidential nomination.
Because we mainly talked about the latter possibility, we neglected to point out that Ryan isn't exactly a towering success in his current job.
Instead of focusing on the legal requirement that Congress adopt the fiscal 2017 budget resolution by April 15, that is, by THIS FRIDAY, Ryan made the obligatory trip to Israel to demonstrate his foreign policy chops and began to air a political advertisement on YouTube that is remarkably similar to the standard political biography candidates use to introduce themselves to voters.
You wouldn't know it by Speaker Ryan's actions, but this week is supposed to be the critical moment for Congress on the budget. The April 15 deadline is written in law, and was specifically designed to prevent spending bills from being considered by the House and Senate until there is a fiscal blueprint in place to keep them in check.
This wouldn't be so bad if the spending committees were planning on waiting until a budget resolution was adopted and the constraint was put in place. But the Senate Appropriations Committee says it is planning on moving ahead as it's allowed to do if the April 15 deadline comes and goes without Congress getting its budget act together. The budget resolution is one of the primary things Congress is supposed to do every year and, therefore, one of the most important things on which the Speaker should be focused.
Paul Ryan is the Speaker of the House, and he can't get a budget passed. Sam Rayburn is guffawing over his bourbon in the Beyond. And why can't Speaker Paul Ryan get his budget passed? Glad you asked.
The deeper problem for Ryan and the rest of the Republican leadership is that House Freedom Caucus is more and more the anti-establishment wing of the Republican Party. And its reflexes have now been trained to distrust whatever leadership does.
Any whiff of compromise smells like the cronyism of politics as usual. Hence that sour "crap sandwich" stench of budget politics under divided government.
Speaker Ryan can't get a budget passed because the Republican Party he helped to build is now full of crazy people that nobody can control.
And people think Speaker Ryan is going to be able to control the fanciful attempt to screw over two presidential candidates at the convention in Cleveland this summer, if Tailgunner Ted Cruz's people already are embedded in the convention's rules committee?
(Things are so bad for ZEGS, that even his primary liberal booster's website seems to have lost faith. http://www.vice.com/read/paul-ryan-what-stupi...ounds-like
It is a tragedy when the illusions of the young are so cruelly dashed. Hope, though, do spring eternal, it do.)
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Capitol, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell can't even control the process of choosing his leadership team. Konztitooshunal skolar Mike Lee of Utah has slipped away from the pack.
Adam Brandon, the CEO of FreedomWorks, gave Lee a hearty endorsement Tuesday morning, extolling him as a principled conservative. "Sen. Lee has pursued a conservative reform agenda that appeals to Americans from all walks of life," Brandon said in a statement.
"We could not be more excited that Sen. Lee is seeking this post. If he is elected, it would be a tremendous boost to grassroots conservative activists across the country and a sign that Senate Republicans are ready to pursue a bold policy agenda."
Lee has told GOP colleagues in recent phone calls that he wants to become the next chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, a post now held by Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.). It's the fourth-ranking post in the Senate Republican leadership.
Lee told one colleague that he believes Barrasso is term-limited and must step down from his post at the end of the year under Senate Republican Conference rules. But Senate GOP leadership aides on Monday told The Hill that Barrasso's term limit doesn't kick in until the end of 2018.
Majority Leader McConnell can't have the leadership team he wants because the Republican Party he has done so much to build now has so many crazy people in it that nobody can control it.
And then, of course, there's obvious anagram Reince Priebus, titular head of the Republican National Committee, the emptiest suit in American politics, who is wandering the landscape pretending to be in charge of the nominating process.
the Feb. 13 debate, Trump blamed George W. Bush for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and said Bush "lied" about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Trump, Cruz and Marco Rubio took turns calling one another liars, and Rubio ridiculed Cruz's Spanish skills.
"Our well-qualified & experienced candidates continue to put forth serious solutions to restore prosperity & strength to America," Priebus tweeted.
And after the March 3 debate, in which Trump spoke about the size of his genitals, Priebus tweeted that "Republican candidates are the only ones offering the course correction voters overwhelmingly want." Priebus sounds like a fortune cookie when he says "the impossible is always possible with unity."
National Chairman Reince Priebus can't have the nominating process he wants because the Republican Party he has done so much to build now has so many crazy people in it that nobody can control it.
It was one of the first articles of consensus here in the shebeen shortly after we opened it in 2011 that there is no functioning institution called the Republican Party anymore.
There was simply a vast universe of orbiting centers of power, some of them secular and some of them religious, some of them made up of a single wealthy person and some of them an aggregation of organized interest groups, all of them operating independently according to their own private physical laws.
This was apparent in the 2012 campaign when nobody could get fakes like Newt Gingrich or fools like Herman Cain out of the race until they were damned good and ready to exit the stage.
Now, though, we look at not only the Republican Party institutions, but those institutions of government that the Republicans control, and we discover that nobody is really in charge.
We go ship-by-ship through the Republican flotilla and discover as we do that nobody is on any bridge anywhere. It's the Mary Celeste squadron, with all guns cleared for action. It is a menace to navigation in a functioning democracy.
The only option may be the scuttle the whole business, just to keep the rest of the country from foundering.
Update (3:49 PM): This afternoon, Ryan told us that we should count him out as a candidate for president. The setting was well-designed. It photographed beautifully. It will be an ornament to any campaign commercial he might choose to run. Playing the role of the greyhounds to Ryan's mechanical rabbit were the members of the elite political media.
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