Should-Read: Yggles's attitude toward Paul Ryan is remarkably close to mine toward Richard Nixon: Matthew Yglesias: House Speaker Paul Ryan’s retirement: good riddance: "The many lives of Paul Ryan: Ryan joined Congress in 1998 but first really made his mark during the Social Security privatization wars of 2004-’05...
...George W. Bush’s administration wanted to use the program’s long-term fiscal deficit as a pretext to alter its fundamental structure away from a guarantee of a decent standard of living in retirement to one where individuals would be reliant on private investment accounts. Ryan emerged as a player... with then-Sen. John Sununu... cost of $2.4 trillion in larger deficits over the first 10 years.... This obviously went nowhere, in part because the cost envisioned was much larger than the Obama stimulus, the Trump tax cuts, or basically anything that Congress ever does. Nevertheless, it did not stop Ryan from rebranding himself a few years later as a deficit hawk. By 2010, he was hailed by journalists like US News’s Paul Bedard and the professional deficit-cutting community as the very model of fiscal responsibility.... "The Fiscy Award judges... David Walker... Maya MacGuineas... Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition..."
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....
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 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.
Paul Ryan’s career ends in abject failure: If Nancy Pelosi never gets her hands on the speaker’s gavel again, she’ll always have the fact that the 111th Congress was one of the most productive of all time. Ryan’s brief speakership, by contrast, did not amount to much.... Social Security privatization that launched his policy relevance is dead.... Medicare privatization... that relaunched his policy relevance is also dead. His reputation as a deficit hawk has been exposed as a sham. He didn’t repeal the Affordable Care Act.... He didn’t undo the Obama administration’s financial regulations.... Congress has basically abandoned hope of doing anything else. What he got was a tax cut, the thing that every Republican majority gets. And since that’s what his donors wanted in the end, that’s probably the important thing....
Ryan has, of course, also abdicated Congress’s constitutional responsibilities in an unprecedented way...
