Nov 1^st

This morning I listened to Chuck Todd interview Paul Ryan, the new Speaker of the House. The Republican’s efforts to obstruct the legislative process will apparently continue. Ryan spent much of his interview declaring that the Republicans needed to come up with some programs; that they had just been devoting themselves to tactics and with tactics they had been doing very well.  When Ryan says “tactics” he means obstructionism and they certainly are very good at obstructionism. Of course they become ever more furious with President Obama the more he outwits them with various executive orders. Imagine fifty different Republican attempts to overturn the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and not one of them passes the Senate. The conservatives knew they wouldn’t pass but they pushed them into the Senate anyway just so they could say, “See, we are really, really trying to stop this terrible law.” They wanted something to appease their tea party friends.

Ryan’s path to the Speakership has been curious because he initially said he wasn’t interested in the job. Indeed he said this over and over again until most people really believed he meant it. Then, wonder of wonders, he didn’t really mean it after all. For the good of the party and the good of the country he would, reluctantly, run for Speaker of the House. He assumed that he was in a position of strength here; after all he was the one acceding to the plaintive requests of his colleagues to come forth and save the party.

As a result this assumption Ryan made certain non-negotiable demands; two of these were that the “Vacate the Chair” motion be eliminated. This motion allows any member of the house at any time to call for a vote to remove the Speaker. The motion must be voted upon immediately. The second non-negotiable demand was that he get the endorsement from each caucus. The sticky wicket here would be the so called Freedom Caucus; this is the tea party folks’ conservatively correct name for themselves.

So what happened? Well Mr. Ryan is now the speaker but those non-negotiable demands were negotiable after all! It seems that the issue of “Vacate the Chair” motion could really be decided later. Then there was the demand for endorsements from all caucuses. Nope, didn’t happen; at least not from the Freedom Caucus. He got a majority but an endorsement required 80 percent and that he didn’t get. The problem for his Speakership is that he caved and that was just the problem that Boehner had; he was a weak speaker too.

Ryan has now endeared himself to the Freedom Caucus by declaring that he cannot work with the President on immigration because the President is a liar… well, so much for any possibility of a rapprochement with Congress until we can get a Democratic majority in the House. What a surprise!