So long Paul Ryan, you won’t be missed

Paul Ryan gave a farewell speech to the House of Representatives on Wednesday. He won’t be missed. Ryan was badly cast as speaker of the House from the start, and failed to ever really grow into the job. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

One problem for Ryan was honesty. For me, the core example was his convention speech in 2012 as a vice-presidential candidate. That Ryan acted as an attack dog and exaggerated some facts was no big deal. But what was unusually dishonest was a particular attack on President Barack Obama: “He created a bipartisan debt commission,” Ryan said. “They came back with an urgent report. He thanked them, sent them on their way, and then did exactly nothing.”

This was extraordinary. Ryan himself was not only on that bipartisan commission, he was the one who torpedoed the “urgent report,” which never reached the president because of Ryan’s own actions. It’s one thing to push the boundaries of the truth or to engage in clever spin, but Ryan’s attack was pure fantasy that transferred his own actions to his opponent.

A second problem was that Ryan’s reputation for policy expertise was mostly a fraud. The same people who celebrated him as a wonk – something he never has been, as Paul Krugman and others have pointed out for years – have also declared President Donald Trump’s clearly inadequate policy knowledge to be sufficient. It’s not just about false perceptions: One of the main reasons that Ryan’s agenda has gone nowhere, despite his ascent in the House and his party’s unified control of government, is precisely that Republicans didn’t have well-developed policy options ready to go. That was true for all of Ryan’s supposed areas of interest, from entitlement reform to immigration to poverty, and of course it was very much true of health care.

As speaker, finally, Ryan was just a terrible match for the job. Political scientist Dave Hopkins gets it right: The people who have thrived in that role are the pure politicians, not the wonks or ideologues, and certainly not those with higher ambitions. So Tip O’Neill, John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi. Paul Ryan, by contrast, “risked his party in order to protect himself.” The most important example of that tendency was Ryan’s decision not to fight Trump at the 2016 Republican convention. Had he and Reince Priebus, then the party chairman, done so, it certainly would’ve been ugly, and Ryan might have lost the support of many party voters. It’s possible (though hardly certain) that they could’ve cost Republicans the election. But there’s a good chance that they would’ve succeeded, and if they had, the party would be in far better shape than it is now.

Ryan wasn’t the worst of the modern speakers; he had more competence and nothing like the sheer destructiveness of Newt Gingrich. And, to be fair, the Republican caucus he presided over would’ve been a challenge for anyone. But things got even worse with Ryan in charge than they had been during Boehner’s tenure, and that’s at least partially on him. As is the least productive period of unified party government in decades.

1. From Seth Masket, an interesting look at what Democratic activists in the early states are thinking about 2020.

2. Chris Baylor at A House Divided on the nomination process and the calendar.

3. Alexander Agadjanian and Yusaku Horiuchi at the Monkey Cage on Trump and the U.S. image abroad.

4. Arelis R. Hernández on the possibility of moving to ranked-choice voting in Montgomery County, Maryland – a useful piece on the advantages and disadvantages of the method.

5. Fred Kaplan on U.S. troops leaving Syria.

6. For more on Ryan, see Matt Fuller and Arthur Delaney at HuffPost, who have plenty of detail about his career in the House.

7. Marcy Wheeler on Judge Emmet Sullivan and the sentencing hearing for Mike Flynn.

8. A different view of that hearing from Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes.

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