Paul Ryan not to run again...

[Johnny1A]

American politics remains roiled by the same issues that have been roiling it for years now.

Paul Ryan, who is a Republican Representative from Wisconsin, and more importantly, Speaker of the House and head of the GOP in the House of Representatives, has announced today that he does not intend to stand for re-election in his home district in 2018.

This is not exactly a huge shock, in one sense.  There have been recurring rumors for weeks now that he might resign, or at least not run again.  But it is significant.  It's high unusual for a Speaker to not run, unless he's in old age and retiring entirely.

One theory is that Ryan expects the 2018 election to be a GOP bloodletting, doesn't want to be in the minority, or fears he would lose his own race, and is getting out while the getting it good to cash in with lobbyists and donors.  Expect this to be the preferred narrative of most of the American Democrat-leaning media, and the Dems themselves.

But these sources will leave big chunks out of the story.  There are other reasons for Ryan to do such a thing.

For one thing, he's caught between Scylla and Charybdis.  The GOP voting base wants reduced immigration, both legal and illegal, less 'free trade', social conservatism, American nationalism, and a certain amount of economic protectionism.  The 'GOP donor class', the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, wealthy men like the Koch brothers, want more immigration, more free trade, social liberalism, and internationalism, and fewer restraints on business.  In short, exactly the opposite of what the GOP voters increasingly want, and these two groups are beginning to actively despise each other.

For another, to the degree Paul Ryan personally believes in any political ideal, it's probably Ayn Rand style libertarianism.  The trouble is that GOP voters have rejected that with increasing vehemence over the last several elections.

In many ways, Paul Ryan has been a liability to the GOP, at least since 2011.  When the GOP won big in 2010, the new Congress had not even been sworn in yet before Paul Ryan was out in public, talking about privatizing Social Security and Medicare.  This is political poison in American politics, including with GOP voters.  Ryan almost single-handedly stopped GOP momentum in 2011 and put them back on defensive, even before the new Congress took office.  Ryan also backed the notorious 'Gang of 8' immigration bill in 2013.  This was looked upon by GOP voters with all the eagerness that they would greet someone presenting them with a  half-rotted dead rat.

Yet apparently many in the GOP apparat harbored the illusion that Paul Ryan and his flavor of Republicanism was popular with their voters.  In 2016, as the GOP elites became more and more afraid that Donald Trump would be the nominee, a panicky plan emerged:  if they could just hold Trump below the 'magic number' of delegates at the GOP convention, he could be denied the nomination even though he was nearly certain to have the most delegates of any primary candidate.  Of course giving it to any of the other candidates with fewer delegates would be unworkable politically, so the theory was that they would draft a non-candidate who was widely popular with the GOP voters and could 'unify the party'.

This plan was always mostly fever-dream, but it's a good question if they really, seriously thought Paul Ryan was widely popular with the GOP rank and file, or if they were just desperate to get a pro-immigration candidate back on top of the ticket and so upset and discombobulated that they weren't thinking straight.

I've been thinking it was likely Ryan wouldn't run again ever since his role in engineering the recent 'omnibus spending bill' that more-or-less gave back every Trump success and confirmed every spending priority of the Democrats.  If he was running again, backing that would be something approximating political suicide, and he didn't just back it, he worked hard to make it happen.  That suggested to me that he might already have privately decided he wasn't running again, and so he could sabotage Trump and curry favor with the business wing freely.  It's a good question whether McConnell means to run again in 2020.

The question now is:  who?  Someone will take his place as leader of the GOP in the House, and his announcement today makes Ryan an open lame duck.  His personal power is going to start bleeding away.  The GOP business wing is going to try, very hard, to get him replaced with a pro-immigration, social liberal internationalist.  Someone cut from the Bush/McCain/Ryan/Romney wing.  But the GOP voters are ready to revolt already, and at least some of the GOP Representatives have to realize that their voters are in no mood for more of the same.

You won't see much of this on American TV, or read it in the 'mainstream' American media, but in fact there's probably at least as many celebrations of Ryan's departure happening among Republican voters as among Dems.

One big danger for the GOP:  Ryan might decide to try and ram through his pet project of cuts to SoSec and Medicare between now and the end of the year, since he's not running again anyway.  If they indulge that, it could destroy them.

[Johnny1A]

On Wednesday, April 11, 2018 at 10:07:27 PM UTC-5, Johnny1A wrote:

One big danger for the GOP:  Ryan might decide to try and ram through his pet project of cuts to SoSec and Medicare between now and the end of the year, since he's not running again anyway.  If they indulge that, it could destroy them.

Many of the business interest groups that form the 'business wing' of the GOP are pushing hard for exactly that now.  The Koch Brothers and their allies are running an expensive ad campaign urging the population to embrace immigration amnesty and open borders, and word is that the Kochs are now threatening that if there's no amnesty this year, they may cut off funding for GOP candidates.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce tried the same tactic in 2014, their head telling the GOP that unless they get an amnesty bill done by 2016, they shouldn't even bother fielding a candidate because there would be no support for him from business.  It was partly a bluff, and partly not, but it turned out not to matter, as Trump didn't just kick over the table, he blew it up.

From a political POV, passing an immigration amnesty before the election would be just about the stupidest thing the GOP could possibly do, short of deep-frying a live kitten on national TV.  It would very nearly guarantee a total Democratic sweep in November.  From the POV of the business community, that's no big deal, the Dems are OK, or so they think.  Just like in 2016, big business would have preferred Jeb Bush, but Hillary was fine if they couldn't have Jeb.

But from the POV of the GOP, if they want to hold Congress it's dangerous even to think about amnesty or increasing immigration.

The questions are whether the GOP leadership understands that, or if they are still so out of touch that they genuinely believe that the public is clamoring for more of the business agenda, and if they do understand it, whether they want to hold Congress.  My strong suspicion is that McConnell and Ryan would be happier to lose it.

[Johnny1A]

The Endless Amnesty Quest continues, with a large dollop of pretense.  First the 'moderate' Republicans in the House threaten to use an arcane parliamentary maneuver to force a vote for full amnesty, on which they know they can count on the Dems to join them, letting in effect Nancy Pelosi write an amnesty bill.  Paul Ryan says he can't stop this, they won't listen to the leadership, so he has to offer a compromise amnesty bill instead to forestall the vote.  He offers two, a modified Goodlatte bill and his own preferred 'compromise' bill, which theoretically has some provisions for some of what Trump claims to want...down the road.

Of course it's all a kabuki dance.  If Ryan and the rest of the House leadership wanted to squelch the initial vote, they could.  They could twist arms and threaten electoral support and threaten dearly held priorities and more or less crush the procedure, esp. since it's an election year.  They didn't want to block it, they wanted it out there as a pretext for 'forcing' them to do their own compromise amnesty.

But yet again, they've run into trouble.  The Dems won't play ball, they want full, 100%, no-holds-barred amnesty and open borders.  The GOP voting base is screaming bloody murder, demanding that the amnesty part be squelched, while the GOP business wing and big donors are demanding that they take out the enforcement provisions and limits to immigration (pallid as they are, they're too much for the business wing), and do a full-on amnesty and increase immigration.  It's an election year, and a lot of Republican Representatives are scared to death of amnesty and scared to not do amnesty at the same time, no matter what they do or don't do, they infuriate some key element of their coalition.

Trump, meanwhile, is being Trump.  Ryan can't pin him down to anything (which may be instinct on Trump's part or may be calculation, I'm not sure).

[Johnny1A]

The questions are whether the GOP leadership understands that, or if they are still so out of touch that they genuinely believe that the public is clamoring for more of the business agenda, and if they do understand it, whether they want to hold Congress.  My strong suspicion is that McConnell and Ryan would be happier to lose it.

Back in April of 2018, I commented in the quote above that I suspected Ryan and McConnell would be happier to go into the minority than to win.  I still more or less think that this was so, back in in April.  Since then, I think McConnell has changed his views a bit, but McConnell was always the smarter of the pair, IMHO.  Ryan, for his part, probably isn't heartbroken that the Dems are taking control of the House next month, and he's in the process of 'going out with a bang' by trying to get a bill through to maximize Irish immigration.

Yes, in a metaphorical middle finger to the GOP base, the outgoing Speaker is pushing for more immigration.  Naturally, while the Dems (and a lot of the GOP in Congress) aren't unhappy with the idea of more immigration, they see it as unfair favoritism and accuse Ryan of ethnic loyalty.  They think we need to throw it open and let maximum immigration from everywhere happen, not just Ireland.

The new GOP leader in the House looks to be Kevin McCarthy.  McCarthy has always been a business first open borders man, but over this last year he's been sending mixed signals on the subject.  Whatever his personal views, it might possibly be that he saw Paul Ryan's speakership founder on the issue, and wants to avoid that shoal if he can.  It might also simply be that he's hoping to mollify the base with words while working behind the scenes to give the Koch brothers et al. what they want on immigration.  Time will tell.

Interestingly, of the GOP House seats that were lost to Dems this year, a large chunk of them were the very 'moderate' (meaning liberal/pro-corporate) Republicans who went with the Dems to try and force a comprehensive amnesty bill through last summer.  Some of those seats may simply be lost indefinitely because the districts are demographically hostile, but others could conceivably be regained in 2020 if the GOP plays their cars right, and filled with Representatives more in tune with their voters.  Again, too soon to tell, but I do seem to detect at least a change in tone on the part of several formerly very corporatist Republicans.  Such lights as Thom Tillis and Lindsey Graham are up for reelection in 2020, and odds are they'll have to run with Donald Trump.  That might be forcing them to take a hard look at where the GOP voters are and what they want.

As for Paul Ryan himself, the attitude of the GOP base as of December 2018 appears to be, more or less, "Just go already."