It's Extremely Unlikely Paul Ryan Will Be Able To Hold Onto His Seat In The 2018 Midterms

The new PPP survey has Congress' approval down at 9%. By a 49-35% margin, voters want to see Democrats win control of the House in 2018. On top of that, the Republican Speaker, Paul Ryan, has a job approval rating of just 16%-- with 62% of Americans disapproving of the way he's handling his job. (52% of Trump voters and 77% of Clinton voters disapprove of Ryan's job performance.) But there's much worse news for Ryan than that. The DCCC commissioned a poll of Ryan's congressional district last week. His job approval among WI-01 Republicans was just 29% and a good sample of Democratic, Republican and independent voters in WI-01 show Ryan with a dismal 14% job approval rating. That isn't something incumbents recover from, not even in 15 months.

And Ryan's hometown newspaper, Janesville's GazetteXtra explained why people in his district have finally turned on him. His slick, deceitful, focus group-tested bullshit has worn thin in the last couple of years and the voters in southeast Wisconsin are excited that the perfect alternative to Ryan's inauthenticity has presented himself in the form of shape, plain-spoken iron worker and union activist Randy Bryce. The GazetteXtra reported that at Monday's phony-baloney CNN fake town hall (in reality a Ryan infomercial) "Ryan left the impression that the problems plaguing Obamacare could be fixed if only the Senate did its part and voted to repeal and replace it." The disgraceful Jake Tapper sat mum while Ryan tried to spin his lies, but the GazetteXtra called him out on them.

Ryan stuck to his talking points while sidestepping criticism of the bill he shepherded through the House in May-- a bill that received virtually no support from health care professionals or advocacy groups, such as AARP. Whether by accident or design, questioners at the town hall never pressed Ryan on the shortcomings of the GOP health care bills.

The GOP created high expectations by spending the past seven years criticizing Obamacare. So nobody can be blamed for feeling let down when the House settled on a bill that the Congressional Budget Office estimated would leave 23 million more Americans uninsured in a decade, including 14 million from reduced Medicaid enrollment.

The GOP promise of lower premiums would ring true only for the healthiest and youngest people buying insurance from individual markets. But premiums for older Americans would skyrocket under the House bill, the CBO found.

At the town hall, Ryan touted high-risk insurance pools operated by states as key to solving Obamacare's problems. But it's not clear whether states or the federal government would adequately fund these pools, potentially leaving people with pre-existing conditions priced out of insurance markets.

Ryan conveyed Monday night, as he often does, his beliefs in broad, philosophical terms. In particular, he responded to a Dominican nun's question with a declaration that he wants to help the poor through “upward mobility, that means economic growth, that means equality of opportunity.”

But what Ryan learned (or should have learned) from the debate surrounding the House health care bill is that people don't view this bill as advancing the principles he claims to espouse. It's perplexing to think how dramatically slashing the number of insured Americans would lead to more “upward mobility” or “equality of opportunity.”

Indeed, the bill has proven so unpopular because many people view it as completely contrary to their own self-interests. They see a dissonance between Ryan's words and the bill adopted by the House.

The far-right elements within the Republican Party are blind to the dissonance, and they seem to have too strong a grip on Ryan. During the town hall, Ryan made no overtures, gave no indication that he's ready to work with Democrats to fix Obamacare. He appears to be following President Trump's lead in pushing the health care system to the brink, though Ryan's constituents have nothing to gain from Obamacare's collapse.

What this nation needs is a bipartisan commitment to figure out how to improve the health care system. But bipartisanship requires compromise--an acknowledgment that neither party will get everything it wants.

Unfortunately, both parties' leaders remain locked in a staring contest, waiting for the other to blink first. Each side seems to treat Beltway politics as a battle to be won, rather than a process to be driven through negotiation with the other party.

It's telling that Ryan never uttered the word “compromise” Monday night, according to our review of the evening's transcript, and that's perhaps the real shame in all of this. He seems content to advance the GOP agenda through the blunt force of partisanship, while his constituents would benefit from a new approach. They want peace of mind. They want a health care system that works for them.

Randy Bryce filled us in on how he saw what I called Ryan's CNN informercial Monday:

Paul Ryan had an event this past Monday in Wisconsin. It was in WI-01 but it was far from an actual town hall. Jake Tapper brought a high tech CNN set into town. One had to apply to gain admission via CNN. Part of the questionnaire included political affiliation. Not only were all of the people specially chosen but the questions were also sent in with the screening process. I applied, but, was not invited. Outside of the event about 300 people who also were not accepted met in the “Free Speech Zone”-- an area where we were allowed to gather. A local businessman approached me and let me know that he never applied, but was sent an invite that included a parking pass through the US Postal Service. (snail mail) Many Wisconsin GOP electeds were in attendance. It was a dog and pony media circus put on for Paul Ryan’s benefit thanks to Mr. Tapper. Also, different sources informed me that even though hundreds were not admitted and waited outside, there were a lot of empty chairs. Hired security and staff were directed to fill the seats so as to not make it appear to be empty.

During the show Paul Ryan was booed by the crowd for mansplaining poverty to a nun. He referred to her as a Dominican nun even though she told him that she did not belong to the Dominicans. He also took the side of guns while talking to a Sikh leader who’s father was murdered by a white supremacist just a few years earlier. On the comical end, he bragged about Cristo Rey-- a Latino Catholic parish that had ceased to exist in 2014.

Even though I wasn’t deemed worthy to ask Ryan any questions our campaign bought tv ads that ran in the district asking him if he accepts 23 million people losing access to health care, when he plans on passing ‘equal pay for equal work’ and asking when he’s going to call Donald Trump out for what he is-- being a racist.

As can be seen, it’s no wonder why Speaker Ryan is afraid to have an actual town hall. He has no idea what’s going on in the community.

He’s going to get a better idea after I repeal and replace him in November of 2018.

In all fairness, I was invited after the event to talk about it with Don Lemon on CNN.

Does Trump Have Any Credibility Left? How About Paul Ryan?

Someone needs to explain to Señor Trumpanzee what "exonerated" and "vindicated" mean. No matter where you woke up Friday-- red state, blue state, purple state, there were no newspaper headlines talking about vindication. They were all talking about how we're saddled with a compulsive, manipulative liar in the White House. Even Karl Rove, in an OpEd for the Wall Street Journal took the opportunity to slam Trump this week-- as did widely-followed right-wing activist Erick Erickson.

Trump, wrote Rove, "may have mastered the modes of communication, but not the substance, thereby sabotaging his own agenda... [Señor Trumpanzee] lacks the focus or self-discipline to do the basic work required of a president... his chronic impulsiveness is apparently unstoppable and clearly self-defeating. He added Trump routinely disregards basic fact checking, making "the already considerable doubts Americans have about his competence and trustworthiness" worse day by day. Rating for were so high for TV (almost 20 million Americans watched Comey's testimony-- as though it were an NBA final) that broadcast media stocks went up while he was speaking. All those folks watching Comey continuously assert that Trump is a liar-- with no a single Republican claiming he isn't-- and then seeing that repeated endlessly on TV for 2 days hasn't hurt Trump's trustworthy and honest ratings among voters-- already the lowest anyone can remember for any president. Erickson actually tried to defend Trump but wound up writing that "we know President Trump lies regularly" and that "the public will latch on to Comey as the honest broker." Trumpanzee, he reminds his Republican readers, "only won because he convinced 70,000 people in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan that he was not as bad as Clinton... if there are at least 70,001" voters who decide to take Comey’s word over Trump’s, the GOP will be in very big trouble for the 2018 midterms.

And his 2 horrid sons have been molded to be just like him

Friday NBC's Chuck Todd began the day writing about Trump's credibility gap.

After former FBI Director James Comey accused President Trump, under oath, of lying and possibly obstructing justice, Trump and his lawyer fired back, trying to turn it all into a he said-he-said dispute. “Despite so many false statements and lies, total and complete vindication...and WOW, Comey is a leaker!” Trump tweeted this morning (after a two-day hiatus). The problem here for Trump: The president has used up so much of his credibility after:

• Misstating the size of his inaugural crowd.
• Claiming that 3-5 million “illegals” voted in the 2016 election.
• Accusing Barack Obama of wiretapping him.
• Boasting, incorrectly, of achieving “the biggest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan.”

And that’s just the tip of the fact-checking iceberg. “In a credibility battle between Trump and Comey, everybody knows Comey is going to win that war,” Adam W. Goldberg, a former associate special White House counsel under Bill Clinton, tells the New York Times... [T]his is important: In a battle over credibility, one person (Comey) has testified under oath; the other one (Trump) hasn’t. And one person (Trump) has raised the possibility of having “tapes” of their conversation but has not produced them; the other (Comey) is begging for any tapes to be released. "Lordy, I hope there are tapes," Comey told Congress.

...Tellingly, the Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee paid no heed to the talking points distributed in advance by the Republican National Committee at the behest of the White House. Instead of attacking Mr. Comey’s credibility, as the R.N.C. and Donald Trump Jr. did, the Republican senators praised him as a patriot and dedicated public servant. They largely accepted his version of events, while trying to elicit testimony that would cast Mr. Trump’s actions in the most innocent light possible.

I didn't include the headline from the Denver Post in the collage up top. Instead, let me quote to you what voters in Republican Congressman Mike Coffman's very vulnerable swing district in the suburbs south and east of Denver were reading today (an area Hillary won convincingly-- 50.2% to 41.3%):

Whatever happens with the investigations into President Donald Trump’s campaign and his firing of FBI Director James Comey, significant damage has been done to the president’s reputation that brings into stark question his ability to lead.

Even if Trump isn’t implicated in colluding with the Russians, even if none of his campaign staffers are found guilty, Comey’s sworn testimony and the known facts about his firing cripple the president’s credibility.

Comey’s testimony portrays a president who only cares about loyalty to himself, and not loyalty to all Americans. By repeatedly pressuring the then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to swear allegiance to him, Trump betrayed America. He never reversed this error, and kept talking about the necessity of personal loyalty with Comey until the day he fired him.

Trump denies everything, of course. But who can believe him? He’s proven himself wonderfully skilled at telling lies.

...Trump’s only values are the constantly shifting ones he conjures to win for himself a favorable news cycle.

Even if he survives these investigations, his credibility going forward will be forever tarnished unless he’s able to reform.

Bob Inglis is a conservative Republican who was a South Carolina congressman. He pointed out that Trump isn't the only liar leading the Republican Party. Ryan has fully embraced the tactic and completely shot whatever remained of his own credibility as well. He's been trying to mislead voters by lying about the impact of TrumpCare, by lying about Trump's draconian budget and by lying about House Republican efforts to cement their ties with Wall Street by giving them the biggest legislative bonanza in decades.

Wisconsin iron worker and union activist Randy Bryce, who is rumored to be about to declare his much-anticipated candidacy for Paul Ryan's congressional seat told us this morning that "Ryan is still making excuses for Trump’s obvious incompetence. He told us to to cut him some slack because he’s 'new at this.' All kinds of French words run through my mind after hearing that because I specifically heard Trump boasting about how much better he was than everyone else running for the job of President. He’d have us all think that he is smarter than all of the generals. At what point can we expect Republican leadership to put the concerns of the country over that of their plans to destroy the country? I don’t think that we can. Our current government has become more corrupt than at any other time in history. Those who refuse to abide by the oaths that they took are complicit in the illegality. Every one of them needs to be removed and replaced. I’m looking forward to doing my part. Speaker Ryan-- the clock is ticking."

Trump accusing Comey of lying under oath, isn't going to help his own credibility. And coupled with Lyin' Ryan's casting scruples to the wind with regular alacrity, the party is taking on a certain undeniable odor. One thing seems certain: these Republican politicians are way more concerned about themselves than they are with the American people.

Another person who noticed how badly Ryan is hurting himself-- and his party-- is Brian Beutler who made the point at the New Republic that Comey's testimony won't just hurt Trump but, largely thanks to Trump, the whole party. "In the midst of the most devastating testimony delivered about a sitting president in the living memory of nearly everyone serving in Congress today, the Republican speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, shuffled before microphones to say that Donald Trump--vin trying to interfere with FBI investigations-- probably just made an innocent mistake: 'The president’s new at this. He’s new to government and so he probably wasn’t steeped in the long-running protocols that establish the relationships between DOJ, FBI and White Houses. He’s just new to this.' Ryan wants us to imagine Trump sitting alone in the White House with only his intellect and his muscle memory as his guides. He asks us implicitly to forget that Trump has a White House counsel, a vice president with years of governing experience, and an attorney general who campaigned with him for a year, all at his behest to instruct him. He asks us, again implicitly, to forget that Trump pierced the veil meant to separate the White House and FBI, to corrupt the rule of law, and that he then fired FBI Director James Comey, lied about why, and confessed-- to NBC’s Lester Holt, and to senior Russian officials in the Oval Office-- that he did it to remove “the cloud” of Comey’s investigation of his campaign.

It is an article of faith in Washington that no revelation about Trump’s conduct, no matter how severe, could convince Ryan and members of his conference to launch an impeachment inquiry. As dispassionate political analysis, this may well be true. It would certainly be foolish to believe the opposite-- that Trump’s impeachment is a certainty.

But for everything we know about Trump’s conduct already, all this means is that the ethical and strategic conduct of Republicans in Congress should now be as heavily scrutinized as Trump’s. Republicans may not know what they’re covering up, but covering up they are; and they may believe they’re acting in their own political self-interest, but they almost certainly are not.

Bracketing everything we know about Trump’s potentially illegal behavior almost makes the GOP’s somber indifference to his conduct in office more damning. Trump, we were reminded Thursday, is an abject liar who doesn’t even seem to understand the concept of the public interest. In his testimony, Comey asserted that he began his practice of taking notes after every encounter with Trump before the inauguration because he became “concerned he might lie about the nature of our meeting.”

Comey used variants of the word “lie” repeatedly, as if to correct for the fact that reporters and news outlets are reluctant to use it themselves.

...Ryan’s special pleading on Trump’s behalf already requires him to insult the public’s intelligence. He may have sunk so much cost into his complicity that he sees no option other than to sink more. Rather than take the hits as they come, he should consider the predicament he’ll face if Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller refers an obstruction of justice complaint to Congress. Like Comey, Mueller is a former prosecutor and FBI director. If he tells Congress, in so many words, that Trump would face a federal indictment were he not the president, will Ryan still reconcile himself to ignoring the crisis he’s helped inflict on the country?

Let's give David Frum the last word on this: "Friends of the president will reply that the Comey hearing did not produce a smoking gun. That’s true. But the floor is littered with cartridge casings, there’s a smell of gunpowder in the air, bullet holes in the wall, and a warm weapon on the table. Comey showed himself credible, convincing, and consistent. Against him are arrayed the confused excuses of the least credible president in modern American history."