Paul Ryan's Personal Brand Continues To Stink To High Heaven

Painting by Nancy Ohanian

Washington is a foreign place for iron worker Randy Bryce. But he was there this week-- just before his featured speech at today's big Iron Workers conference on apprentice training in the Detroit area. But the meetings in DC were important. Midwest progressive champions Mark Pocan and Jan Schakowsky introduced him to members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus-- which unanimously endorsed him yesterday. He sat with Wisconsin legend and former congressman Dave Obey getting advice and tips for the coming race against Paul Ryan. There were meetings with groups like the League of Conservation Voters, National Nurses United, the Latino Victory Fund and Planned Parenthood. And he ended his business meetings Tuesday night with... well, Bernie Sanders, of course.

And while he was in DC and then Detroit, actor and progressive activist Mark Ruffalo-- who, like Bryce, was born and grew up in southeast Wisconsin-- endorsed him on twitter... "because when you fall Speaker Ryan has made sure there will be no safety net to catch you." That was helpful. But what do you make out of Trump's far right hand man, Steve Bannon, referring to Ryan as "a limp-dick motherfucker who was born in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation." It's certainly accurate, at least metaphysically, which is how Bannon tends to speak. It comes right from Joshua Green, the Bannon expert and author of Devil's Bargain, the story of the Bannon-Trump alliance.

Green wrote that Bannon’s comment on Ryan came during the spring of 2016, when it became increasingly possible that Trump would become the GOP presidential nominee, to the surprise and concern of establishment Republicans. Some of them had floated Ryan as a possible alternative if the party’s convention were to become contested.

“One fleetingly popular scenario to stop Trump from becoming the nominee was for GOP delegates to coalesce around a white-knight alternative at the party convention in July,” Green wrote, noting that Ryan had “emerged as the chattering-class favorite.”

This development, according to Green, “sent Bannon into a panic of his own” and the Breitbart chairman who later that summer would lead Trump’s campaign, began “plotting an all-out war to stop Ryan, of whom he was both fearful and dismissive-- sometimes within the same sentence.”

Ryan has become increasingly unpopular-- both nationally and in his own district. The national PPP survey released yesterday show that the vast majority of Americans disapprove of how he's doing his job as Speaker. They also disapprove of the way Mitch McConnell handles his job as Senate Leader... but McConnell isn't up for reelection ion 2018. Ryan, of course is. The national polling:

But the local polling is even scarier. Ryan's about to get a rare electoral challenge courtesy of someone Wisconsin voters see as authentic and "one of us." Not many people in Janesville, Racine, Kenosha or in the burbs and small towns south of Milwaukee see Ryan as either authentic or "one of us." In fact, the last poll taken of the district's voters, showed them extremely reluctant to vote for Ryan again.

Molly Ball, reporting for The Atlantic yesterday, reported that Republicans aren't turning on Trump yet-- They're Turning On Each Other. "The House is mad at the Senate. The Senate is mad at the House," she wrote. "Various factions in the House and Senate are mad at each other or mad at their leaders. Republican lawmakers have yet to turn on President Trump in any meaningful way. But they’re starting to turn on each other." And Ryan is coming in for a lot of heat. "[A]fter half a year of consolidated GOP control, not a single major piece of legislation has been enacted."

“We’re in charge, right? We have the House, the Senate, and the White House,” one GOP member of Congress told me. “Everyone’s still committed to making progress on big issues, but the more time goes by, the more difficult that becomes. And then the blame game starts.”

The House blames the Senate: At a press conference last week, Kevin McCarthy, the majority leader, waved a chart of 226 House-passed bills that the Senate hasn’t taken up. “We will continue to do our work here, and we hope the Senate continues to do their work as we move forward,” McCarthy said pointedly.

Some new members blame their elders. A freshman congressman from Michigan, Paul Mitchell, got a dozen of his fellow newbies to co-sign an op-ed that urges the Senate to get moving, implicitly calling out their senior colleagues for forgetting what they were sent to Washington to do. “Failure to do so is a failure to follow the will of our voters,” the freshmen wrote in their article published Tuesday.

For its part, the Senate blames the House. A Russia sanctions bill passed the upper chamber with 98 votes a month ago, but it has yet to come to the floor in the House. That prompted Senator Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to accuse the House of “dilly dallying” and “a ridiculous waste of time.”

House leaders say procedural issues and Democrats have tied up the legislation, which the White House opposes. Some members, however, suspect that House leadership is purposely slow-walking the bill to avoid embarrassing the president. A spokesman for House Speaker Paul Ryan denied that was the case, telling me the White House’s position on the issue was “not a factor” in the bill’s fate.

Though little heralded, the sanctions bill could mark a moment of truth for White House-congressional relations. If sent to President Trump’s desk, the bill would amount to a rebuke of the president’s Russia policy, one he would surely be loath to sign. But given the Russia scandal swirling around Trump, a veto would be explosive. And if the GOP Congress overrode such a veto, the president’s clout would be severely diminished.

Meanwhile, many senators are annoyed with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for the rushed, secretive process that produced the health-care bill, and for threatening to cancel their August vacation for a potentially fruitless legislative session. And everyone is annoyed with the House Freedom Caucus, which has also demanded that lawmakers spend next month in D.C.

But everyone is always mad at the Freedom Caucus. Divisions between Republican factions are nothing new; nor is friction between the House and Senate. In an oft-repeated fable, a new Republican member of Congress, eager to go after the “enemy” Democrats, is corrected by an old bull: “The Democrats are the opposition,” he says. “The Senate is the enemy.”

Still, some wonder whether the current sniping isn’t better directed to Pennsylvania Avenue, where the scandal-mired president creates new headaches with every passing day. “We’re a big-tent party, so of course there are divisions,” the member of Congress told me. “But the only thing that could unite the clans is consistent and engaged leadership from the president. And it’s fair to say we’ve gotten mixed signals.”

A House Republican staffer described the fractious mood on Capitol Hill as “Republican-on-Republican violence.” As for why lawmakers don’t train their ire on the real root of their problems, the staffer shrugged: “Maybe it’s just easier to attack people without 13 million Twitter followers.”

"Everyone Ends Up Dead On The Floor"-- Welcome To The GOP Congressional Mindset

I've been meaning to mention that hilarious story about the hundred 8th graders from South Orange, New Jersey visiting Washington on a school trip who refused to pose for a picture with Speaker Ryan.

Close to 100 8th graders refused to take a photo with the Speaker and instead sat in a parking lot across the street. Speaker Ryan then took a photo with the remaining class and posted it to his Instagram.

"I can’t take a picture with someone who supports a budget that would destroy public education and would leave 23 million people without healthcare,” Matthew Malespina, a student at the school, told his local newspaper, the Village Green.

Others grounded their decision in their aversion to Trump.

“I didn’t want to be in [the picture] because he believes in most of what Trump believes in,” a fellow student, Louisa Maynard-Parisi, told the Village Green.

Parents were torn about whether the kids should have sat out on the photo. Ryan was a "legitimately elected official," one parent wrote, and they would have been offended if conservative students had done the same thing to President Obama.

Matthew Malespina's mother, on the other hand, couldn't have been more proud.

"I am proud of my son and all the other students who chose to respectfully not to participate in the photograph with Speaker Ryan.”

Molly Ball's story at 6AM Monday in The Atlantic, at least for Ryan and his Republican cronies in Congress, was less hilarious. They control the House, the Senate and the White House and should be abletoimpose their agenda on the nation. But, instead, everything seems tone falling apart, or, as Ball put it, "a ceaseless, disorienting swirl of scandal, 120 days of self-inflicted chaos and crisis." And if consistent polling is to be believed, dozens of them-- including Ryan-- are going to lose their seats in the rapidly approaching 2018 midterms.

At a press conference Lyin' Ryan was asked what was his view on the idea that Republicans might be better off with the vice president, Mike Pence, in the White House instead of Trump, Ryan shook his head in exasperation. "Oh, good grief," he said. "I’m not even going to give credence to that."

“But your members are saying that!” the reporter said. Republican members of Congress were buzzing about this idea, openly wondering, as the presidential mess threatened to consume their careers and priorities, whether it might be possible to remove the president and move on.

Congress, Ryan insisted, was perfectly capable of doing its job. “I know people can be consumed with the news of the day,” he said, as though a potential impeachment were the latest celebrity scandal, or the time everyone was up in arms for 24 hours about avocado toast. “But we are here working on people’s problems every day. We have all these committees that do different jobs, and our job is to make sure that we still make progress for the American people, and we’re doing that. It’s just not what we’re being asked about.”

Ryan listed more accomplishments underway—streamlining the Pentagon, sanctions on Syria, workforce-development programs—and insisted the House could “walk and chew gum at the same time.” But Trump’s troubles have cast a long shadow over the 291 members of his party in the House and Senate, who see their agenda going up in smoke in what is generally a presidential party’s most productive year.

A flawed, unpopular health-care bill is stalled in the Senate, the president’s budget proposal has been dismissed out of hand, and hope is fading for other priorities such as tax reform and infrastructure. “How do you pack all that in?” Senator John McCain asked last week, adding, “So far, I've seen no strategy for doing so. I'm seeing no plan for doing so.” One Republican congressman suggested that what was needed was for the president to throw “a temper tantrum” to get lawmakers to act-- this congressman happened to be named Brat.

Meanwhile Democrats sit back and watch it burn, with no small amount of schadenfreude, and the Republicans who never liked Trump see their worst predictions fulfilled. “You bought this bad pony. You ride it,” the anti-Trump consultant Rick Wilson tweeted recently. A staffer to a Senate Republican who did not vote for Trump told me, “We didn’t have high expectations, so we’re not disappointed. We tried to warn you.”

But Paul Ryan, with his long-cultivated persona as the party’s resident idealist, has always had high expectations. He watched last year as Trump ate his party; now he must watch as the president consumes his dreams. “Paul wants to govern, he’s trying to get what’s possible to get done, and he’s got a lot of credibility on the line,” Ryan’s friend Jimmy Kemp, the son of the late former Representative Jack Kemp, told me. “He’s been working on these issues for so long.”

Kemp, who wrote in Ryan’s name on his presidential ballot, described the speaker as burdened but steady. “He’s frustrated and it’s wearing on him, but he’s not throwing in the towel,” he said. “He just has to answer questions about so many things he doesn’t want to answer questions about.”

For the Republicans running the government, Capitol Hill has become a workplace with extremely poor morale. The moderates fear for their careers, while the conservative true believers see little to hope for. When the liberal magazine Mother Jones credited Representative Justin Amash of Michigan with being the first Republican to raise the possibility of impeachment, the office of Representative Carlos Curbelo of Florida called to request a correction: Curbelo had gone there first.

But for the most part, his party has not openly turned on Trump. What would be the point? Behind closed doors, a longtime House Republican staffer told me, a few lawmakers still wholeheartedly defend the president; among the rest, there are differing degrees of fatalism. One group thinks it is possible to fight through the crisis, while another is resigned to “a long slow death,” as this staffer put it, potentially culminating in a Democratic-controlled House beginning impeachment proceedings in 2019. “This is like Reservoir Dogs,” the staffer said. “Everyone ends up dead on the floor.”

...It has become a Capitol Hill cliché lately that the days feel like weeks and the weeks feel like years. Lulls in the news feel ominous, and you never know what is going to happen. Tempers are fraying: the GOP’s congressional candidate in Montana’s special election last week tackled a reporter for pressing for his position on health care (and still won the election). “There is total weirdness out there,” Representative Mark Sanford of South Carolina said after the Montana incident. Trump, Sanford said, had “unearthed some demons.”

...Washington’s turbulence has yet to redound to the benefit of Democrats, and the Montana victory soothed some Republican nerves. But one GOP lobbyist wondered to me whether longtime members of Congress might soon take the opportunity to retire if the situation doesn’t improve. “You finally have united Republican government, and this is as good as it gets? Why bother?” he said. “A malaise is setting in.”

Ileana Ros Lehtinen (R-FL) has already announced she's retiring-- from a nice blue Miami district not even the DCCC is likely to lose (they they seem to be already trying hard to)-- where Obama beat Romney 53.0% to 46.3% but where Hillary eviscerated Trumpanzee 58.6% to 38.9%, el Señor's worst performance in the country in any GOP-held district. But Ros-Lehtinen is probably not the only Republican looking to retire as Trump and Ryan make a shambles of their party. The Cook Report, which is rarely accurate about this kind of stuff, listed a dozen senior Republicans they claim may be on the verge:

• Don Young (AK)
• Vern Buchanan (FL)
• Mario Diaz-Ballart (FL)
• Fred Upton (MI)
• Frank Lobiondo (NJ)
• Leonard Lance (NJ)
• Rodney Frelinghuysen (NJ)
• Pete King (NY)
• Patrick Meehan (PA)
• Charlie Dent (PA)
• Jaime Herrera-Beutler (WA)
• Dave Reichert (WA)

The list is making the rounds in DC but from talks I've had with reliable GOP staffers, it's as silly as most of the nonsense coming out of Cook. And not included is a Republican who probably actually is retiring at the end of the current term: Science Denier-In-Chief Lamar Smith of Texas.