A scam of a party says goodbye to its top fraud

Paul Ryan perfectly represented today’s GOP. And that was the problem.

By Paul Waldman April 11 at 1:23 PM

The dream is over.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan announced this morning that he won’t be running for reelection, after 20 years as a member of Congress. There are a lot of ways to look at this decision and what it says about Ryan personally and this particular moment in history. But at a deeper level, it shows us just how hollow the conservative project in America has become.

The proximate cause of Ryan stepping down is that his party looks increasingly likely to suffer an electoral disaster in November. He’s facing an unusually strong challenge from Randy Bryce, the likely Democratic nominee in his Wisconsin district, so he probably calculated that there were two realistic outcomes for him. The worse one was that he was defeated while his party lost the majority, just as happened to then-speaker Tom Foley in 1994. The better one was that he held on to his seat while Republicans lost the majority, which might not have been better at all. Being speaker may have meant plenty of headaches for Ryan, but being House minority leader is a total drag — you still have to manage your unruly caucus, but you have no real power at all and can’t make any progress on your agenda.

Nevertheless, Ryan might have decided to stick around. He’s only 48 years old, and even if Republicans lose Congress this year, they’ll take it back eventually. And then he could get back to pursuing all those important conservative goals, right?

Ah, but there’s the problem, and the reason Ryan’s decision to bail out for what I assume will be an obscenely remunerated job with an investment firm is so revealing. After fifteen months with total control of the government, Ryan and his colleagues achieved almost nothing, and he’s now decided that there’s nothing more to do.

In his press conference this morning, Ryan explained his departure this way: “I have accomplished much of what I came here to do, and my kids aren’t getting any younger.” So what did he accomplish?

For years, Ryan has presented himself as someone deeply concerned with fiscal discipline, committed to getting America’s books in order. As anyone with any sense realized, this was a scam: Like all Republicans, he used the deficit as a bludgeon against Democratic presidents, then forgot all about it when there was a Republican in office.

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