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Paul Ryan: A Poor Choice for Speaker
by Matthew Vadum
Contrary to Republican establishment propaganda, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is not reliably conservative. He has strayed so far from the conservative mainstream that his recent voting record alone ought to instantly disqualify him from consideration as the next speaker of the House.
He is the wrong man at the wrong time. If Ryan ends up wielding the speaker’s gavel, the low-intensity civil war bubbling in the Grand Old Party may quickly go nuclear.
And the fact that Ryan wants to make veteran Beltway lobbyist David Hoppe his chief of staff in the speaker’s office should concern conservatives. Ryan describes his fellow Wisconsinite as “a foot soldier in the conservative movement,” but Hoppe also reportedly “has a record of working across the aisle” when working across the aisle means working against conservatives. As the Washington Examiner reports:
He currently serves as a senior advisor to the Bipartisan Policy Center, a nonprofit founded by former Senate Majority Leaders Howard Baker and Bob Dole, both Republicans, and Tom Daschle and George Mitchell, both Democrats, in 2007 to foster cooperation between congressional Democrats and Republicans.
Well, that’s one way of putting it.
The Bipartisan Policy Center is a think-tank that leans left. (In fairness, it is not as radical as John Podesta’s Center for American Progress or the downright kooky Institute for Policy Studies.) BPC’s star attractions, former Sens. Daschle and Mitchell, are obvious left-wingers; Baker, who passed away last year, did serve in the Reagan White House but only after losing to the Gipper; and George H.W. Bush in the 1980 primaries and the retired 92-year-old Dole weren’t exactly “severe” conservatives, as Mitt Romney might put it. In other words, there are currently no inspirational conservative figureheads to look up to at this so-called bipartisan think-tank.
BPC president and co-founder Jason Grumet is an Ivy Leaguer who served as a senior advisor on energy and environmental issues for Obama’s 2008 campaign. The month before Obama trounced John McCain, Grumet bragged that the would-be administration “would initiate those rulemakings” needed to classify carbon dioxide, the gas essential to plant life that you breathe out of your lungs, as a dangerous pollutant in need of a crackdown.
BPC, which in 2005 hailed the advent of carbon emissions trading as “the auspicious intersection of climate change science and business imperative,” is underwritten by the Joyce Foundation. Barack Obama used to serve on Joyce’s board, and the foundation funded the so-called school reform initiatives of unrepentant terrorist and Obama buddy Bill Ayers. BPC is also funded by well-endowed pillars of the left-wing philanthropic establishment, including the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (the MacArthur “Genius Award” people), the Rockefeller Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Carnegie Corp. of New York, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Suffice it to say that having someone like Hoppe as Ryan’s chief enforcer isn’t something that should comfort conservatives.
Students of politics know that Ryan has long benefited from his reputation as a conservative, but the question that needs to be asked is, conservative compared to what? In recent years, at least, his reputation has been undeserved. Ryan is a conservative only in the dual sense that he supports the status quo and that his policy objectives and votes in the House of Representatives are to the right of the overwhelmingly left-wing and radical left-wing members of the media-entertainment-academia complex.
When it comes to actually doing things instead of just flapping one’s lips, Ryan is somewhere between a liberal and a mushy moderate. In choosing a successor to John Boehner (R-Ohio), it is essential that Ryan be judged by his actual deeds, not just by his public image.
Whether Ryan is a RINO depends on where you sit. As a colleague reminds me daily – no, make that hourly – the RINO epithet is not primarily an ideological descriptor. A “Republican In Name Only” is first and foremost a self-identified Republican who refuses to fight. For example, no serious person would argue that Rudy Giuliani, who is out of step with most Republicans on abortion and gun control, is a RINO. Rudy, who is willing to take the fight to his adversaries, is about as tough as they come.
Ryan is certainly no wimp. He definitely has a lot of fight in him. But on issues of importance, he’s regularly working against conservative goals.
Plenty of pundits have succumbed to Ryan’s undeniable charms, swearing up and down that Mitt Romney’s 2012 running mate is a red-blooded conservative. For example, RINO thought leader Peter Wehner of Commentary, lambastes as “ludicrous” the assertion that Ryan is not conservative:
Ryan is among the most articulate and effective conservatives in American politics. On issue after issue – taxes, health care, school choice, abortion, the Second Amendment, welfare, defense spending, and more – Ryan is undeniably conservative. Moreover, the budgets Representative Ryan has produced are the most ambitious and far-reaching efforts to re-limit government that any Republican has ever produced.
And in the areas where Ryan is supposed to be a heretic – including free trade and immigration – Ryan is where Ronald Reagan was. It’s Ryan who represents Reagan-style conservatism, not his critics.
It is undeniably true that Ryan is very conservative, but only by Beltway standards. In the real America outside Washington, D.C., you have to do something to advance conservative policies to be a real conservative. Being a conservative de facto is more important than being a conservative de jure. Deeds matter more than words.
As for Ryan supposedly inheriting the mantle of Reaganism, Wehner proffers a slippery argument, invoking “presentism,” which in this case consists of applying the standards of today to the political realities Reagan faced upon taking office in 1981. Reagan was every bit as populist and radical and opposed to big business and crony capitalism as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and the holdouts in the congressional Freedom Caucus who aren’t endorsing Ryan for speaker – and even more reviled by the Republican Party’s establishment at the time. Reagan attacked the country club wing of the party and secured only a tiny handful of endorsements from GOP officeholders.
Read more at American Thinker:
