Assembled Wednesday in a committee room full of congressional interns – and reporters – House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) rebuked the disagreeable tone of politics in the 2016 race and even criticized his own use of divisive rhetoric in the past.
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“Speaker Ryan’s words will ring hollow until he backs them up with action and withdraws his support from Donald Trump”, Adam Jentleson, spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said in a written statement. “And when passions flare, ugliness has sometimes been inevitable”. But we can’t accept this. “We should demand better from one another”. “Now, a little skepticism is healthy”. It’s not too late to reach them (and more importantly, their less politically-attuned friends). Ryan has nothing to say about immigration, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, or violence at political rallies.
“Our political discourse, it did not used to be this bad, and it does not have to be this way”, he said. “We don’t insult them into agreeing with us”, he said.
Ryan’s name is once again being floated, this time as a to bail out a Republican Party faced with the possibility of Donald Trump as its standard-bearer.
Many people are wondering how someone who hasn’t been campaigning for the presidency, could qualify as a nominee.
The division in the party has led to wild speculation that Ryan, who ran on the 2012 ticket as Mitt Romney’s vice president, could somehow exit the convention as the party’s nominee if no candidate walks into Cleveland with the nomination locked up.
Spokespeople for Speaker Ryan have denied these ideas and said that instead, Ryan will be discussing the state of American politics as a whole.
‘I speak of this in the past tense only because I no longer serve here in the Ways and Means committee, ‘ the congressman said, as he used his old committee quarters for the backdrop to today’s speech.
“Members of Congress need to be part of the solution, not part of the problem”, he said, noting that 7 out of 10 Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction.
Ryan has promoted policies that would all but eliminate the social safety net, while talking about inner city people having a culture of poverty marked by generations of lazy men. He’s spoken out about Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States as well as his response after ex-Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke backed his candidacy.
The right-wing Freedom Caucus, which pressured the previous speaker to resign a year ago, forced Ryan to pull the measure for now….Majority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn’t want to deal with the budget, or any other controversial issue that could further complicate the re-election bids of more than a half-dozen embattled senators who fear they’re running in an inhospitable environment.
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Meanwhile, Democrats are using the weeks of delay to chastise Ryan and his fellow Republicans. “I shouldn’t castigate a large group of Americans to make a point”. (Ryan tried to take that weapon off the table before he became speaker, but the hard-liners called his bluff.) But the last time the GOP caused a shutdown, the party’s standing sunk like a rock.
