Did the Ryan boom last less than 24 hours? Or was the whole thing just more establishment delusion? I guess we don’t know their final answer yet. But the tone coming out of the ‘Freedom Caucus’ seems to tell the story clear enough. Caucus co-founder Matt Salmon compared Ryan’s demands for family time to “interviewing a maid for a job and she says, ‘I don’t clean windows, I don’t do floors, I don’t do beds, these are the hours I’ll work.”
Far-right and far-weird Rep. Daniel Webster (R-FL), the ‘Freedom Caucus’s’ nominal current standard bearer for Speaker says he still has the support of the Caucus, even after Ryan’s sort of entry. Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) says he doesn’t like Ryan’s demand that his Caucus give up the right to depose him when it chooses. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) says Ryan’s demands are so “bold” and “unreasonable” that he must not be serious about his bid.
TPM’s Tierney Sneed has a run-down of the GOP hard-right’s hardening line against Ryan. But the key isn’t so much the demands or resistance to demands as the increasingly denigrating, sometimes even contemptuous tone, which simply doesn’t seem compatible with the sort of universal assent Ryan’s puts forward as his essential condition.
The most revealing line I heard all day was an interview with a member on cable news today in which the member said – paraphrasing – ‘We got rid of Boehner to have a Speaker with less power, not more.’ And that is unquestionably accurate. That is why they did it. The whole point was get Boehner out of the way and give the hardliners what they see as a clean shot at Obama – with all the nonsense embedded in that desire.
I will say this. Given the state of our civic religion and all the sacred cows and insecurities we genuflect to in public, half the people were coming forward to say how refreshing it was to hear Ryan say he wouldn’t put in the hours Speaker’s normally do because he didn’t want to take time away from his family. But my feel was that he said it in a way that came off – or perhaps can now be characterized as – entitled and precious. Parents all over the country wrestle with this dilemma every day. And it’s not like he’s the only member of Congress with kids. There was something about the tone and perhaps the fact that these demands were coupled with the procedural ones. But right or wrong, it’s been a focus of far-right denigration.
I don’t know how this ends. There seems to be absolutely no Plan B after Paul Ryan. And that makes me suspect that by one route or another it must and will happen. But the Speakership by acclimation – with night’s and weekend’s off and unlimited ice cream – that Ryan demands seems increasingly unlikely. After less than twenty four hours.
