Boehner says Paul Ryan may “have an announcement” this evening.
You see the news in our feature story that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) just sort of announced his candidacy for the Speakership. We’ll have more reported details shortly. But the gist is he’s going to try to turn the dynamic of the GOP caucus on its head. I emphasize, try.
You read the headline right. Sometimes someone digs so deep down into bullshit that there comes a moment when they are entirely surrounded by it – up, down, right, left. Those are good moments to say: how did I get here? And how do I get out? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had one of those moments today. But those questions did not occur to him.
In case you’re wondering: the headline is not a tease. In a speech Tuesday, in an effort to make his case about Palestinian provocations and violence against Jews, the Israel Prime Minister actually found his way into defending Adolf Hitler.
Here’s how it went down.
You won’t believe this: House Freedom caucus doesn’t like Paul Ryan’s conditions.
When the White House announced that Joe Biden would be making an announcement in the Rose Garden with the President at his side it was pretty clear Biden was a no. The only other possibility was that Obama had moved to a level of Not Giving a F*ck mode beyond anything we’ve seen before. Obama: Okay, folks, I’ve watched both these two work on the great issues of our time. And you want Joe. Trust me. Joe’s the guy.
No, that didn’t happen.
Josh Marshall is currently in the Hive taking questions from Prime members, join us here.
The House Freedom Caucus just adjourned its meeting and declared that it will not endorse Paul Ryan for speaker or accede to his conditions for an endorsement, but that a super-majority of members of the Freedom Caucus do support him for speaker, Tierney Sneed reports from the Hill.
In purely numerical terms, that appears to give Ryan enough votes to secure the speakership in a vote of the full House, but not on the terms he laid out. This looks like an effort to put the ball back in Ryan’s court. The question at this moment: Will he take it and go home?
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.”
It’s a pretty rough moment when the German government has to correct the Prime Minister of Israel about German responsibility for the Holocaust.
So we have the Freedom Caucus’ answer to Paul Ryan. They’ll support his bid, but not his terms. Around 70% of members of the group voted to support him in a Caucus meeting. But apparently their rules require 80% support for an official Caucus endorsement. But the key point is its endorsement without agreeing to Ryan’s terms. And notably, Ryan would have to climb down some more since he made an actual endorsement a condition.