Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan is, in my view, crazy for taking the job. Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives is, right now, an impossible job that will likely chew up and spit out even the best of politicians.
But maybe Ryan has extracted enough compromises from the assorted bunch of lunatics who like to call themselves the “Freedom Caucus” that he can actually govern. We’ll see.
What we can say about Ryan is that he seems to want to actually govern, which may strike you as a basic qualification for anyone who seeks public office, except that the Freedom Caucus has turned that on its head. These 40 or so representatives don’t want to make things work. They want the government to fail. And, paradoxically, they’ll bend democracy to the breaking point in order to make their dream come true.
Making up less than 10% of Congress, they want to shove their extremist views down the throats of the American people by using procedural tricks like refusing to go along with increases in the debt limit, all in the name of the very democracy that they are trying to dismantle. Lacking an actual majority or anything even close to it, they want to gain by sheer obstruction what the very American system they claim to defend won’t produce on its own.
But Ryan is not a Freedom Caucus member. He is a man of Washington, having come to Congress at the tender age of 29, long before there was anything called the tea party.
And while it’s true that his budget proposals have been filled with the same tired litany of callous and discredited conservative ideas — cuts in Medicare and Social Security, tax breaks for the wealthy, and big increases in the military budget — at least he makes budget proposals. There’s no denying that he wants to govern as an extremist right-winger, but there’s also little doubt that he wants to govern.
At its best the Democratic Party is the party of community and at its best the GOP is the party of individualism. In the normal give and take of American politics, each party tempers the other’s excesses. Democrats check Republicans from being too hard-hearted, and Republicans stop Democrats from giving away the store.
But the tea party has been something way out of the mainstream, a movement that isn’t just conservative but radical, almost anarchist. They don’t just hate liberal policies; they despise our government itself. Ryan might be super-conservative, but he’s still on the edge of the mainstream. He might be ultra-right-wing but at least he’s still on the bird.
So, maybe Paul Ryan can help get our federal government functioning again, compromising and making deals with a Democratic president and arriving at policy solutions that might be more conservative than I would like, but which at least move the country forward. Maybe he can end the wasteful and empty attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and defund Planned Parenthood. Maybe he can get a transportation bill and a federal budget passed.
On the other hand, maybe I’m just being naïve. That’s a real possibility, but given all the other alternatives, at this point maybe Paul Ryan is the best choice to make our federal democracy work. As Wisconsinites and as Americans — and especially as liberals who believe that our government can do good things for our country — we should wish him the best.
