Paul Ryan admits GOP can’t govern without a hostage crisis
Rep. Paul Ryan, the House GOP’s budgetary chieftain, gave a brief but remarkable interview to the Washington Examiner’s David Drucker in which he essentially conceded that Republicans will only negotiate with Democrats over the budget if they can hold the U.S. economy hostage to increase their leverage.
Ryan didn’t say that explicitly, of course, but once you cut through all the familiar Ryan gibberish, that’s his plain meaning. In the interview, Ryan discusses the fact that Republicans don’t want to enter into conference negotiations over the budget (even though they had previously insisted on “regular order” for a long time). Instead, Ryan wants a pre-conference agreement before regular conference negotiations. He gives a bunch of procedural reasons for this, such as the fact that if conference negotiations fail, the House minority has the authority to force Republicans to take uncomfortable votes (on so called “motions to instruct”). But this is the meat of it:
Ryan said his primary objective is to prevent a divisive partisan battle that would consume Congress throughout the summer and make it harder for House Republicans and Senate Democrats to reach a budget compromise. The congressman also worries that a protracted budget fight would poison the legislative process and spill into negotiations to raise the debt ceiling, which the Congress must do this fall when the U.S. is expected to reach its borrowing limit.
“The moves I’m making, and the decisions I’m making, are to try and maximize the chance of success in the fall,” Ryan said Thursday during a brief interview with The Washington Examiner. “If we go to conference and it’s a stalemate and we have all these motions to instruct and all of this partisan fighting after 20 days, then we’ll grow farther apart and we’ll make it harder to get an agreement, that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing.”
Of course in the Senate McCain and the "sane" ones are denouncing the insanity; and the bomb-throwers like Cruz & Rubio are pouring gasoline on it...
But it's nice to see the 'Baggers admit, even convolutedly, that the only strategy they have is to try to destroy...Since politics is still more important to them than the good of the nation.
The GOP governs? What does Obama do? Whine that his hands are tied. I want to close Gitmo, but both the Dems and GOP on Congress don't want me to, waaahh!
Thomas Sowell: There are no solutions, just trade-offs.
