(Photo: AP/Andrew Harnik)
It's said that one should never look a gift-horse in the mouth. But on Tuesday, Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, poised to take up the gavel of House speaker, deigned to inspect the teeth of his, claiming to find them not to his liking.
Now in what is likely his last week as speaker of the House, John Boehner announced a budget deal that, should it pass, will save the United States from defaulting on its debt. Almost immediately, Ryan expressed his consternation.
"I think the process stinks," Ryan told reporters. He continued, according to this report by Politico's Jake Sherman:
"This is not the way to do the people's business," Ryan said. "And under new management we are not going to do the people's business this way. We are up against a deadline-that's unfortunate. But going forward we can't do the people's business (this way). As a conference we should've been meeting months ago to discuss these things to have a unified strategy going forward."
It was a priceless bit of political theater, as the deal allows Ryan to begin his term as speaker without having to address an emergency for which the solution-no matter what shape it took-was destined to trigger more vitriol from the same right-wingers in the House who pushed Boehner from power, and who have the power to do the same to his successor.
The current speaker's parting gift to Ryan is a bill that will require a majority of Democratic votes to pass (in order to offset the expected substantial number of Republican defectors), making it a measure that no political leader seeking to mollify the right could afford to put forward.
As I write this, guesses vary wildly as to how many Republicans will ultimately vote for the deal. (Politico estimates a range of between 60 and 120.)
The bill contains its share of measures that right-wingers, inside and outside the tiny but mighty House Freedom Caucus, are inclined to dislike, including a measure that prevents Medicare premiums from taking a giant leap. But the major issue for the dissenters is the process by which the bill's contours were decided-one conducted in secret by Boehner, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and President Barack Obama. Committee chairs were not consulted, leading some, like Representative Mike Conaway of Texas, who leads the Agriculture Committee, to protest. (The budget deal includes a measure to cut costs in the federal crop insurance program.)
In response, Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, who chairs the Rules Committee, declared that he wouldn't mark up the bill until he knew more about it. Others complained that the two-day timeframe between the construction of the 144-page bill and the up-or-down vote scheduled for it left little room for examination.
All of that may be true, but there's a reason the deal had to be done this way, and Ryan knows it.
In a dysfunctional family, especially one with excitable members prone to irrational violence and hostage-taking, more reasonable members have no other way to move for the good of the family as a whole than to tiptoe in the dark, out of the ogres' view. Ryan knows this.
But it's the violence to the body politic that brought him to power-the economic violence of the billionaire Koch brothers, who propelled him to prominence by promoting his career through their Astroturf group, Americans for Prosperity; the political violence of the House Freedom Caucus, a mere 40 or so members of the Republican majority that exist solely to obstruct legislation aimed to enhance the common good.
And that's what makes Ryan's false earnestness all the more galling. In taking the criticism for having saved the U.S. from crisis and default, Boehner likely helped save the U.S. economy. In the process, he also necessarily enabled the prospective speakership of Paul Ryan. For all of that, one might expect Ryan to be grateful.
