Quote:Paul Ryan’s absolute greatest passion in life, the thing that drives him and underlies all of his work in public office, is destroying government programs for poor and low-income people. This was behind his 2005 push to privatize Social Security; it’s behind the budgets he released every single year from 2008 to 2014, which dramatically slashed everything from Medicare to Medicaid to food stamps; it’s behind his “poverty plan” that promised to block-grant food stamps and Medicaid and thus eliminate the federal guarantee that the poor won’t die from starvation or lack of medical care; it’s behind his proposal to take money away from poor disabled people and slap ineffective and vindictive work requirements on every program in sight.

Paul Ryan is a guy who, by his own recollection, has been dreaming of taking health care away from poor people since he was “drinking out of kegs,” and who makes his interns read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, an extended argument for the moral precept that poor people are stupid and lazy and do not deserve help from anybody. This person, on Friday, condemned Democrats for … not wanting to give health care to poor and middle-class children.

Let me be very, very clear. Paul Ryan is the speaker of the US House of Representatives. He has been speaker since October 29, 2015. That’s six months after the last time Congress funded the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Ryan has known, for his entire time as speaker, that funding for CHIP would expire on September 30, 2017. 

He had ample opportunities to address that. He could’ve reached out to President Obama and offered to extend it for several more years. He could have agreed to make it an entitlement, like Medicaid, whose funding does not have to be continually reauthorized. Obama, I guarantee you, would have leaped at the opportunity to permanently enshrine and fund a vital program that gives health care to 9 million poor and middle-class kids.

Ryan, if he were so passionate about CHIP, could have made its renewal a priority in 2017, under unified Republican control of government. He could have introduced a simple bill funding it for a few more years, or many more years, and brought it to a vote in the House. Democrats would have helped it easily evade a filibuster in the Senate.

Quote:This award was completely at odds with Ryan’s actual record in Congress, which had featured support for multiple rounds of budget-busting Bush tax cuts, Bush’s deficit-financed 2003 Medicare bill, his wars, and his TARP bank bailout. But the new Ryan was said to be a deficit visionary thanks to his 2010 budget framework, which outlined a long-term plan to reduce the budget deficit. Except as Jonathan Cohn wrote at the time, the plan relied entirely on magic asterisks — an unspecified tax reform that would bring revenue to 19 percent of GDP while increasing economic growth, unspecified cuts to domestic discretionary spending, and a bare assertion that Medicare cost growth could be greatly reduced through privatization, with no plan to explain how that would work.

After being tapped as Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012 and losing, Ryan decided that his fake budget plan had landed him with a reputation as being too mean-spirited. So by 2014, he was garnering gushing coverage from McKay Coppins and others for his newfound commitment to fighting poverty. Ryan’s newfound commitment to fighting poverty didn’t mean he disavowed his support for a large tax cut for the heirs to multimillion-dollar estates. Or his support for a large tax cut for the owners of businesses. Or his support for a large tax cut for high-income individuals. Or his support for reducing spending on poor children’s health care, housing, and nutrition assistance. Indeed, nothing about Ryan’s actual policy agenda of sharply lowering the material living standards of low-income people in order to finance regressive tax cuts had changed.

Quote:The Hill reported Thursday that Ryan forced out Conroy, who had been in the role for seven years. The news that Conroy had been pushed out was a surprise to many members who had thought that his retirement announced last week was voluntary.  Democratic lawmakers have said that they believe the reason that Conroy was pushed out was a prayer he gave that was perceived as critical of the GOP tax law.  

Conroy later echoed a similar sentiment in an interview with The New York Times. Some Catholic Republicans spoke up during the open-microphone portion of the meeting and pressed Ryan on his explanation. One of them was Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), who said he regularly spoke with Conroy and had never heard any of his colleagues complain about him.