I’ve read a number of articles on the right recently that mull over what Trump will do—will he preserve it or won’t he?—and a bunch more about the pernicious Republicans in Congress wanting to save it.

I won’t even bother to link to most of the articles; they’re easy enough to find. But this one is fairly typical, and it ends with a familiar sentiment: “It’s time to primary these Republicans. We did not elect them to provide amnesty.”

But I recall two things from way back when DACA was announced by President Obama.

The first is that much of the GOP opposition to it was based on the fact that any such action should have come from Congress and not the executive branch. In fact, a lot of people (myself included) were pretty incensed about that:

Nearly all Republicans in the House of Representatives (along with three Democrats) voted 224-201 to defund DACA in June 2013. Lead author of the amendment Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) stated, “The point here is…the President does not have the authority to waive immigration law, nor does he have the authority to create it out of thin air, and he’s done both with these Morton memos in this respect.”[20] However, in practice Congress does not have the ability to defund DACA since the program is almost entirely funded by its own application fees rather than congressional appropriations.

Although politicians are divided on immigration issues related to DACA, former presidential candidate Mitt Romney stated that he would honor the grants of deferred action approved under DACA until a more permanent legislation was put into place.

Under the presidency of Donald Trump, DACA has been under scrutiny, also in view of Trump’s earlier announcement during his candidacy that he intended to end that program.

Trump-supporting pundits are framing this as the GOP Congress vs. Trump (see this), with the double-crossing RINOs in Congress liking DACA and trying to stop Trump from ending it. But did Trump actually say he intended to end that program? Well, as with many issues, Trump said an awful lot of things about it (from August of 2016):

Anyone who has followed Trump knows that he’s been all over the place on immigration, both historically (pro-amnesty, pro-Dreamers) and even recently (touchback immigration, letting the “good ones” back in).

Here’s an article from December of 2016 on Trump and DACA:

President-elect Donald Trump has made many promises on immigration, including a new one Wednesday to “work something out” for the so-called Dreamers — young immigrants brought to the country illegally as children.

“We’re going to work something out that’s going to make people happy and proud,” Trump said in a Time magazine interview.

“They got brought here at a very young age, they’ve worked here, they’ve gone to school here. Some were good students. Some have wonderful jobs. And they’re in never-never land because they don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Trump had routinely pledged to get rid of President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, the executive action that temporarily shields young people from deportation if they are students, in the military or working, and are otherwise law-abiding.

Trump still pledges to do that. But now he’s also suggesting he would like to find some way to continue accommodating these young people in the United States.

Trump was always suggesting both things.

Which brings us to the the current GOP in Congress and their current position on DACA:

In addition to Ryan’s endorsement [for a Congressional solution rather than just an executive one], another conservative boost on Friday came from Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, a staunch conservative who has in the past supported immigration reform.

“I’ve urged the President not to rescind DACA, an action that would further complicate a system in serious need of a permanent, legislative solution,” Hatch said in a statement. “Like the President, I’ve long advocated for tougher enforcement of our existing immigration laws. But we also need a workable, permanent solution for individuals who entered our country unlawfully as children through no fault of their own and who have built their lives here. And that solution must come from Congress.”

According to an aide, Hatch called Trump Thursday to talk DACA. Hatch’s “focus was explaining to POTUS that rescinding now would make the situation more complicated, and Congress should take the lead on a permanent solution,” the aide said, adding: “Those talks are already happening.”

And the dread RINO Ryan has said this:

Ryan said Congress was working on a legislative fix to preserve the program.

“I actually don’t think he should do that,” Ryan said of Trump’s consideration of terminating the program. “I believe that this is something that Congress has to fix.”

The idea that this is a question for Congress has long been the conservative position, but although the legions of people on the right who distrust and oppose Ryan don’t know for sure what he’s contemplating or advocating regarding DACA, they are fairly certain that he is about to support a policy that’s pretty much the same as that of Obama, and that this is a potential betrayal. It is certainly very possible they are correct.

Ryan denies it:

Ryan has long been sympathetic to the plight of Dreamers. At a CNN town hall at the beginning of the year, Ryan was asked by a young woman protected under DACA whether he wanted her deported. He said he was working with the Trump administration and seeking a “humane solution.”

“What we have to do is find a way to ensure that you can get right with the law,” the speaker told the young woman.
Nevertheless, Ryan has also voted alongside Republicans for years in efforts to strip funding from deferred action or end it, and Ryan’s office emphasized he is not supportive of the executive version of the program.

Ryan spokeswoman AshLee Strong emphasized after the interview: “The speaker does not agree with President Obama’s DACA overreach. He believes it is Congress’s responsibility to set immigration law.”

It’s possible that Congress will “solve” the problem by approving a program that is pretty much like Obama’s. Or Congress may refine it to make it stricter. I doubt they will make it as Draconian as many on the right would like, though, and I think that will cause (or rather, exacerbate already-existing) anger. Or DACA reform may end up like Obamacare “reform”—that is, with the GOP unwilling or unable to get together enough to pass any bill at all. If that happens, then it’s possible that Trump will act on DACA—and my guess is that his actions will be on the moderate side and won’t please the more extreme right, either. However, I don’t think Trump’s hardcore supporters will turn on him no matter what he does on this issue.

What are the bills currently under consideration by Congress? My strong suspicion is that they represent slightly tightened-up versions of Obama’s DACA, and that there will be no mass deportations of people who came here as children and have lived here since then. It might be instructive at this point to review what DACA already is, so we’re clear on what we’re talking about:

To be eligible, illegal immigrants must have entered the United States before their 16th birthday and prior to June 2007, be currently in school, a high school graduate or be honorably discharged from the military, be under the age of 31 as of June 15, 2012, and not have been convicted of a felony, significant misdemeanor or three other misdemeanors, or otherwise pose a threat to national security. The program does not provide lawful status or a path to citizenship, nor does it provide eligibility for federal welfare or student aid.

In August 2012, the Migration Policy Institute estimated that as many as 1.76 million people could be eligible for DACA. Of those, 28% were under 15 and would have to wait until reaching that age to apply. In addition, roughly 20% did not meet any of the education criteria, but could become eligible by enrolling in a program before submitting their application. 74% of the eligible population was born in Mexico or Central America. Smaller proportions came from Caribbean and South America (11%), Asia (9%), and the rest of the world (6%).

Acceptance into DACA is not automatic, either, even if a person meets those requirements.

I don’t know about you, but these provisions themselves don’t upset me greatly; I was more upset about the way DACA was done through executive action. That doesn’t mean I’d be equally upset if Trump undid DACA by himself, because once something is done through executive action it ought to be possible to rescind it through executive action.

And actually, I’d prefer it was repealed (or at least restricted very greatly) by Congress. I think DACA represents a possible slippery slope to actual amnesty. Here’s a review of why Obama should not have done this through the mechanism of executive action. The piece adds some specific criticism of DACA’s provisions that points to some ways it might be tweaked to make it far better and much narrower:

The most obvious problem with DACA is that it is illegal. By unilaterally issuing work permits and deportation relief to a large class of illegal immigrants, President Obama effectively rewrote immigration law…

The second problem with DACA is that it harms working-class voters, the very people who put Trump over the top…

One might argue that many DACA recipients were already working, so it’s better if they have work permits. But giving work permits to illegal immigrants makes it possible for them to seek employment in almost any job, so the competition with less-educated natives will hit occupations that until now were mostly unaffected. Security jobs are a good example. The lobbies of all large offices and apartment buildings in America have security guards who at a minimum take the names of visitors and call police if there is a problem. These are $12- to $20-an-hour jobs that often come with benefits and that can pay even more depending on the security level. In cities across America, many of these workers are African-American men. Illegal immigrants typically cannot get such jobs because they require valid Social Security numbers and IDs and the ability to pass a background check. But with DACA, they now have these things…

Some DACA recipients do fit this sympathetic description, but the program applies to a much broader group of illegal immigrants. Based on the age and residency requirements, a 15-year-old can travel to the U.S. illegally, stay for five years, and then receive a work permit at the age of 20. Contrary to media portrayals, applicants need not identify as Americans or demonstrate any affinity for American culture…

Put simply, DACA is not a program that carefully considers the humanitarian case for individual applicants. It is a blunt instrument that protects some who can be described as sympathetic youth as well as a less sympathetic group who are more akin to ordinary illegal immigrants…

The only way some kind of DACA-like amnesty should even be considered by Congress is in the context of reducing overall immigration levels, perhaps attached to the Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment (RAISE) Act, introduced in revised form yesterday by Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue.

That whole article is worth reading. And surprise, surprise, it’s in the National Review.

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He certainly made such suggestions. But not only did he never say “don’t repeal it,” he explicitly promised many many times not only to repeal it, but to call on Congress and work with them to repeal it immediately as well as to replace it:

Trump is correct [when he claims that at] no point in time did he pledge to repeal and replace Obamacare in 61 or 64 days. Instead, he pledged to demand a repeal on Day One ”” even if it took a special session of Congress to make it happen. He pledged on several occasions to repeal it “immediately.” The message he conveyed to his voters was very much not that “this is something we will get to eventually” but that this was something that would come first on the agenda.

That WaPo article I just quoted goes on to offer many additional campaign statements of Trump’s to that effect. This one from September, 2016, is typically unequivocal, and it is not the only time Trump said as much:

On my first day I’m going to ask Congress to immediately send me a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare.”

Trump made many more campaign statements in that vein (some are listed in the article I linked). Now Trump is trying to back off from the fact that he made these promises (should I put the word “promises” in scare quotes?). However, Trump spoke often not only of Obamacare repeal/replace, but of the importance of doing it immediately.

Now, there are a lot of things a person could say about that if a person wanted to get Trump off the hook (not that Brian E. is doing that; I think he’s just explaining some of the specific things Trump said he wanted in the bill). A person could say that Paul Ryan also had a role in the recent bill and its haste, of course that’s correct. But that does not undo what Trump said, and the fact that he made it clear that this had to be done right away, and that he pushed the passage of this particular bill which was clearly inadequate and hasty.

A person could also say, “Oh, those statement were among things that Trump said but didn’t mean.” But it’s ex post facto rationalizing, a perfect way to justify making excuses for anything Trump said that doesn’t work out.

Or a person could say that Trump’s not a policy wonk, so he relied on Ryan to tell him the bill was a good one. But Trump had better have a mind of his own and the ability to judge such things—or have advisors who are independent of Congress who can explain such things to him so he can understand, or we are in deep trouble.

I’m sure there are other ways avid Trump supporters could spin this to absolve him of responsibility. Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan.

This particular defeat has many fathers, but one of them is Trump. I’ve long said that during the Trump presidency I will do my utmost to be fair to him. I will give credit where it’s due, and blame him when he deserves it. I intend to continue that path.

But I’d much rather he give me cause to give the credit.

The post Trump and the timing of the Obamacare reform attempt appeared first on The New Neo.

When a man whose entire candidacy and public standing is predicated on the myth that he is a winner has to face in every single moment a reminder that he is going to face one of the biggest, most humiliating losses in presidential history on the biggest stage imaginable, you better believe he will lash out. We cannot predict exactly the manner it will play out, but we have seen the embers already and they are ugly.

Well, yes. But that leaves out an important point, which is that this behavior is not new for Trump. And he’s not lashing out because he perceives he’s losing. In fact, I’m not even sure whether he does perceive he’s losing, because his narcissism may protect him from considering that possibility, and he will blame others rather than himself if it does happen.

As will many of his most fervent followers.

However, in addition to basing his candidacy on “being a winner,” he has also based it on his propensity to lash out. So of course, now that he is under greater stress in the stretch, that behavior is increasing. It’s what he knows, what he does, and what has given him his well-deserved reputation as a fighter. Many of his supporters very much like that about him: “He doesn’t play by those Marquess of Queensbury rules.”

No, he doesn’t. And one thing that article didn’t mention is the fact that one of the people Trump is lashing out at most vociferously and most often these days seems to be Paul Ryan. For example, this interview of Trump’s combines his dissing Ryan with an emphasis on knowing or not knowing “how to win,” and an assertion that he—Trump—will win (it was immediately preceded by Trump’s statement “Well, I don’t want to be knocking Paul Ryan…”):

When asked by ABC News’ Tom Llamas before a campaign event tonight in Green Bay, Wisconsin, whether he believed Ryan wanted him to win the race to the White House, Trump responded, “Well, maybe not, because maybe he wants to run in four years or maybe he doesn’t know how to win.”

“Maybe just doesn’t know how to win. I mean, who can really know. But I know I’m in his territory and they are all screaming for Trump,” Trump said, referring to the fact that his campaign event was in Ryan’s home state. “The head of the [state] Republican Party just left me. He shook my hand. He says, ‘You are gonna win Wisconsin.’ And I know one thing, we are gonna do very well here.”

Earlier, Trump “had called Ryan a ‘very weak and ineffective leader’ and claimed ‘there’s a whole sinister deal going on’ with Ryan and the Republican establishment.” It’s been a theme of Trump’s right along to criticize Republicans nearly as much as he has Democrats (maybe, at times, even more), and it’s one of his appeals to many of his supporters angry at the GOP and angry at anyone who doesn’t get on board the Trump train.

But here are my questions: if Trump really expects to become president (and let’s say he does), why would he want to lessen the number of Republicans in Congress? Why would he want to offend and alienate them? Does he not think he will need their help once he got in office? Does he think it would be easier to work with Democrats than Republicans? Or does he plan to circumvent Congress?

Or does he think about any of these things at all?

The post Trump on the ropes appeared first on The New Neo.

The reason? People in his district like him, they really really like him.

The post Paul Ryan wins his primary… appeared first on The New Neo.

Those days—ah, those days are gone. Since then (and I’m not sure when it began, but it wasn’t too long after that) Ryan has sunk like a stone with two groups: conservatives, and Trump supporters (not the same thing). The left, of course, can’t stand him; that’s a given. So seeing both right and left against him, I have long tried to ferret out the truth.

Yeah, I know. Good luck with that.

But I continue to attempt it, because I try not to judge people on the spin given them by left or right. Saturday’s post about what Ryan had really said about suing Trump was a good example of my efforts.

Now, this present post isn’t going to be a biography of Ryan. It isn’t even going to be a summary of what he has done or hasn’t done in the seven and a half months since he became Speaker. Those things would take a lot longer than the hour or so I’m going to spend writing this. But I want to discuss a comment that “snopercod” made today, because I think it’s both typical of attitudes towards Ryan and understandable as well, given the sort of coverage Ryan has had:

Neo asks:

“”¦did you ever wonder how much of your Ryan-hate was based on media spin and how much on reality?”

I ask that question to myself all the time. When confronted with an epistemological question, though, I always look at the results to determine who is lying to us. So far, Ryan is found wanting when it comes to results. The federal budget is still going up, Koskinen still hasn’t been impeached, and the U.S. is still spending Billions to build power plants in Africa and wind farms in Vietnam (corporate welfare for GE). I would love to change my assessment of Ryan; All it would take would be ONE small victory for conservatives ”“ just one little thing that I could look to as a sign that Ryan isn’t just another Boehner. Like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, I Am Waiting.

At the outset I will remind everyone that Ryan has been in office for not-quite eight months, and Congress is a notoriously slow engine. In addition, for bills to actually pass and become law, there’s a Senate that must be gotten through, as well as a Democratic president named Barack Obama with a veto pen and a phone—as he seldom tires of reminding us.

But let’s get back to snopercod’s comment. There are several issues here. The first is what snopercod would like to see Ryan have done—that is, snopercod’s agenda. On that, I will take the things he mentioned (which I’m sure are not inclusive) point by point. On the budget, I previously wrote this post—containing links that I’d recommend following or you won’t understand what I’m talking about—about Paul Ryan’s explanation for what happened with the budget and what some of his plans are for the future. I wonder how many people are familiar with what he said then, rather than what the MSM or many blogs on the right wrote about what they think he did or didn’t do and why.

Then there is the agenda for impeaching Koskinen, which is going forward. Probably not at a pace desired by those who would like Congress to be a speedier venue, but it’s going forward nevertheless, at least in the House (where Ryan resides). Instant gratification is not the sort of thing in which Congress specializes, and I repeat that Ryan has only been in office for a little less than eight months.

As for African power plants and Vietnamese wind farms, those are issues about which I know nothing and don’t have time to look into at the moment. But I think we can agree that dealing with whatever problems that might be involved with them has not been a big priority for the right within the last eight months, and Ryan is not a miracle worker who needs to quickly fulfill every single item on a particular voter’s legislative agenda.

Which brings us to the second big issue: what has Ryan actually accomplished? I wrote at length about one accomplishment that most people don’t even know about (or which they have minimized, if they do know about it), the fact that Obamacare was repealed by both House and Senate and then the repeal was vetoed by Obama.

In addition, Ryan’s plan is to vote on an Obamacare replacement. Now, coming up with a replacement plan is not easy, to say the least, and it’s been delayed much longer than I’d like to see. But that’s not surprising, either, considering the complexity of the issue and its contentiousness even among Republicans—and again, remember that Ryan has been in office not quite eight months. At any rate, yesterday this announcement was made:

Ryan and several key House committee chairmen believe they have finally come up with a concept and plan that could be used as the basis for the replacement of Obamacare, provided of course that Donald Trump succeeds President Obama in the White House and the Republicans can retain control of the House and Senate in the November general election.

The new plan set for release this week reportedly will include a refundable tax credit that could be used by low and moderate-income families or others who don’t have the benefit of employer-provided coverage to purchase health care insurance in the private market. One version getting a lot of attention provides a universal tax credit adjusted by age, so that the older you are the bigger the tax credit.

The proposed GOP tax credit would mark a significant departure from the refundable credit currently available under Obamacare, which is based on a sliding income scale and can only be used to subsidize the premiums on health care insurance plans purchased within state and federal Obamacare exchanges.

The proposal would also raise billions of dollars in revenue for the new program by imposing a cap on the federal tax exclusion on employer-based health insurance. Currently, premiums paid for employer-sponsored health insurance are excluded from taxable income. That reduces the amount that workers owe in income and payroll taxes by about $250 billion a year. The House Republican plan would substantially cut into that major tax break.

Read the whole thing if you’re interested. But it’s just a preliminary report, so wait till next week to see the actual proposal as announced (assuming, of course, that is is announced). My point is that this represents a lot of effort and must have been difficult and time-consuming to iron out, but that whether you approve or not it’s something that’s been going on under Ryan’s watch.

If you want to see other bills that have been passed, it’s not easy. There haven’t been many comprehensive articles on that, so you have to go to something like this site and try to separate the wheat from the chaff, knowing that for the most part the vast majority of bills passed by the House are going to be about something minor. But how many people have actually tried to find out—not relying on the MSM or blogs—what has been done under Ryan so far and what hasn’t? Very few, I’d imagine, because it takes way too much time and effort.

Which brings us to a third issue: future plans. How many people have familiarized themselves with Ryan’s detailed and oft-laid-out plans for future legislation? Probably not many, because it’s long and bor-ing to do so. But if you care to see what he’s got in mind—or at least what he says he’s got in mind—go here and start reading.

A lot of people, of course, have already soured on Ryan and don’t want to hear what he has to say. They have already dismissed him because he didn’t do what they wanted, and he didn’t do it fast enough, and what he did (repealing Obamacare, if they even know that happened) didn’t matter because Obama vetoed it. So I’d ask them a question: what should he have done, and not just “what” but “how”? How might he have accomplished it, and please be realistic? If your answer to everything is “shut down the government”—well, I don’t think that would have worked, because I think it would have only resulted in greater Democratic power and popularity and an Obama stonewall. That’s an old question that we can debate ad nauseam (and have already), so I’m just acknowledging it here without getting too deeply into it.

What I see is that people are impatient, annoyed, frustrated, all too ready to lay blame. And I’m not saying there isn’t blame to be laid. I’m frustrated and annoyed, too. My goal here—as I’ve said before—is not to be some Ryan shill. But if I’m going to blame him—and I’m willing to do so because I have no dog in the Ryan race—I want to do so for reasons that are actually based on reality rather than propaganda. I see so much propaganda from left and right, and so much vulnerability to it (yes, the right is just as vulnerable as the left), that I feel compelled to at least raise these questions.

I’ll give the last word to The Atlantic, which published an article somewhat related to this theme. The Atlantic staff is hardly a bunch of Ryan-supporters, of course, but they make a good point here, and not just about Ryan but about a lot of Republicans this election cycle:

Except that, thus far, Ryan’s beloved agenda””the one his wonkish heart has been dreaming of and laboring over and counting on to define his speakership””has been something of a PR bust, yet another sad casualty of this election cycle’s Trumpsanity.

Just look at what happened at the rollout of the agenda’s first plank: Ryan’s pet anti-poverty plan. The speaker and seven colleagues crossed the Anacostia River to commune with the impoverished, overwhelmingly minority residents from the “bad” side of Washington. But after all the speechifying, the only thing reporters wanted to talk about was Donald Trump’s latest outrage, regarding the Mexican heritage of Judge Gonzalo Curiel. And so the big news to come rolling out of the event was Ryan’s “textbook” racism comment.

“The first six questions were about Trump,” AshLee Strong, Ryan’s spokesman recalled to me. The leader’s office has come to expect that sort of thing, she admitted. “Still, it seemed like an odd time to be hammering at Trump.”

For the second rollout (theme: national security), Ryan wasn’t taking any chances. He held the June 9 event at the Council on Foreign Relations, and lawmakers did not take questions from the press, only members of the council. But even then (and despite Ryan’s best efforts), the topic du jour was Trump, and the news stories to emerge focused not on the difference between Republicans’ governing vision and a Democratic one””which is kinda the whole point of the “A Better Way” theme””but on the gulf between Ryan and his own party’s presidential nominee…

There’s more, but you get the idea.

This actually isn’t Trump’s fault, not really. It’s the media, it’s the public, and it’s just the way of the world and in particular of the press. Someone like Trump gets our attention, whereas sober policy does not. Someone like Trump can be easily spun to reflect poorly on Republicans and it’s something people will read, whereas Ryan talking about how he wants to fix things presents more of a challenge. Is there any wonder the Trump news drowns out the Ryan news? Is it any wonder that the Ryan news, when covered at all, is often covered in such a way that it will hurt him with both left and right?

The post Who is Paul Ryan and why do all these people hate him? appeared first on The New Neo.

QUESTION: Speaker Ryan, you said that Donald Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims coming into the country was not (inaudible). Chairman McCaul has said that (inaudible) rhetoric (inaudible) helps the recruiting of ISIS. Was Donald Trump wrong to double-down on his Muslim…

Paul D. Ryan: No, I stand by my remarks. I’ll bet you do, too, as well. I do not think a Muslim ban is in our country’s interest. I do not think it is reflective of our principles not just as a party, but as a country. And I think the smarter way to go in all respects is to have a security test and not a religious test.

QUESTION: Constitutionally, do you think Donald Trump, if he were president, could enact a ban on (inaudible)?

Paul D. Ryan:That’s a question — that’s a question about immigration law. And you can go into the 1952 Immigration and Naturalization Act to determine whether or not the president has that kind of discretion of not.

No threat to sue there. The lawsuit remark occurred in a HuffPo interview two days later:

In a sit-down interview in his ceremonial Capitol Hill office on Thursday, Ryan told The Huffington Post that Trump does not have “a blank check” with his endorsement. “I don’t know what that line is,” Ryan said, “but right now, I want to make sure that we win the White House.”

So, what he is saying is that even a Republican president cannot just do whatever he wants; that the imperial presidency needs checking on either side, but that his priority is to get a Republican president in the White House.

He continued:

On the topic of Trump’s proposed Muslim ban and his statements that he could enact such a policy without Congress, Ryan noted that Republicans were releasing part of their agenda on executive overreach that very day, and, in news that’s sure to please Trump, Ryan suggested that he and the House of Representatives were prepared to sue a Republican president if need be.

“I would sue any president that exceeds his or her powers,” Ryan said.

It’s unclear, however, if Ryan thinks Trump enacting a ban on Muslims entering the country would actually exceed presidential powers. “That’s a legal question that there’s a good debate about,” Ryan said, pointing to the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act.

So as far as I can see, it’s later writers who have been suggesting that Ryan said he’d sue Trump over Muslim immigration and then claimed to not be sure if a Muslim ban violates the law. But Ryan does not appear to have said that at all, at least not so far as I can tell from rather lengthy research trying to get a copy of the actual interview text (if you can find one, please let me know). What I see here is probably a clever piece of suggestive writing by the HuffPo author, suggesting that Ryan said what he said about executive overreach in a discussion “on the topic of Trump’s proposed Muslim ban and his statements that he could enact such a policy without Congress.” What appears to have happened, as best I can reconstruct amidst the twists and spin, is that it was the interviewer who was discussing Trump’s Muslim ban, and Ryan countered by saying he reserved the right to sue any president for executive overreach, and that Congress agrees, and that it is not at all clear that Trump’s Muslim ban would be a case of executive overreach. But it seems that some conservatives fell into the “Ryan is an anti-Trump POS” trap.

What does Ryan appear to have actually said? I would love to get my hands on a transcript to determine that, but from what I’ve read it appears that he said what I’ve just summarized him as having stated. I would think most conservatives would agree with his general statement on restricting executive overreach when it occurs—unless they want a dictator who is our dictator, but then I wouldn’t think the word “conservative” should apply. As far as a ban on Muslim immigration goes, Ryan has expressed disagreement with it and prefers an ideologically-based ban (I am in agreement with that idea of a ban based on ideology, and have been for quite some time; see this post from last December).

This incident has been reported, however—and later spread around the blogosphere—as though Ryan had said something like “I disagree with Trump’s ban on Muslims and if he does anything of the sort I’ll sue him—and by the way I have no idea whether what he is proposing is legal or not.” What he apparently did say is more like this, “I disagree with Trump’s Muslim ban and I’d prefer a ban on certain ideologies,” and on a separate occasion: “I want a GOP president, but I’m prepared to sue one if he oversteps, as I would sue a Democrat who oversteps. But on the Muslim ban question, that needs researching because it may or may not be overstepping.”

Talking Points Memo, a blog on the left, titled its article about this, “Paul Ryan On Stopping A President Trump’s Muslim Ban: We’ll Sue Him!” That’s what they want you to think Ryan said. TPM almost certainly knows that pro-Trump and anti-Ryan blogs and pundits will pick up on it and spread the word around as though that’s what Ryan said, and that it will become accepted as truth. I’ve seen the right fall for this type of ploy many many many times: picking up on the spin of the left about someone on the right, and reacting in rage.

Look, you can hate Paul Ryan all you want, but hate him for something he actually did or said, not what the left says he said. And if you can find something from his own mouth that contradicts my reconstruction here of what actually happened, please present it. My goal is finding the truth rather than repeating the spin of others, or protecting or attacking Paul Ryan. I would hope that’s your goal, too.

[NOTE: One other related issue was discussed in the comments section recently. There were quite a few comments on the general subject, but I’ll stick to an exchange I had with commenter “Frog,” who brought up the Paul Ryan lawsuit question here by writing:

Paul (the goat from Janesville) Ryan says “We” will sue Trump as POTUS if he exceeds what the goat believes allowable about Muslims and Mexico. He sure hasn’t sued Hussein yet.

My answer can be found here. At the time I wrote my reply to Frog, I had not yet found the original articles about Ryan and the lawsuit and what he said, and did not yet realize that Ryan had not actually threatened to sue Trump because of the Muslim ban. In my reply to Frog, I pointed out that Ryan was indicating a disagreement with any process that meant a president would be exceeding his powers. And then I took up the question of whether Ryan, as Frog wrote, “sure hasn’t sued Hussein [Obama] yet,” and the history of that:

Paul Ryan has been Speaker only since Oct. 29, 2015, which is about seven and a half months. But his predecessor—a man you probably detested as well, John Boehner—has sued Obama. The topic had to do with the same issue, executive action that was inappropriate and a violation of the separation of powers.

The history of the first Boehner lawsuit is here (it had to do with Obamacare). Then in 2015 Boehner said he planned to sue Obama again, this time for executive overreach on immigration. But (at least as far as I can determine) before it got to the Senate, the lawsuits by Texas and 25 other states against Obama got an injunction (in Feb. of 2015), and so Congress’ lawsuit was put on hold.

In addition, in late February 2016, Paul Ryan threatened to sue Obama if he closes Gitmo:

“We are making legal preparations if the president tries to break the law,” Ryan said on Wednesday.

The Wisconsin Republican said what “boggles” his mind is that Obama would be directing the military to knowingly break the law by transferring prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to U.S. prisons in an effort to close the detention center.

“Our law is really clear,” Ryan said, adding that it was Democrats who first wrote the language barring detainees from coming to American soil.

So, Boehner sued Obama over questions of presidential power re Obamacare, and came close to suing over the same issue with immigration but appears to have stopped because other lawsuits resulted in an injunction. Since Ryan has become Speaker, which was fairly recently late last October, he has threatened to sue Obama over the same issue of limiting presidential power, this time regarding closing Gitmo. This was a direct and specific threat to Obama by Ryan over that issue, unlike his very general recent statement reserving the right to sue a Republican president who overstepped, as well, the one that was spun by the liberal media into a specific threat to sue Trump over a specific issue.

By the way, Ryan’s threat to sue Obama over any executive order to close Gitmo may have worked, because (if you can believe Obama, which is always iffy) the White House indicated four days ago that Obama will not issue such an executive order.]

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How is Klein wrong? Let me count the ways. One:

The real power in American politics resides in Congress, not in the presidency.

People say the president has the power to set the agenda, and it’s true. But presidents only set agendas they think Congress might pass, or at least consider. The president leads ”” but only where he thinks Congress will follow.

It’s Congress that writes bills and Congress that passes them. It’s Congress that can spend money and declare war. Congress, with a sufficient majority, could govern aggressively without the president’s cooperation ”” they simply need to overturn his vetoes.

“Simply?” Does Klein have a clue how many times in the 20th-21st centuries the Republican Party has had enough members of Congress to override a Democratic president’s vetoes without a very significant number of Democrats joining in? I’ll give him the answer: Zero. Usually when a party is very strong in Congress—and that party is usually the Democratic Party—the president has been from the same party. FDR’s Congresses are an excellent example of the latter phenomenon—they were overwhelmingly Democratic, but FDR was a Democrat, too.

The three times Democrats have been really close to controlling 2/3 of Congress when a Republican is president, and have only needed a small number of Republicans to join them in order to override a presidential veto, have been during the Ford administration (Ford, having been appointed, was an atypical president), the latter years of Reagan’s administration, and during Bush 1’s term (the Democratic majority was stronger in the House than the Senate for both Reagan and Bush I). If you want to see which vetoes by presidents have been overridden by Congress, take a look at this chart, which indicates it’s much more common to override vetoes by Republican presidents than by Democratic ones.

Two:

Conversely, there’s little the president can do without congressional cooperation. When the president proposes an agenda that Congress refuses to consider then, like the tree in the forest, no one really cares whether it makes a sound. Anyone remember the health-reform plan that was the centerpiece of President George W. Bush’s 2006 State of the Union?

I guess that used to be true. In general (although not always), presidents had more respect for the principle of separation of powers, and more fear of what the public would do if they overstepped the usual bounds. Obama has demonstrated no such concerns. He has explicitly said, over and over, if Congress doesn’t do it, he will. And that’s exactly what he’s done.

Three:

[Paul] Ryan doesn’t want to be team captain [i.e. president]. He wants to be the guy preparing the legislation the next Republican president will sign into law.

At least Klein acknowledges a bit of reality here: it would take a Republican president for the Republican Congress to get anything accomplished. If a Democrat is elected, Paul Ryan can plan all he wants but his plans will probably come to naught. What are the chances of a Republican being elected? I doubt Klein thinks they’re very good.

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I’ve previously discussed Obama’s excuse for insulting Paul Ryan to his face:
‘

Obama seems to like to dress people down publicly; humiliating someone and watching him/her squirm (or try to suppress the squirm) is another way to assert power over another person and to feel superior oneself…I don’t actually believe Obama didn’t know about Ryan’s attendance [at the speech where Obama insulted him].

But at the time I wrote that, I was unaware that Ryan was sitting in the front row for the speech in question. That means that Obama has had to do some pretty tricky dancing in order to avoid admitting the fact that of course he knew Ryan was there when he made the speech. Let’s take a look at how he did it:

I’ll go ahead and say it—I think that I was not aware when I gave that speech that Jack [sic] Ryan was going to be sitting right there. And so I did feel, in retrospect, had I known—we literally didn’t know he was going to be there until—or I didn’t know, until I arrived. I might have modified some of it so that we would leave more negotiations open, because I do think that they felt like we were trying to embarrass him. We made a mistake.

As Ann Althouse points out, the first red flag is the word “think” in the phrase “I think that I was not aware.” It’s a very odd construction under the circumstances; people don’t speak like that unless they’re trying to fool the listener, or unless they’re remarkably inattentive to their own thought processes. He thinks he was not aware? Obama was either aware or not aware, and he’s the only one who would know it, outside his inner circle. If it was an aide who invited Ryan to attend the speech (as previously alleged), and Obama was not informed beforehand, then that’s something he should remember and not just “think” he remembers. It should have been a huge shock when he saw Ryan sitting there.

But it goes way beyond that. The reference to Jack Ryan instead of Paul Ryan is telling in the Freudian sense. I’m no Freudian, but that’s quite a slip; Jack Ryan is the guy Obama was running against in Illinois whose seamy divorce records were conveniently unsealed (either independently, or as a result of some string-pulling by Obama allies).

Obama says he was unaware of Ryan’s presence “when I gave that speech.” But even if Obama was unaware of Ryan’s presence before he took the podium, if Ryan was sitting in the front row, Obama became aware “when he gave that speech.” And if he was unaware under such circumstances, then he is extraordinarily and pathologically out of it.

Obama then contradicts himself and says first that “we” didn’t know beforehand (that would probably include his staff, unless he’s using the royal we). Then he catches himself, perhaps because he recalls that in the Woodward book the author says that Ryan was specifically invited to the speech by Obama staffers. So Obama corrects himself and says “I” didn’t know—“until I arrived.”

So, which is it, Barack? Did you not know when you gave the speech, or did you become aware when you arrived?

Obama then goes on to add what I think is his most curious statement of all: he acts as though he had no power whatsoever to change his speech once he saw Ryan sitting there. Perhaps he’s correct. After all, his reliance on prepared remarks and the teleprompter is legendary. Even had he wanted to temper his remarks (which I do not for a moment believe), are we really to understand that he had no ability to ad lib and override his own speechmakers, and was forced to insult a man sitting in front of him because Obama is a preprogrammed robot who cannot adjust to circumstances?

Now, that’s quite an admission.

You may have noted that I have a higher-than-usual degree of anger about this particular incident, even though it’s really a very small one in the scheme of things. Don’t a lot of politicians do this sort of thing? Yes. But Obama does it more blatantly, more arrogantly, and more consistently, with an incredibly inappropriate air of his own self-righteousness—and in large part he gets away with it.

The post Obama and the Ryan-insult excuse: all you ever needed to know about Obama… appeared first on The New Neo.

It seems to me he’s making an awful lot of assumptions without illustrating them, and assuming we share them. He says that those who dismiss the Democratic convention as “relatively meaningless” are “fooling themselves,” but he never offers any evidence whatsoever that the convention itself is meaningful or has influenced anything.

He indicates that Republicans don’t seem to be aware of how leftward the nation has gone, but my impression is that they are very aware. And very concerned; I don’t know a single conservative who isn’t. Who’s Kurtz hanging out with? Not the folks at neo-neocon.

Kurtz blames Romney for keeping the gloves on:

Only the Romney campaign can cut through the cultural, educational, and media filters and force a debate over the Obama Democrats’ bogus redefinition of the American dream. The media can ignore what conservatives say, but they still have to cover the candidate. With the exception of his welfare ads, however, the Romney campaign has avoided an assault on Obama’s ideology. Romney’s entirely plausible strategy is to downplay the ideological battle (Ryan nomination notwithstanding).

Again, I must disagree. Why dismiss the Ryan nomination as being of no import? And the very hard-hitting Ryan speech at the convention? Has Kurtz missed where Romney pretty much called Obama a liar? And speeches such as this one?:

At the Republican convention, speaker after speaker talked about the growth of big government under the Democrats. Sure, they didn’t use the “leftist” word for Obama (at least, I don’t recall them doing so), which seems to be one of Kurtz’s beefs. It’s not one of mine; I don’t think that approach would resonate with most Americans who need to be persuaded. But the days of “Obama is a nice guy” are long gone, although on occasion Romney may continue to utter that phrase (which is basically condescending, if you think about it). But “Obama is a nice guy in over his head” is not the theme of the Romney campaign.

I think you’ll see plenty more hard-hitting ads and speeches from Romney/Ryan before Election Day that attack (sometimes more subtly than Kurtz would like) Obama’s ideology. Whether the American public is too far to the left to hear or care remains to be seen.

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Witness Maureen Dowd’s latest column on the man, which is a good example of the growing genre that one might call the Picture of Dorian Gray mode of Ryan critique.

Did you know that Ryan’s a hater? Yes indeed, as described by no less an authority than (as Dowd admiringly writes):

…Tom Morello, the Grammy-winning, Harvard-educated guitarist for the metal rap band Rage Against the Machine, [who] punctured Paul Ryan’s pretensions to cool in a Rolling Stone essay rejecting R&R (Romney ’n’ Ryan) as R&R (rock ’n’ roll).

Morello’s statements in his role as (Harvard-educated!) political commentator were apparently important enough not only for Rolling Stone to publish, but for Dowd to highlight at the beginning of her NY Times column:

[Ryan] is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades,” Morello writes, adding: “I clearly see that Ryan has a whole lotta ”˜rage’ in him: A rage against women, a rage against immigrants, a rage against workers, a rage against gays, a rage against the poor, a rage against the environment. Basically, the only thing he’s not raging against is the privileged elite he’s groveling in front of for campaign contributions.”

Dowd goes on to evoke the many ghosts of hated GOP VP-nominees past. Ryan’s like Sarah Palin because he uses the word “awesome.” He’s like Dan Quayle because he’s young enough to be Romney’s son, as Quayle was to Bush senior. And he’s like Dick Cheney because he sounds reasonable but that’s merely an example of “la belle indifférence, or “the beautiful calm” of hysterical people” (and note that Dowd uses the term in a manner that demonstrates an almost total ignorance of what it actually means; see this].

And then there’s the usual reverse-racist crap du jour about “white guys,” so popular in these enlightened days:

Republicans find the tableau of two rich white guys ”” same shirts, different generations ”” comforting.

Actually, it’s Democrats like Maureen who find it comforting to think so.

It’s often said that conservatives believe liberals are stupid but liberals believe conservatives are evil. If Paul Ryan is one of the most conservative members of Congress, ergo he must be one of the most evil, even if his demeanor and words and personality and history project nothing of the sort. But that’s the beauty of it, according to Dowd, whose last paragraph begins this way:

Beyond the even-keeled Ryan mien lurks full-tilt virulence.

Full-tilt virulence, thy name is Dowd.

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