Last night on his radio show Mark Levin explained why he believes Paul Ryan is not running for re-election, and it has everything to do with how he’s run the Congress since he became Speaker of the House.
Listen:
CNS News, who provided the audio, also transcribed his remarks:
“See, I don’t think that Paul Ryan is resigning because he’s tired of being Speaker and all the spin that’s out there. This spending bill that passed in March, around March 22, was disastrous for the country and the Republican Party because the people running for reelection cannot say they’re fiscal conservatives anymore, unless they voted against it.
“And so, they don’t have a lot to run on. They could run on tax cuts, but they can’t run on being fiscally serious people when they voted to spend more than Barack Obama ever proposed. They can’t run on repealing Obamacare this time because they didn’t. They repealed a very, very small part of it involving individuals, but that leaves 85 percent of the rest of the population of the country. And they wouldn’t repeal it.
“And then, of course, the southern border is not secure. They said they would secure it. They said they would support money for a wall. They supported money for everything, including Planned Parenthood, but there is no money for a new wall – none.
“And it reached the point, and we pointed it out on this program, where Paul Ryan was sounding like a leftist. He was into the class warfare argument when it came to the tax cuts.
“Now, I’ve talked to Paul Ryan from time to time – not lately, that’s for sure. He’s a very nice man. He’s a very nice man. And I do believe he’s a man of great integrity. I do not believe either of those things with Mitch McConnell. But Paul Ryan, as Speaker of the House, had a responsibility to do more than he did, and you cannot say that he had great accomplishments when, in fact, he did not.
“Obamacare is now here to stay, and we have now deficits going forward at a trillion dollars a year. The Congressional Budget Office, which is actually moderate to left when it comes to its predictions, is predicting come 2024 the interest on our debt will be bigger than spending on national defense – each year.
“The spending bills and the tax bills are to come out of the House of Representatives first. He had a working majority, but to the extent he did, he should have put down the left in his party, not the right. But that’s not what he did.”
Ryan has been a surprising disappointment, especially in the age of Trump. It all started with his mediocre Obamacare reforms that he tried to sell us as ‘repeal’ and, as Levin points out, his $1.3 trillion dollar Democratic spending bill that most Republicans refused to vote for.
Tax reform is his only claim to fame and even that’s not as good as it could have been.
So yeah, I think Levin has a strong point about why Ryan is really leaving.