By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog
A ‘supermajority‘ of the conservative House Freedom Caucus is reportedly backing Paul Ryan for speaker, Save Jerseyans, including the fiercely-independent Justin Amash, explaining “Paul is a policy entrepreneur who has developed conservative reforms dealing with a wide variety of subjects, and he has promised to be an ideas-focused speaker who will advance limited government principles and devolve power to the membership.”
Former Prosecutor Trey Gowdy recently opined that “[i]f I had one draft choice and I was starting a new country, I would draft Paul to run it.”
But you’re still going to hear the Wisconsin superstar decried as a RINO today on social and new media. Why? Because Al Sharpton isn’t the only politico who makes money off of keeping people irrationally and unproductively angry. They’re on our side of the aisle, too, sad as it is to say. On the radio. On the Internet. In Super PACs. And they actually LOSE money if the GOP wins.
So screw’em. I’m not listening to them anymore nor should you.
To be fair, not all Ryan skeptics or outright-opponents are operating off of (or actively peddling) bad information. They’re conservatives of good faith and intentions who are sick and tired of losing. They want to HEAR our arguments and have confidence that leadership will fight for them. So much so that they’re willing to turn to men of very questionable ideological consistency, like Donald Trump and Ben Carson, in this time of national crisis. And they didn’t fall in love with Paul Ryan’s bookish debut in 2012 to make things a little more complicated.
What these particular dissidents really want, I’ll submit, is an end to the two-party system.
Do you? George Washington may’ve preached against the formation of political parties but we’ve always had them, since the beginning of America, and with the notable exception of the pre-Civil War run-up and Ross Perot, there have almost always been two. It’s how we roll. And in a pluralistic, huge nation of 300+ million souls, I’d argue there are much worse organizing principles. Can we expect to maintain the unity of a continent with Green, La Raza, White Supremacist, and Christian Democrat parties beating each other to a pulp in the lower chamber? I wouldn’t bet on it.
My plea to this second class of anti-Ryan folks, the ones who don’t fit neatly or at all into either the category of “child” or “pied piper,” is to reflect upon the realities of our system and what it is they TRULY want out of the speaker election process.
Prefer a European-style parliamentary system? Okay; be ideologically honest about it and say so!
But if you agree with me that the two-party system is valuable, and should you further concur that a split resulting in Hillary Clinton’s election is NOT a preferable outcome for the country, then please accept that a two-party system is never going to yield a speaker, or a president, with whom you agree 100% of the time. It’s just not possible. In fact, if you think it happens by accident, you’re probably not scrutinizing him or her nearly closely enough!
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Am I supposed to be happy that a person endorsed by the White House, Pelosi, Reid, and Luis Gutierrez will become the Speaker? That, to please the Crown Prince of the Chamber, the rules by which the Speaker can be recalled will be changed? Matt, get off your partisan horse already. “Us vs them” is not about conservatives, RINOs and Democrats, it’s about the Capitol and the rest of the districts.
Has he walked back his amnesty support? Or his support for the Ex-Im bank? Does he still want all of his weekends off, because the GOP kind of needs the fundraising at that level. And making it harder to remove the speaker? We complain about the “imperial presidency” and yet limiting the ability to bring a motion to remove would set up an “imperial speakership.”