Ryan Lyin' Weasel

One of the few amusements the Trump Error affords is reading accounts of awful people getting dressed down by an even more awful person. From Greg Sargent at The Post:

The New York Times reports that Trump erupted in a rage at Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and other Cabinet members over the alleged failure to make “progress towards sealing the border.” According to the Times, Trump also raged about the “continued failure of his administration to find a way to build a wall along the southern border.”

The Post adds more reporting, noting that Trump’s “blowup lasted more than 30 minutes.” His face “reddened” as he railed that Nielsen must “close down” the border and shouted: “We need to shut it down. We’re closed.”

Other outlets reported that Nielsen, who tried to explain the complexity of the border situation but was shouted down, “almost resigned” over Trump’s tirade, composing but not handing in a resignation letter.

Gary Cohn allegedly wrote but didn’t submit a resignation letter after Trump defended Nazis in Charlottesville. I guess the unsubmitted resignation letter is the cabinet/adviser version of “Ivanka privately opposes.”

In The Post, Sargent points out Paul Ryan’s towering hypocrisy on the immigration issue:

Vulnerable Republicans in the House are pushing a discharge petition that would force a vote on immigration bills, including two measures that would grant the dreamers legal status, one of them packaged with fortifications to border security. Seventeen Republicans have signed the petition, meaning that if organizers can get eight more, it would pass, since Dems will support it — forcing a full House vote on whether the dreamers will be protected or remain in limbo.

Ryan is trying to stop this from happening. He justifies this by claiming that there’s no sense in voting on measures protecting the dreamers that Trump would veto. As Ryan put it: “We actually would like to solve this problem, and that is why I think it’s important for us to come up with a solution that the president can support.”

But this is utter nonsense, because there isn’t any deal that Trump is willing to support that can pass Congress… Ryan is trying to prevent a vote to protect the dreamers precisely because such a measure could pass the House… A deal protecting the dreamers in exchange for border security would probably pass the House by a comfortable margin, and it might pass the Senate — after all, passage in the House would bring tremendous pressure on moderate Republican senators — especially if the White House didn’t actively lobby against it.

But Trump will not accept any deal to protect the dreamers, even though it could very likely pass both chambers, unless it also contains deep cuts to legal immigration. So if the House passed it, the White House would lobby the Senate against it, and if that failed, Trump would then have to veto it. Either of those would look horrible, because after House passage, suddenly protections for the dreamers would appear in reach. This is the spectacle that Ryan is trying to avert — all to protect Trump from having his true priorities revealed in all their ugly glory.

Ryan no longer has to worry about reelection or hanging onto the speaker’s gavel, but he’s willing to hold a fig leaf over Trump’s ugly bits. Why? Because the Republican Party hopes to stock the courts with more fanatics, enable corporations to pollute and despoil without regulatory oversight and slash programs and policies that benefit the vulnerable, and while Trump is a big, fat, embarrassing, racist baby-man, he’ll happily sign that shit if they call it a “win” for him.

Oh well. At least we won’t be subjected to paeans about Ryan’s wonkishness, fiscal rectitude and principled conservatism much longer since he’s gonna cut and run after this term expires. That day can’t come soon enough.

Lyin’ Ryan Is the Fig Leaf for Trump’s Racist Immigration AgendaPost + Comments (191)