\u00a0By Matthew Vadum
\nAmerican Thinker<\/p>\n
Contrary to Republican establishment propaganda, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is not reliably conservative. \u00a0He has strayed so far from the conservative mainstream that his recent voting record alone ought to instantly disqualify him from consideration as the next speaker of the House.<\/p>\n
He is the wrong man at the wrong time.\u00a0 If Ryan ends up wielding the speaker’s gavel, the low-intensity civil war bubbling in the Grand Old Party may quickly go nuclear.<\/p>\n
And the fact that Ryan wants to make veteran Beltway lobbyist David Hoppe his chief of staff in the speaker’s office should concern conservatives.\u00a0 Ryan describes his fellow Wisconsinite as “a foot soldier in the conservative movement,” but Hoppe also reportedly “has a record of working across the aisle” when working across the aisle means working against conservatives.\u00a0 As the Washington Examiner reports<\/a>:<\/p>\n He currently serves as a senior advisor to the Bipartisan Policy Center, a nonprofit founded by former Senate Majority Leaders Howard Baker and Bob Dole, both Republicans, and Tom Daschle and George Mitchell, both Democrats, in 2007 to foster cooperation between congressional Democrats and Republicans.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Well, that’s one way of putting it.<\/p>\n The Bipartisan Policy Center is a think-tank that leans left. \u00a0(In fairness, it is not as radical as John Podesta’s Center for American Progress or the downright kooky Institute for Policy Studies.)\u00a0 BPC’s star attractions, former Sens. Daschle and Mitchell, are obvious left-wingers; Baker, who passed away last year, did serve in the Reagan White House but only after losing to the Gipper; and George H.W. Bush in the 1980 primaries and the retired 92-year-old Dole weren\u2019t exactly \u201csevere\u201d conservatives, as Mitt Romney might put it.\u00a0 In other words, there are currently no inspirational conservative figureheads to look up to at this so-called bipartisan think-tank.<\/p>\n BPC president and co-founder Jason Grumet is an Ivy Leaguer who served as a senior advisor on energy and environmental issues for Obama’s 2008 campaign.\u00a0 The month before Obama trounced John McCain, Grumet bragged that the would-be administration “would initiate those rulemakings” needed to classify carbon dioxide, the gas essential to plant life that you breathe out of your lungs, as a dangerous pollutant in need of a crackdown.<\/p>\n BPC, which in 2005 hailed the advent of carbon emissions trading as “the auspicious intersection of climate change science and business imperative,” is underwritten by the Joyce Foundation<\/a>.\u00a0 Barack Obama used to serve on Joyce’s board, and the foundation funded the so-called school reform initiatives of unrepentant terrorist and Obama buddy Bill Ayers.\u00a0 BPC is also funded by well-endowed pillars of the left-wing philanthropic establishment, including the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (the MacArthur “Genius Award” people), the Rockefeller Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Carnegie Corp. of New York, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation.<\/p>\n Suffice it to say that having someone like Hoppe as Ryan’s chief enforcer isn’t something that should comfort conservatives.<\/p>\n Students of politics know that Ryan has long benefited from his reputation as a conservative, but the question that needs to be asked is, conservative compared to what<\/em>?\u00a0 In recent years, at least, his reputation has been undeserved.\u00a0 Ryan is a conservative only in the dual sense that he supports the status quo and that his policy objectives and votes in the House of Representatives are to the right of the overwhelmingly left-wing and radical left-wing members of the media-entertainment-academia complex.<\/p>\n When it comes to actually doing things instead of just flapping one’s lips, Ryan is somewhere between a liberal and a mushy moderate.\u00a0 In choosing a successor to John Boehner (R-Ohio), it is essential that Ryan be judged by his actual deeds, not just by his public image.<\/p>\n Whether Ryan is a RINO depends on where you sit.\u00a0 As a colleague reminds me daily \u2013 no, make that hourly \u2013 the RINO epithet is not primarily an ideological descriptor.\u00a0 A “Republican In Name Only” is first and foremost a self-identified Republican who refuses to fight.\u00a0 For example, no serious person would argue that Rudy Giuliani, who is out of step with most Republicans on abortion and gun control, is a RINO.\u00a0 Rudy, who is willing to take the fight to his adversaries, is about as tough as they come.<\/p>\n Ryan is certainly no wimp.\u00a0 He definitely has a lot of fight in him. \u00a0But on issues of importance, he’s regularly working against conservative goals.<\/p>\n Plenty of pundits have succumbed to Ryan’s undeniable charms, swearing up and down that Mitt Romney’s 2012 running mate is a red-blooded conservative.\u00a0 For example, RINO thought leader Peter Wehner of Commentary, lambastes as “ludicrous” the assertion that Ryan is not conservative:<\/p>\n Ryan is among the most articulate and effective conservatives in American politics.\u00a0 On issue after issue \u2013 taxes, health care, school choice, abortion, the Second Amendment, welfare, defense spending, and more \u2013 Ryan is undeniably conservative.\u00a0 Moreover, the budgets Representative Ryan has produced are the most ambitious and far-reaching efforts to re-limit government that any Republican has ever produced.<\/p>\n And in the areas where Ryan is supposed to be a heretic \u2013 including free trade and immigration \u2013 Ryan is where Ronald Reagan was.\u00a0 It\u2019s Ryan who represents Reagan-style conservatism, not his critics.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It is undeniably true that Ryan is very conservative, but only by Beltway standards.\u00a0 In the real America outside Washington, D.C., you have to do something to advance conservative policies to be a real conservative.\u00a0 Being a conservative de facto<\/em> is more important than being a conservative de jure<\/em>.\u00a0 Deeds matter more than words.<\/p>\n As for Ryan supposedly inheriting the mantle of Reaganism, Wehner proffers a slippery argument, invoking “presentism,” which in this case consists of applying the standards of today to the political realities Reagan faced upon taking office in 1981.\u00a0 Reagan was every bit as populist and radical and opposed to big business and crony capitalism as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and the holdouts in the congressional Freedom Caucus who aren’t endorsing Ryan for speaker \u2013 and even more reviled by the Republican Party’s establishment at the time.\u00a0 Reagan attacked the country club wing of the party and secured only a tiny handful of endorsements from GOP officeholders.<\/p>\n In other words, it doesn’t necessarily matter where Reagan “was” when he was president.\u00a0 Things were different back then.\u00a0 Reagan even admitted he got tricked into supporting an immigration amnesty.\u00a0 And back in the sixties, when Reagan was governor of California, he did some things that didn’t please conservatives.\u00a0 But Reagan’s fabulously successful movement was the precursor of today’s Tea Party movement, and it must be viewed in the context of his time.<\/p>\n It is certainly true that Ryan talks a good game.\u00a0 He’s a strong communicator and a good debater, and unlike Democrats, he actually understands math and is not waging a scorched-earth war against it.\u00a0 At times his rhetoric can be inspiring.\u00a0 He comes across as a really good guy \u2013 and he probably really is one.\u00a0 He seems like a solid conservative, at least on the surface.<\/p>\n But as conservative Republicans are painfully aware, talk is cheap.\u00a0 Believing in and advocating the right ideas aren’t enough, especially in this Obama-created era of moral darkness and relativism.<\/p>\n Fighting for the right ideas is a key distinction between conservative Republicans and Republicans In Name Only.\u00a0 RINOs won’t fight for the conservative beliefs they claim to hold, so they become experts at lying.\u00a0 To remain in power, they have to be adept at fooling the party’s base into believing they are serious, committed conservatives.\u00a0 They get away with it most of the time because even among the better-informed members of the base, not too many assiduously track how lawmakers vote.<\/p>\n RINOs excel at paying lip service to conservative stances.\u00a0 When pressed, they rain down a blizzard of excuses for why Republicans can’t do the right thing: we don’t have the majority we need; we don’t have the super-majority we need; we don’t have both houses of Congress; we don’t have the White House; we don’t have the Supreme Court; and so on.\u00a0 And then there are the whispered and unspoken excuses of the cowardly: we don’t want to be called racist or mean or the Party of No, and we don’t want to alienate women or Latinos or blacks or illegal aliens who will be voters one day.<\/p>\n If Paul Ryan isn’t a RINO, he at least has some powerful RINO tendencies.<\/p>\n When Ryan votes in the House of Representatives, which is what the people of the first congressional district in the southeastern tip of Wisconsin sent him to Washington to do,\u00a0 his mask falls away.<\/p>\n Ryan currently receives<\/a> a “Liberty Score” of just 58 percent from the Conservative Review website, which corresponds to a failing grade of “F.”\u00a0 In the Senate, Majority Whip John Cornyn<\/a> (R-Texas), the fellow who, under the leadership of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), routinely arm-twists and cajoles his fellow senators into pre-emptive surrender to President Obama and the Democrats, rates 57 percent.\u00a0 On Heritage Action’s scorecard, Ryan rates<\/a> just 56 percent as of Oct. 22.<\/p>\n Without recourse to emotive language, Conservative Review’s profile of Paul Ryan<\/a> concludes that his congressional voting record is not all that conservative (though it’s better than current speaker John Boehner’s<\/a> 37 percent).<\/p>\n According to Conservative Review, Ryan, who was first elected to Congress in 1998 at the age of 28, has long been thought of “as a rising star in a new generation of conservatives,” but “his voting record as well as behind-the-scenes backing of an establishment agenda, reveals that he is one of the more moderate members of the House Republican Conference.”<\/p>\n Ryan was a conservative voice on fiscal and economic issues while he served as chairman of the House Budget Committee (2011-2015).\u00a0 His “Path to Prosperity” budget plan called for maintaining current levels of domestic spending for five years, while rescinding the economic stimulus law and reducing spending by more than $6 trillion over a decade, which would have the effect of “shrinking federal spending as a percentage of the economy to its lowest level since 1949.\u201d\u00a0 The plan also called for eventually replacing Medicare “with a subsidy that used free market forces to drive down the cost while raising the level of care.”<\/p>\n Bear in mind that budget plans are not the same as appropriations.\u00a0 Ultimately, lawmakers can do what they want.\u00a0 They cannot bind a future Congress.\u00a0 Reducing overall federal spending can be tricky, especially given Washington’s crackhead accounting practices<\/a> that hold sway in the make-believe world of “baseline budgeting,” in which both cuts and increases can count as cuts.<\/p>\n But even if Ryan is given credit for the “Path to Prosperity,” he’s still part of the problem.<\/p>\n After his unsuccessful run for vice president, Ryan returned to Congress and moved away from his some of his conservative positions. \u00a0“Ryan seemed to be increasingly concerned with creating a more geographically broad base for Republicans and his voting record tracked more to the middle.”<\/p>\n In late 2013, “he helped broker a budget deal with liberal Senator Patty Murray [D-Wash.] that repealed one of the key conservative victories under President Obama\u2019s reign \u2013 the sequester budget caps that helped keep spending in check.”\u00a0 In the current Congress, Ryan gained added prominence as chairman of the powerful tax law-writing House Ways and Means Committee.<\/p>\n Although Ryan’s high-profile efforts at reforming entitlement and welfare programs have helped “jumpstart a conversation about the untenable state of spending in these areas,” they “do not excuse his often patently liberal votes.”\u00a0 Ryan voted to extend unemployment benefits, bail out the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and repeatedly to hike the debt limit without spending reductions.\u00a0 Before the Obama administration, Ryan backed the big-government boondoggle known as the No Child Left Behind Act as well as President George W. Bush’s reckless Medicare Part D prescription drug program.<\/p>\n According to Conservative Review:<\/p>\n He opposes crony capitalism in theory, but this has not stopped him from endorsing bailouts for banks and the auto industry, as well as a failed stimulus package.\u00a0 He continually supports status quo transportation spending, and even led the charge in the House to make amnesty a reality.\u00a0 Friendly Republicans will defend Ryan\u2019s consistent moves to the middle as \u201cpragmatic,\u201d but the policy results are the same\u2014gains for a big government agenda.\u00a0 (Mediaite) \u00a0While Ryan may have an eye toward a more conservative governing vision, and would one day like to see that vision realized, it is a mistake to see him as an enemy of Speaker Boehner or the establishment\u2014he simply provides no true contrast to their culture of surrender.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Would Ryan be a better speaker than Boehner?\u00a0 Well, who wouldn’t make a better speaker?\u00a0 As Sean Hannity recently remarked, \u201cPaul Ryan, on too many issues for me, is the same as Boehner \u2026 under the leadership of Paul Ryan and John Boehner, we\u2019ve added $4.1 trillion to the debt.\u201d<\/p>\n Conservatives also need to consider if Ryan, unlike Boehner, would honor the so-called Hastert Rule, under which legislation supported by a majority of Republican lawmakers can come to the floor for a vote even if the speaker is personally opposed to it.<\/p>\n Although Ryan is reportedly keen on reviving the rule, why does he insist on weakening<\/a> a separate procedural rule that keeps the speaker accountable?\u00a0 The venerable parliamentary device known as the “motion to vacate the chair” was what finally pressured Boehner to abandon his gavel for the golf course.\u00a0 A Ryan spokesman said his boss wants “to de-weaponize it so it’s not always hanging over the head of whoever is speaker.”\u00a0 Under current rules, any House member may raise the motion that vacates the speaker’s chair if passed by a simple majority.\u00a0 It’s a desperately needed check on the presiding officer’s power.<\/p>\n Those who say Ryan, whose list of endorsers on the Democratic side of the aisle seems to grow almost by the minute, would unite Republicans leave out an important detail.<\/p>\n In terms of the GOP grassroots, Ryan is on the wrong side of the international trade issue and is on the dead wrong<\/em> side of immigration, including amnesty for illegal aliens, a political issue that Donald Trump singlehandedly revived at his campaign launch a few months ago.\u00a0 Ryan sounds like self-styled “citizen of the world” Barack Hussein Obama as he takes the position that immigration flows should be increased, a position shared with just 7 percent of Republican voters, according to a recent Pew Research Center study<\/a>.\u00a0 (The study found that 67 percent of GOP voters want immigration decreased and 25 percent want it to stay the same.)<\/p>\n This means that 93 percent of GOP voters disagree with Ryan on a key element of a hot-button issue that gets hotter each and every day, as illegal aliens continue swamping the nation, depressing wages, bankrupting U.S. social programs, and adding to Democrats’ electoral muscle.\u00a0 Remember that even illegal aliens get counted in the U.S. Census for House apportionment purposes.\u00a0 Some illegals even manage to vote, and the federal Motor-Voter law encourages such behavior.\u00a0 The Clinton-era National Voter Registration Act requires government officials to offer illegal aliens voter registration forms while at the same time forbidding any pesky questioning<\/a> about whether an applicant is a U.S. citizen.<\/p>\n Ryan does not put the interests of Americans first and has been surprisingly frank<\/a> about it.\u00a0 As Breitbart News reports:<\/p>\n In 2013, while aggressively stumping for [Florida Republican Sen. Marco] Rubio\u2019s immigration plan, Ryan called for the implementation of open borders immigration policies which would allow for the legal and free movement of foreign labor and foreign goods across national boundaries.\u00a0 Ryan insisted that the U.S. needs an immigration system that has, \u201cgates open to the people who are coming in pursuit of their version of the American dream.\u201d<\/p>\n America, Ryan declared, \u201cis more than our borders.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n