It's actually even worse than saying he voted for it before he voted against it. Here's what Paul Ryan
said:
First of all, those are in the baseline, he put those cuts in. Second of all, we voted to repeal Obamacare repeatedly, including those cuts. I voted that way before the budget, I voted that way after the budget.
But in the budget he didn't vote that way. He spins further:
It gets a little wonky but it was already in the baseline. We would never have done it in the first place. We voted to repeal the whole bill.
Ryan is trying to claim that he's not responsible for the Medicare "cuts" (they are actually savings,
extending the life of the Medicare trust fund), because he voted against them before he voted for them before he voted against them again. Obviously, he's against Obamacare, but nobody forced him to include the Medicare savings in his budget plan. He's claiming he had no choice about whether or not to include those savings in his budget plan, but if that were true, he wouldn't have had any choice about anything in his budget.
Bottom line: Like his boss, Ryan is playing a political game, taking whatever position makes him look good at the moment. When it was politically useful to have $716 billion in Medicare savings in his budget plan, he included them. Now that its become politically useful to be against them, he's switched his position. And the only thing he's consistent about is taking the position that he thinks is in his own personal political interest.