You can almost hear the maniacs in Congress crying, "But he was supposed to be our House Speaker!" They deposed John Boehner so they could get this? None of Ryan's tenure as speaker has been easy, because the Freedom Caucus maniacs and their big backers in interest groups won't ever let leadership off easy. But now they feel completely betrayed by Ryan, because they all believed him when he said "Obamacare repeal,”—and now they feel he is reneging.
But on one of the biggest days of his political career, when House Republicans released their much-anticipated Obamacare replacement, many of Ryan's closest friends in the conservative intelligentsia expressed disappointment—if not outright dismay—with the legislation bearing the speaker's imprimatur.
Indeed, virtually every prominent conservative health care expert—precisely the sort of ideological allies who have backed Ryan in the past—panned this legislation.
The Cato Institute's Michael Cannon called it "a train wreck waiting to happen." The American Enterprise Institute's Jim Capretta told POLITICO the GOP's decision to do away with a cap on tax credits for employer-based health insurance reflected a reluctance to "deal with reality." Forbes' Avik Roy, widely considered one of the pre-eminent health care policy experts on the right, predicted the legislation would make insurance unaffordable for millions of the nation's poor and offered an analysis with subsections titled, "The Good," "The Bad" and "The Terrible." The Wall Street Journal editorial board was the lone dissenter, calling the bill "the most consequential GOP social-policy reform since the welfare overhaul of 1996."
(Um, WSJ, wasn’t there a Democrat in the White House in 1996?)
That's not even counting the people who will end up voting on the thing: Republican House and Senate members who get their marching orders from the Koch brothers and the Club for Growth and Heritage Action. Who all really hate this bill.
It's very possible they'll all suck it up and go ahead and vote for Ryan because popular vote loser Donald Trump tells them to. It's also possible that popular vote loser Donald Trump hears from Breitbart (and therefore Steve Bannon) that everybody hates this and he realizes that it could very well make him more unpopular with everybody (especially Bannon) and he drops it like a hot potato.
The one thing that's almost certainly going to be true when we come out of the other side of this is that Ryan's speakership is deeply damaged. There are too many conflicting sides internally in the GOP for him not to make some real enemies in this process. If he's lucky enough to see this bill pass through the House (unlikely) and the Senate (highly unlikely) and get signed by President Trump Bannon (who really hates him), then he personally owns the new law that takes healthcare away from millions of people and millions of dollars away from the states—including plenty of Republican ones.