Life used to be so good for Paul Ryan. He was the Wunderkinder of the GOP, the man with the plans, and best of all, he didn’t have to produce jack shit. Spend all day talking about how great things would be if only you had the chance to do your job, how quickly and easily you could repeal the ACA, and how idyllic everybody’s life would be after all those nifty tax reforms passed. And then, just to show you’re serious about it, once every six weeks or so, pass another meaningless ACA repeal bill on to the Senate for a quick, painless death.
But then Paul Ryan committed the unpardonable sin, he got under the skin of the Tiny Thumbs Diktator. He never fully endorsed him, he called him out publicly a couple of times for his more loutish behavior, and then he crossed the Rubicon, daring to exclude Trump from a Ryan function that Trump had invited himself to.
This could not stand. Trump publicly slammed Ryan, and even went to the extent of having Bannon use Breitbart to endorse a primary candidate even farther off the 10 meter board than Trump was. These two goofballs were in marriage counseling before they even got to the altar.
But then, when it became clear that they were going to have to live together, at least for a while, they kissed and made up. Ryan spoke glowingly about his frequent contacts with Der Trumpkopf, and Trump gushed about his respect for and full confidence in Ryan. As I wrote in a previous diary, having Trump’s “full confidence” is like having the FBI show up at your door, it’s never a good omen.
Trump made sure that Ryan had a chance to take the ball into the end zone right off of the bat. But instead of letting Ryan get a few batting practice swings in on something simple he could pass, Trump sent him up to the plate with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. The repeal of the ACA. To say that didn’t go well would be like saying that sperm whales are pretty freakin’ big. It was a disaster, after 7 years the GOP and specifically Ryan had no feasible replacement ready to pitch to the masses. Trump himself jumped in to try to salvage the deal, and both of them ended up looking like idiots when it had to be pulled from the floor. I’ll give Trump credit, while he blamed everybody from the Democrats to the Tea Party to the Tuesday thugs, he let Ryan off the hook. Or so it seemed.
Politico has a great new ARTICLE on the new tax plan that Trump will reveal today, and about how it will be rolled out and rammed through congress. And it’s not good news for Ryan, Trump clearly has neither forgotten nor forgiven, either for the campaign snubs, or Ryan’s making him look bad on the ACA repeal and replace;
But after Ryan failed to get his Obamacare replacement bill over the finish line last month, the White House changed its mind. Trump decided the administration needed to take a more hands-on role in tax reform rather than leaving the details to the speaker, three administration sources told Politico. Indeed, Ryan’s team has been kept largely in the dark on some key details of the plan, congressional and White House sources say.
“We made a mistake last time” in having Ryan take the lead on health care, one senior administration official told Politico. “We learned our lesson.”
“Largely in the dark” is a huge understatement, which we are not used to hearing from an administration which prefers superlatives, but in this case it’s true. Ryan had already been working with the Trump administration, “hand in glove” on a tax reform bill, and was stunned when Trump threw out the news on the fly last Wednesday, his office got no heads up from the White House.
Trump is out to give Ryan a spanking. Not only does he want huge corporate tax cuts, from 35% down to 15%, he doesn’t want to offset any of the cuts with spending decreases putting the administration at odds with fiscal conservatives in the GOP who insist tax cuts must be revenue neutral. And just to dig the knife in a little deeper, Trump is excluding Ryan’s controversial import border tax, on which he has been working for over a year as a centerpiece of the package.
There are two problems in this tactic for Trump. The first is that only the House can write and submit a tax bill. Trump can send over a wish list of proposals that he would like to see, but he cannot hold a gun to Ryan’s head and force him to include those proposals in the bill. The only thing Trump can do would be to veto the bill if it gets to his desk, and with nothing legislative on his scorecard so far, would he really veto tax reform out of pique? Trump is once again, as seems so often, dealing from weakness here.
The second problem is a much larger one for Trump. Tax reform is an incredibly complicated, usually no-win piece of legislation. Somebody is going to take it in the shorts economically, if it’s the little people, they boot you out of office, and if it’s a big business, there goes your donations and you’re underfunded for re-election. That’s why nobody has seriously even tried to tackle it in so long. If I know that Trump is taking over sole ownership of this tax bill, then it means that most likely ranchers on the Outback already know about it too, it’s not like I have a “Deep Throat” in the White House. If this goes down in flames in the congress, which it seems likely to do, if for no better reason than it has been slapped together on the fly just like the ACA repeal to submit to the impulses of His Lowness, and is not even thought out, then Trump will be the one to have all of the mud spatter back on him, he has already accepted ownership of this blivet.
Have no doubts, if this tax reform boondoggle turns into another political “Burning Man” statue, Trump will do everything in his power to throw Ryan onto the pyre, and Ryan already has less than stellar support in his caucus. But Trump will likely suffer even more. Forget the Trombies, the sane people who held their noses, and pulled a lever voted for positive change, and seeing not only no lower healthcare premiums with better coverage and service, but now nothing extra in their paychecks either is not likely to make their opinion of his job performance on their behalf very charitable. Enjoy the impending train wreck and your popcorn now, but keep your eyes and actions focused on November of 2018, in the end, it’s all that matters right now.