What happens when you're House Speaker Paul Ryan and you've suffered the worse legislative defeat in modern times, AND that defeat is your own party's fault? You tell your concerned members not to do some soul searching and determine whether the path that you are collectively on is leading you to an abyss, but instead, literally, to "deflect and pivot."
When constituents ask why Republicans haven’t finished their long promised health care overhaul, passed a budget or crossed any big-ticket campaign promises off their to-do list, GOP leaders want members to point instead to the bills they have passed.
To help with that deflection, the House Republican Conference last week hand-delivered member offices a 28-page August resource kit full of talking points on legislation the House has passed in the first six months of unified Republican government under President Donald Trump.
Another way leadership hopes to help its members avoid talking about the GOP’s health care failure is providing them with the tools needed to pivot the conversation to rewriting the tax code.
The House Ways and Means Committee put together a nine-page resource kit on “delivering pro-growth tax reform to the American people,” which is emerging as the Republicans’ top fall agenda item. Members’ offices also received August calendars citing 31 reasons for rewriting the tax code — one for each day of the month as well as each year since the last tax overhaul passed in 1986.
Sure, that'll work. After all, they've only been promising Obamacare repeal for SEVEN YEARS. When that fact comes up, Ryan is advising his members, it's fake news: "The GOP messaging strategy also involves attacking the media for focusing on their failures rather than their accomplishments." In Ryan's words, "People may turn on their TVs, and they think that all that we do here in this bubble is spend our time focusing on one thing at one time, or you know, bickering with each other about one thing." That's not what's happening, he says. "The reality is that there is some very important work getting done here to improve people's lives."
Yes, that work is, um, well, let's see … rolling back environmental protections? Sure, that'll work. Ryan's biggest hope lies in being able to snow Republican voters into thinking that when he says "tax reform" it means something good for them, and not just for the one percent. His second biggest hope is that if Republicans do manage to pass tax reform, Republican voters don't notice that it's just more one percent piss trickling down on them. Or maybe he's just hoping that no one ever realizes what a massive fraud the whole Republican enterprise—and especially him—really is.