Paul Ryan signals end of his short honeymoon, admits Planned Parenthood can't be defunded

Paul Ryan hasn't even worked a full day as speaker of the House, and he's already said enough to make members of the Freedom Caucus write up their motions to vacate the chair.

"I think we need to be very clear about what we can and cannot achieve and not set expectations that we know we can't reach given the constraints of the Constitution," Ryan told CNN's Dana Bash on "State of the Union." […]

Bash asked, "Will you defund Planned Parenthood?"

"This is what I mean when I say being an effective opposition party. I think being an effective opposition party means being honest with people upfront about what it is we can and cannot achieve," he said. […] "We have a president that isn't willing to listen, that isn't going to sign lots of our bills into law, we have a Senate that has a very difficult process when it comes to actually getting bills voted on, so knowing that we have those constraints, we have to operate within those constraints."

In other words, no, he won't defund Planned Parenthood. That's the kind of public acknowledgement of reality that doomed John Boehner. He does go on to say, "I believe we need to do our oversight. We're just beginning to start a committee to investigate Planned Parenthood. That's important. So the special committee on Planned Parenthood, I think, should be in the driver's seat overseeing this process." So there's that—he's perfectly willing to waste even more of the taxpayers' money on purely political investigations. That might keep the maniacs satisfied for a few weeks.

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