Concerns About
Paul Ryan Emerging Out of Ted Cruz-Created Contested Convention as Nominee
Dominate Wisconsin
by Julia Hahn 2 Apr 2016Washington D.C
In recent weeks, there has been increasing discussion
about the possibility that House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) 56% could
emerge out of a brokered convention as the Republican nominee if the donor
class is successful in denying Donald Trump the requisite 1,237 delegates.
Just as Paul Ryan’s ascension to House Speaker
represented a total repudiation of the GOP electorate by GOP lawmakers, Ryan’s
selection as the Party’s nominee would similarly represent the donor class’s
silencing of voters and voters’ views on immigration, trade, and foreign policy
that have transformed the country and its role in the world.
Regardless, many in the “#NeverTrump” movement have
indicated that they would support Ryan against the wishes of the Republican
electorate that has voted for Trump.
“If we don’t have a nominee who can win on the first
ballot, I’m for none of the above,” said former House Speaker John Boehner,
who exited the House shortly after teaming up with Ryan to give President
Obama expanded trade powers. “I’m for Paul Ryan to be our nominee,” Boehner
said.
“If it’s an open convention, it’s very likely [the
nominee] would be someone who’s not currently running,” Ryan’s fellow
Wisconsinite Governor Scott Walker said last week. Walker’s declaration follows
an earlier pronouncement that he would be “just
fine” with leaving his state’s Sanctuary Cities in
place.
As conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly, who has endorsed
Donald Trump, warned in
January, “After months of waiting for Trump to self-destruct, the
Washington-based Republican Establishment has finally found a way to take back
control of the party from the outsiders and grassroots. The plan revolves
around the newly empowered House Speaker, Paul Ryan.” Schlafly writes that
through a brokered convention, “‘dark horse’ Paul Ryan could become our nominee.
Such an outcome could destroy the Republican Party and guarantee a Democratic
victory by causing disheartened grassroots voters to stay home.”
Currently speaking, it’s mathematically impossible for
Ohio Gov. John Kasich to win the majority of delegates walking into the
Republican National Convention in July. Similarly, while not mathematically
impossible for Cruz to get there, it’s close— he’d need close to 90 percent of
the remaining delegates to win a majority walking into the convention. As such,
the strategy both are employing is force a contested convention—and wrest the
nomination from Trump there. The risk, however, is that at a contested
convention—as the now Cruz-backing Walker acknowledged—there’s no guarantee at
all on who may emerge as the GOP nominee at that point. It could even be, as
Walker said, someone who isn’t currently running: i.e., Paul Ryan.
As Capitol Hill aides have explained,
amongst Washington’s GOP political class Ryan is regarded as the “Republican
Jesus.”
Indeed, National Review, which helped
put the third world migration enthusiast Paul Ryan into the Speaker’s
office, seemed to embrace the idea of nudging him into the Oval
Office. National Review’s deputy managing editor penned a piece
entitled, “Paul Ryan for President!” writing: “One can imagine a case where
Trump and Cruz control 60 to 70 percent of the vote between them, and neither
one will budge, and no other candidate or boss will consider helping either
one. Then it will be time for a respected and inoffensive candidate to offer a
contrast to all the strong personalities in the Republican race, and Ryan is
nothing if not Mr. Acceptable.”
Following their endorsement of Speaker Ryan, National
Review became the heart and soul of the “#NeverTrump” movement,
meaning that the organization has effectively abandoned even the
pretense of being concerned about migration. As Breitbart has
previously reported, not only will Paul Ryan continue to push for massive
increases to the already record-breaking pace of migration, but his commitment
to large-scale migration means it’s unlikely legislation will pass the House
that would reduce immigration growth by curbing visas, which more than 9 in 10
GOP voters want.
As one conservative political operative told Breitbart
News, “The Republican convention is the GOP establishment’s prom, and Paul
Ryan is their Prom Queen.” The operative explained that in the event of a
brokered convention, “Ryan would ‘somehow’ surface as the nominee, the same way
he ‘somehow’ surfaced as the Speaker, despite explicitly saying he did not want
the job.”
Although Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) 97%’s political
ideology is in line with Ryan’s brand of Washington think-tank
conservatism—whether it’s Cruz’s record of pushing for expanded foreign
worker programs or offshoring trade policies—party leaders seem to prefer Paul
Ryan’s presentation, and are likely to use Cruz’s gains to ultimately throw
delegates towards Ryan.
“You don’t really think they [GOP establishment figures]
want Ted Cruz, do you? I mean they’re using him to stop Trump, that’s
there view of this,” Pat Caddell said on
Thursday’s program of Breitbart News Daily. “I believe they are
using Cruz as a cat’s-paw … I don’t think they’re going to nominate him. I
think they will then move to nominate, to try to nominate an Establishment
figure, someone who hasn’t run.”
Revealingly, Paul Ryan has yet to endorse Cruz for
President. If Ryan were to endorse Cruz, it would arguably make it much more
difficult for Ryan to accept the nomination over a candidate he had previously
endorsed— suggesting that Ryan’s ultimate aim is to use Cruz’s victories to
pave his own path to the nomination.
However, in order to emerge as the donor class’s savior,
Ryan needs to win Wisconsin’s primary election on Tuesday— putting Ryan
Republicanism on trial. This effectively means that voters are not casting a
ballot between Trump and Cruz, but rather the philosophy of Donald
Trump versus Ryanism.
Indeed, Ryan has postured himself as the “Republicans’
anti-Trump.”
“Speaker Paul Ryan is emerging as the Republican’s
biggest counterweight to Donald Trump,” The Hill wrote in
January.
Since Trump’s philosophy is so opposite of Ryan’s, if
Trump were to win Wisconsin, it would be seen as a wholesale rejection of Ryan
Republicanism. Losing Wisconsin would be politically devastating for Ryan and
would make it exceedingly difficult for him to emerge out of the contested
convention. As such, Wisconsin is a must-win for Ryan via a proxy of his policy
viewpoints, Ted Cruz.
Paul Ryan and corporate media have sought to frame the
GOP Civil War of voters versus donors and donor proxies (i.e. Fox News,
Republican publications, and various corporate-owned radio networks) as a
battle waged over something as frivolous as candidates’ “tone” rather than the
substantive policy divisions between the electorate and the Party’s corporate
funders.
The media is correct in that voters are currently facing
an election between Trump and anti-Trump, but the media has failed to
articulate the policies differences between them.
Ryan Republicanism consists of four core tenets, which are:
Population Replacement
Since Wisconsin voters sent Paul Ryan to Washington
nearly two decades ago, the U.S. has imported a population of immigrants that
is nearly three times larger than the entire population of Wisconsin, which now
stands at 5.7 million. Each year the U.S. issues more green cards than the
collective population of the 13 colonies the year George Washington was born.
This year, the U.S. will issue five times more green cards than there are
members of Daughters of the American Revolution.
Yet Paul Ryan believes those numbers should be even
larger. For the past two decades there has been perhaps no greater advocate for
the donor class’s agenda of mass migration than Paul Ryan.
As Roy Beck, president of the immigration control group NumbersUSA, told Breitbart last
October, Ryan “has spent his entire adulthood ideologically connected to
the open borders crowd. Open Borders is in his ideological DNA. That’s the
terrifying thing. He’s an ideologue and has spent his whole life working for
ideologues. Open borders seeps out of every pore of his being. This isn’t
personal, it’s just who he is… Paul Ryan is the heart and soul of crony
capitalism.”
Dating back to his time as a Capitol Hill staffer in the
mid-90s, Ryan was in part responsible for derailing the immigration curbs
championed by Civil Rights leader and late-Democratic Congresswoman Barbara
Jordan. “Ryan is part of the group that created the massive immigration problem
facing the nation today,” Beck said, noting that
today, “As a direct result of Paul Ryan and [his then-boss] Sam Brownback,
there are an additional 10 million immigrants in the country [than we otherwise
would have].”
In 2013, Ryan joined forces with open-borders advocate
Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) 19% to campaign for Sen. Marco Rubio
(R-FL) 78%’s amnesty agenda. Gutierrez has previously said, “I have only
one loyalty… and that’s to the immigrant community.”
While stumping for amnesty with Gutierrez, Ryan
repeatedly made the case for open borders, declaring that:
“America is more than just a country… It’s more than our borders. America
is an idea. It’s a very precious idea.”
This statement is significant because, while a country
has borders, “ideas” do not. If America is an “idea” rather than a “country,”
then recent refugees from Somalia have as much of a “right” to a job in the
United States as do children whose ancestors fought in the American Revolution.
Ryan’s belief that America is “an idea” has similarly
been articulated by open borders ideologue—and rejected Presidential
candidate—Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) 37%, who recently endorsed Ted
Cruz.
In 2007, Graham gave an address to La Raza in which said, “An American
is an idea. No group owns being an American. Nobody owns this. It’s an idea
that’s unique to the planet and one of the center pieces of this idea is that
you come here trying it knock it out of the park as a person.”
In a 2011 speech to the Alexander Hamilton Society, Ryan
similarly suggested that America’s culture does not belong to any one group—
i.e. its foundation was just as much the legacy of Britain as it was the legacy
of Somalia: “America’s ‘exceptionalism’ is just this – while most nations at
most times have claimed their own history or culture to be exclusive, America’s
foundations are not our own – they belong equally to every person everywhere. The
truth that all human beings are created equal in their natural rights is the
most “inclusive” social truth ever discovered as a foundation for a free
society. “All” means “all”! You can’t get more “inclusive” than that!”
The notion that being American is “an idea” without any
cultural legacy and that America’s foundations “are not our own,” but instead
“belong equally to every person everywhere” suggests that Ryan believes that
merely stepping onto U.S. soil somehow has the magical transformative
effect of turning recent migrants into an automatic Jeffersonian Democrats with
a perfect understanding of Constitutional governance.
Ryan perhaps best demonstrated his commitment to this
idea in a 2014 radio interview in
which Ryan explained why “immigrants from the third world” make “some of the
best Americans.”
“Some of the best Americans are the newest Americans,”
Ryan declared.
Ryan suggested that it’s the job of Republicans to import
more of them and then try to convince them of their
conservative principles. “This is a challenge that conservatives have to
answer, ” Ryan said.
In this regard, Ryan has certainly done his part. As
House Speaker, Ryan funded visas
for more Muslim migrants this year alone than there are Paul Ryan voters in his
own district. According to Pew, only 11% of Muslims in the United States are
Republican or lean Republican.
Working Class Communities “Deserve To Die”
Throughout his career, Ryan has demonstrated an
unwavering commitment to offshoring U.S. jobs in the name of maximizing
corporate efficiencies, regardless of the economic devastation it has on
American workers and communities.
National Review recently provided a
pitch-perfect explication of Ryan Republicanism in explaining their own
views about the economic status of these working-class towns.
“The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale
communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative
assets. Morally, they are indefensible,” writes National
Review’s Kevin D. Williamson. “The white American under-class is in
thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used
heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does
OxyContin.”
Williamson insists that the destruction of these
communities was not a result of our nation’s immigration or trade policies: “It
wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It
wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current
immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that.”
Polls show
that among the American electorate, Republican voters are the group most skeptical of
free trade—with a nearly five-to-one margin of Republican voters believing that
free-trade deals slash wages rather than raise them. Only a minuscule 11
percent of GOP voters, according
to Pew, believe that so-called free-trade deals will be good for
wages.
As Pat Buchanan has explained, Trump’s
success represents a repudiation of the “free trade” idolatry that has allowed
China “to cart off what was once the greatest manufacturing base the world had
ever seen. Compare Detroit and Shanghai today — to see the fruits of
‘free trade’.”
While Donald Trump has said that his
presidency is the only way to kill Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership, Paul Ryan
was Obama’s partner in crafting the TPP.
As CNN’s Dana Bash wrote in a piece entitled,
“Paul Ryan’s New Partner: Obama,” Ryan “allied with the President he tried to
defeat [in 2012]. As chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee,
he’s muscling a controversial trade bill through the House that could shape
President Barack Obama’s legacy — and his own.”
In an op-ed with Ted Cruz published in the open
borders Wall Street Journal, Ryan outlined the Ryan Republicanism
trade agenda. In their op-ed, Cruz and Ryan describe the TPP as an “historic”
agreement that “would mean greater access to a billion customers for American
manufacturers, farmers and ranchers.”
According to the Economic Policy Institute, between 2001 to
2013, the U.S. lost 3.2
million jobs to China— including more than 68,000 jobs in Wisconsin.
Military Adventurism
Paul Ryan subscribes to the donor class orthodoxy on
military adventurism.
As Larry Sabato has explained,
“Ryan is just a generic Republican on foreign policy.”
“On foreign policy, Paul Ryan is truly a product of the
era of George W. Bush,” Daniel Larison wrote in
2012.
Ryan is “an internationalist of the old school,” wrote the Wall
Street Journal’s Bret Stephens. “He supports the ‘arduous task of
building free societies,’ even as he harbored early doubts the Arab Spring was
the vehicle for building free societies.”
As CNN reported:
During the administration of former President George W.
Bush, Ryan was a reliable supporter of the administration’s foreign policy
priorities, having voted to authorize the use of force against Saddam Hussein.
He also supported the 2007 surge of U.S. troops to Iraq… During his time in
Congress, the Middle East has been an area of interest for Ryan. He formed the
Middle East Caucus in the early 2000s, and from his position on the Ways and
Means Committee, he took the lead on pushing free trade agreements with Middle
Eastern and Gulf countries that called for countries to enshrine the rule of
law and women’s rights in their governments.
Ryan Republicanism promotes policies that would start
foreign wars in the Middle East and then would bring the refugees of those wars
into the United States. In this sense, Ryan Republicans are launching a
Democratic experiment on two fronts: not only do they seek to nation build and
make the world safe for Democracy abroad, but they also seek to import large
flows of migrants, who have no history of Democracy and limited government,
into the country to see if they can seamlessly integrate into our Democracy
here.
Wealth Redistribution
Ryan Republicanism also includes a unique vision of
wealth redistribution in which income is transferred out of the middle
class and into the pockets of both wealthy business owners and poor
migrants. This is accomplished through trade deals that shift wealth to
the owners of capital and away from laborers, as well as immigration
policies that eliminate workers’ ability to bargain for higher wages. This also
comes in the form of a greater emphasis on cutting Social Security and Medicare
rather than reducing welfare benefits to migrants and foreign workers.
During the 2012 election in which Paul Ryan and Mitt
Romney managed to lose what had been described as a “gimme
election” against Barack Obama, Ryan sought to make the
election a mandate on reducing Medicare payments.
As the New York Times reported at
the time, Ryan’s budget plan became of “political focal point” of 2012.
The New York Times correctly predicted that Ryan’s plan would
“become the standard by which Republican candidates for the House, Senate and
White House are measured.”
Indeed, Ryan’s decision to put Medicare cuts at the
forefront of the GOP agenda— rather than welfare benefit cuts for migrants
or job placement efforts for welfare recipients— cost Republicans heavily in
what was immensely favorable year in which Democrats were on defense.
During the election, Ryan said he was determined to
message on Medicare cuts: “We want this debate. We need this debate, and we
will win this debate,” Ryan said.
It was unclear why Ryan wanted the election to be a referendum on Medicare
cuts, which even for those who believe such cuts are fiscally necessary
often view them as something that can only be done after winning an election
rather than a rallying cry before the election is held.
Ryan and Romney not only lost the election, but
Ryan failed
to win his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin.
While Ryan has demonstrated his constant focus to reign
in entitlements for American citizens as part of his previous framing of the
“makers and takers,” Ryan has shown no such impetus to stop the government
from giving benefits to non-citizens who are not entitled to them. For
instance, Ryan was responsible for a widely-panned strategy to cut veterans’ benefits for
American citizens instead of cutting welfare benefits for illegal
immigrants.
—
Between 2000 and 2013, Wisconsin’s middle-class
households shrunk more than any other state in the country, according
to Pew Charitable Trusts.
The state has hemorrhaged jobs to China and Mexico. Meanwhile the cost of
illegal immigration for Wisconsin taxpayers is
approaching $1 billion per year and the total foreign-born population (legal
and illegal) has reached 275,000.
If Ryan emerges victorious in Wisconsin, he will be in a
strong position to continue pushing to expand migration, pass offshoring trade
deals like the TPP, and use American troops and dollars to spread American
Democracy in the Middle East.
Wisconsin voters will weigh in on these issues in
Tuesday’s election.
Paul Ryan
Paul
Ryan is a member & speaker for the U.S.
House of Representatives, a member of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, was a
guest at the Koch Industries annual
conference, and a recipient of "Defender of the American Dream"
award from the Americans for Prosperity.
Note: National
Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform is a paid for staff by the Economic Policy Institute.
Raul Yzaguirre
was a director at the Economic Policy
Institute, and the president & CEO for the National Council of La Raza.
Open
Society Foundations was a funder for the Economic Policy Institute.
George
Soros is the founder & chairman for the Open Society Foundations, and was the chairman for the Foundation
to Promote Open Society.
Foundation
to Promote Open Society was a funder for the Economic Policy Institute, the Aspen Institute (think tank),
and the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Rockefeller
Foundation was a funder for the Economic
Policy Institute, the Aspen Institute (think tank), and the National Council of La Raza.
Nadya K.
Shmavonian was the VP for the Rockefeller
Foundation, and EVP for the Pew
Charitable Trusts.
Walter Isaacson
is the president & CEO for the Aspen Institute (think tank), and was
the chairman & CEO for CNN.
Jack
Valenti was a trustee at the Aspen Institute (think tank), and a
member of the Burning Tree Club.
John A. Boehner is
a member of the Burning Tree Club,
and was a member & speaker for the U.S.
House of Representatives.
Tom C. Korologos
is a member of the Burning Tree Club,
and married to Ann McLaughlin Korologos.
Ann
McLaughlin Korologos is married to Tom
C. Korologos, and was the chair emeritus for the Aspen Institute (think
tank).
David
H. Koch is a trustee at the Aspen Institute (think tank), the EVP
for Koch Industries, the chairman
for the Americans for Prosperity
Foundation, and was a donor for the Americans
for Prosperity.
Koch Industries
is the sponsor for the Koch Industries
annual conference.
Americans
for Prosperity Foundation is an affiliated group with the Americans for Prosperity.
Paul
Ryan was a guest at the Koch
Industries annual conference, a recipient of "Defender of the American
Dream" award from the Americans for
Prosperity, is a member of the National
Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, and a member & speaker
for the U.S. House of Representatives.
John A. Boehner
was a member & speaker for the U.S.
House of Representatives, and is a member of the Burning Tree Club.
Richard M. Nixon
was a member of the Burning Tree Club,
and an honorary member of the Bohemian
Club.
William
Randolph Hearst was a member of the Burning
Tree Club, and a member of the Bohemian
Club.
George H.W. Bush is
a member of the Burning Tree Club,
and a member of the Bohemian Club.
Henry A. Kissinger is a member of the Bohemian Club, a director at the
American Friends of Bilderberg (think tank), was a lifetime trustee at
the Aspen Institute (think tank), and a 2008 Bilderberg conference
participant (think tank).
Jack Valenti was a
trustee at the Aspen Institute (think tank), and a member of the Burning Tree Club.
Walter Isaacson
is the president & CEO for the Aspen Institute (think tank), and was
the chairman & CEO for CNN.
Ted
Turner is the founder of CNN,
and a member of Kappa Sigma.
Edward R. Murrow
was a member of Kappa Sigma, and a
member of the Burning Tree Club.
John A. Boehner is
a member of the Burning Tree Club,
and was a member & speaker for the U.S.
House of Representatives.
Paul
Ryan is a member & speaker for the U.S.
House of Representatives, a member of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, was a
guest at the Koch Industries annual
conference, and a recipient of "Defender of the American Dream"
award from the Americans for Prosperity.
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