You probably saw the whole McConnell kerfuffle this week when he admitted the Republicans plan to shut down the government if they keep control of the House and win control of the Senate in November. Republicans with pretensions to national office and some aura of being part of the mainstream, were having coronaries. Paul Ryan, for example, when speaking to audiences that aren't all Republican, vowed that there would be no government shutdown-- at least not before the election. He hints strongly, though, that after the election, House Republicans will be on the same ruinous page as McConnell and Ted Cruz.
In his book, Ryan calls the 2013 shutdown a "suicide mission" for the House GOP, and on Wednesday he told CQ Roll Call he agreed that Republicans were easy to blame for the events that transpired.
But House Republicans won’t repeat that mistake this September, Ryan predicted: “We will pass a clean [continuing resolution], and if for some reason the Democrats don’t take that, then they will clearly have shut the government down … it will be patently obvious … that they are playing politics with this, and trying to trigger a shutdown so they can blame us, but we’re really blameless in this particular situation.”Ryan’s confidence that his conference will cooperate in passing a stop-gap spending bill free of controversial policy riders-- "until Dec. 11 is what we’re thinking," said Ryan-- contradicts Democrats’ cries over the past few days that the GOP is spoiling for another shutdown that could cost them the election in November. How insane is the Republican Party becoming? This George W. Bush quote-- in response to a question about John McCain in the 2008 election-- comes via The Right Perspective: "I probably won’t even vote for the guy," Bush told the group, according to two people present. "I had to endorse him. But I’d have endorsed Obama if they’d asked me."Ryan, on the other hand, said he is so enthusiastic about the plutocrat that has been rejected several times by the American people that he would gladly drive Romney's bus in he chose to run (for president) again in 2016. "A lot of the things [Romney] said in the campaign, projections he made ... were true," he said. Ryan also added that he favors limiting the mortgage interest deduction to loans up to $500,000, something unlikely to go over well with the Republican base… to put it mildly.
