A Ryan republican in the age of Trump
Rep. Rodney Davis got a lot of face time on national TV news last year — reciting talking points about health care and massive tax cuts on CNN and Fox News and CNBC any time they called. And every time they called, it was Paul Ryan’s talking points that Rodney Davis recited. That’s what a deputy whip in the majority caucus does; they carry water for the speaker.
But, with Ryan today announcing that he won’t seek another term, it’s a good time to reflect on the fact that Davis’ positions and behavior aren’t just a part of his job description. He and Ryan share an ideology and an approach to governing. Both men have lived inside right-wing politics since they graduated from college. Davis trained at the knee of Congressman John Shimkus for 20 years before coming to the hill. Ryan worked for Jack Kemp and Sam Brownback.
It’s not a marriage of convenience. These two dig each other. They were standing around the frat-party keg of life together, long before they actually met.
They aren’t Trumpists. They’re traditionalists. Trumpism is amoral and completely indifferent to the concept of truth. It’s a mean, racist populism that wants to burn down the concept of representative government in favor of authoritarianism and personal financial gain.
Davis and Ryan might be less dangerous, all things considered, but they’re more insidious. They’re a scalpel, not a wrecking ball. They acknowledge our shared moral universe, and they live in our reality. But they’ll thread every needle and distort every position to get what they want.
When Trump says “That’s not what I said,” he means “What I said in the past has no meaning. I might as well not have said it, and what I’m saying now has no meaning either.” He doesn’t believe truth exists. When Davis says “that’s not what I said,” he means it very precisely and pragmatically — “I carefully formulated my statement to mean one thing but sound like another.”
Trump is a wild, nihilist monster, nothing but will to power. Ryan and Davis are Eddie Haskel. They aren’t personally corrupt, but they want to fleece you. They want to take your lunch money and shamelessly kiss up to everyone with an ounce of influence. And they still want to get a thank you, to be considered the cool kid, to get your vote for homecoming king.
Sure, there’s an ideological element — lower taxes and “personal freedom” that any 20-year-old Randian can parrot. They feel for the disenfranchised and those who have been dealt a tough hand. They just can’t let that get in the way of a tax cut for the richest people in the country or the slightest electoral advantage. They make heroes of the working poor but refuse to acknowledge things like the fact that 60 percent of all Medicaid recipients are, in fact, the working poor and that almost half of families who are on SNAP have someone in the household working. They tout the raises that lower corporate taxes might bring but ignore that those corporations’ average workers often work full time and still live in poverty. They spend two decades pretending to wring their hands about the deficit, then add $1.5 trillion to the deficit at the first opportunity.
They make carefully crafted statements that obscure simple facts and intentionally mislead their constituents. A case in point from yesterday: Rodney Davis said on Twitter “When the #taxreform package was being debated, I successfully fought to ensure the graduate tuition waiver was preserved under the new tax code. The tuition waiver is crucial to helping grad students get their degree as well as helping teach undergraduates.”
There’s not precisely a lie anywhere in there, yet he’s being deceptive. His version of fighting is sending a show-horse letter to house leadership (whose ear he has without any letter) regarding those tuition waivers, while simultaneously telling the local paper that he’d vote for the tax bill regardless of whether the waiver protection was included. The waivers never made the house version of the bill. That’s gamesmanship, not fighting. It’s protecting entrenched power, not protecting a major chunk of his district and their livelihood.
Or take an example from only a week ago. Davis spent days avoiding an invitation to a student-organized town hall. Students called his office, 400-plus constituents signed a letter asking him to attend, and 30 constituents showed up to ask him personally. Even after all that, he had the audacity to explain to the media that he was “not aware” of the invitation. It’s a classic political dodge. His staff no doubt ignored it for him, allowing him to be unaware. He avoids lying without speaking a word of truth.
These are old, old games — both the policy and the politicking. Eighteen months ago, they’d’ve been considered hopelessly boring. And maybe they still are.
But they’re dangerous for two reasons. One is bad policy. Trickle-down economics is a lie, and any glance at history will show that giving money to the wealthy in form of tax cuts doesn’t improve the lot of low and middle income Americans. The investments never come. The GDP shrinks. The disparities between rich and poor become wider — and, while we’re at it, why support health care for the most vulnerable among us when we could stuff that money in the stock market instead?
The self-respect and self-sufficiency of a working-class job fade further into the past.
Two, this vision of politics as a career, as a means of furthering yourself and gaining influence, is poisonous to our system of government. It encourages our representatives to seek money and safety and to hide from the people they represent. The only fight is to see who can best serve the most powerful people.
These are dangerous times because of the politics of Donald Trump and his supporters. But these are the times of Donald Trump because of politicians like Paul Ryan and Rodney Davis. We need to unseat Rodney Davis, not because he supports Donald Trump but because he thinks like Paul Ryan.
