I wrote about Paul Ryan retiring back in April, when he announced he would not be running for reelection to the House of Representatives. With Speaker Ryan’s term ending January 2, let me add a few final thoughts.
If you want to know why Paul Ryan is leaving, I would refer you to two things. First, a column by Megan McArdle at the end of November:
“‘It’s such a depressing time for people like you and me,’ said my dinner companion on Thursday. I raised a querying eyebrow.
‘We’re policy people,’ he explained. ‘And policy is dead.’
Depressing indeed. He had come to Washington from California to offer his expertise on public policy, in a town that has practically given up making any. …
[H]is visit had confirmed what we both already knew: Almost no one with the power to make policy is interested in getting it right. They’re interested in talking points that flatter the folk beliefs of their base, and if the data contradicts voter opinion, they’d rather do the wrong thing than the unpopular one.”
But that’s not Paul Ryan. He is interested in policy. That’s what he wants to do. He didn’t want to be Speaker. He wanted to get policy right. He cared about things like tax reform and getting entitlements under control. He proposed “A Roadmap for America’s Future” in 2008. And he continued to push these proposals in every Congress after that. He ultimately got the House Republicans to adopt his ideas. While others were running away from Social Security and Medicare reform because they were worried about losing votes in the next election, Paul Ryan was making serious proposals to reform Social Security and Medicare because he was worried about the next generation.
In his farewell address, you could hear the excitement in his voice as he talked about the tax reform bill he helped to get passed:
“And, after years of doubt, years of the cynics saying it could not be done, we achieved the first major overhaul of our tax code in 31 years.
Think about it. We went from having the worst tax code in the industrialized world to one of the most competitive.
This is something I worked on my entire adult life, and it is something that will help to improve people’s lives for a long time to come.
It is one of those elusive generational reforms.
It is why we do this.”
Obviously, the tax bill wasn’t perfect. It reformed the tax code, but it didn’t deal with the deficit. I am sure Speaker Ryan would have preferred to do both, but he couldn’t. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Ryan had to pass bills with the Congress he had, not the Congress he wanted.
While Paul Ryan was able to get the tax reform bill passed, there were other things he couldn’t do because, as Ms. McArdle said, most people in Washington don’t care about actually doing things anymore. They care about talking points and making their base happy.
In his farewell speech, Speaker Ryan identified three big problems that need to be addressed: helping people lift themselves out of poverty, saving our entitlement programs, and fixing our immigration system. But the politics of Washington would not allow it:
“The state of politics these days, though, is another question, and frankly one I don’t have an answer for.
We have a good sense of what our politics should look like. …
But today, too often, genuine disagreement quickly gives way to intense distrust. We spend far more time trying to convict one another than we do developing our own convictions.
Being against someone has more currency than being for anything. Each of us has found ourselves operating on the wrong side of this equation from time to time.
All of this gets amplified by technology, with an incentive structure that preys on people’s fears, and algorithms that play on anger. Outrage is a brand. …
We default to lazy litmus tests and shopworn denunciations. It is just emotional pabulum fed from a trough of outrage.
It is exhausting. It saps meaning from our politics. And it discourages good people from pursuing public service.”
Read the last paragraph again: “[The state of politics today] is exhausting. It saps meaning from our politics. And it discourages good people from pursuing public service.”
Paul Ryan is exhausted. Understandably. But he is not exhausted from accomplishing something – because actually doing something isn’t exhausting. He is exhausted because he can’t do what needs to be done. Our politics today not only “discourages people from pursuing public service,” it discourages them from staying in public service. Is there any better example of why Paul Ryan is retiring than the current government shutdown? People with good faith and common sense could sit down and end it in a few minutes. But both sides seem to care more about pandering to their base and preventing the other side from winning than about solving the problem and actually governing properly.
Megan McArdle asked: “Is there any hope of resurrecting policy from its untimely demise?” While she couldn’t identify how it might happen, she did say, “There’s always hope, because the only ironclad rule of politics is that things change, and quicker than you might think.”
Paul Ryan is only 48. With luck, maybe our politics can change back to actually doing things to help people, and Paul Ryan will come back. Because the poor still need to be helped, our immigration system still needs to be fixed, and, perhaps most importantly, our entitlement programs still need to be saved. And so, I won’t just say farewell to Paul Ryan. I will say, “Auf Wiedersehen.” Because “Auf Wiedersehen” not only means goodbye, it also means until we see each other again.
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