Paul Ryan’s First Big Lie As Speaker

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Earlier this week, Paul Ryan marked the occasion of his first appearance on the Sunday shows as speaker of the House by telling a whopper. In an interview by Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week,” Ryan took immigration reform off the table because, he said, Pres. Obama had been “proven untrustworthy on this issue.”

That’s rich, since it was Ryan who became immigration reform’s biggest advocate in 2013 — only to pull his support and help collapse passage in the House after a bipartisan bill proposed by the “Gang of Eight” had passed in the Senate with more than 80 votes.

It’s also rich because the real reason Speaker Ryan won’t pursue immigration reform now is because he struck a backroom deal with the fire-eating tea baggers in the House who drove his predecessor, John Boehner, out of office. Ryan traded killing immigration reform for their votes for him as speaker.


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Transcript from ABC News:

RADDATZ: The National Review reported this week that you made a promise to the House Freedom Caucus that you will not bring immigration reform legislation to the House floor while President Obama is in office.

RYAN: Yeah, I think he’s proven untrustworthy on this issue. He tried to go around Congress with an Executive Order to rewrite laws unilaterally. Presidents don’t write laws. Congress writes laws. So yes, I do not believe we should and we won’t bring immigration legislation with a president we cannot trust on this issue. If we believe and have consensus on things like border enforcement, and interior security, then that’s fine.

Raddatz, who surely knew better, let that comment pass, of course. The White House struck back the next day:

WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY JOSH EARNEST: It’s a little hard for him to make the claim that somehow the president hasn’t acted in good faith on immigration when Speaker Ryan actively thwarted a compromise he himself helped to broker. And then for him to come back and claim it’s somebody else’s fault? It’s preposterous.

Ryan’s propensity for abusing the truth is not surprising or new. He was, after all, the Republicans’ vice presidential nominee on the 2012 ticket with Mitt Romney, who was caught telling lies over 500 times during the campaign.

But Ryan’s record of twisting the truth stands on its own. In August 2012, around the time Ryan joined the GOP ticket, Juan Cole listed “Top Ten Repeated Paul Ryan Lies,” on his Informed Comment site.

“In honest political debate,” Cole wrote, “when a candidate says something that is not true, he is confronted by journalists and the public, and either gives evidence that it is true, or backs off. Ryan continues to insist on repeating known falsehoods, to the extent that even Fox Cable News lamented his dishonesty.”

Ryan’s speech accepting the vice presidential nomination at the Republican National Committee was infamously packed with lies, including an egregious lie that Obamacare had eliminated services provided by Medicare, prompting Pres. Clinton to respond at the Democratic Convention in Charlotte:

PRES. CLINTON: When Congressman Ryan looked into that TV camera and attacked President Obama’s Medicare savings as “the biggest, coldest power play,” I did not know whether to laugh or cry. Because that $716 billion is exactly to the dollar the same amount of Medicare savings that [Ryan] had in his own budget. You gotta give him one thing. It takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did.

During the campaign, Ryan was even caught lying about his record as a marathon runner.

For Republicans and their lapdogs in the establishment media, part of Ryan’s appeal is the winsomeness of his baby-blue blinkers — which Jon Stewart once likened to “looking into a Smurf’s anus.”

Earlier this year, Jonathan Chait detailed “Paul Ryan’s Most Shameless Lie Ever,” in which the then-Budget Committee chairman blamed the ravages inflicted on the middle and working classes by decades of GOP trickle down economics on Pres. Obama.

“Shamelessness is the primary feature of Paul Ryan’s public persona,” Chait noted, “(the secondary feature being a woundedness he displays when his shamelessness is pointed out).”

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One thought on “Paul Ryan’s First Big Lie As Speaker”

  1. Do republicans even care about the truth, they know that most of their support does notkeep up on things, but just listen to the garbage they spout.
    I am amused that Jebby would kill Hitler as a baby if he could go back in time. I may be wrong but I was under the impression that Prestcott was a Hitler supporter at the beginning of WW2, and his Carlisle group made quite a killing selling Hitler weapons.

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