Speaker Ryan's #WrongWay Agenda Continues Going the Wrong Way
From MSNBC:
Paul Ryan's anti-poverty plan isn't the ‘better way'
Unfortunately for Ryan, his timing wasn't ideal: the political world was focused on Donald Trump's overt racism yesterday, and when the Speaker unveiled his new anti-poverty proposal and fielded questions from reporters, they wanted to hear the Speaker's thoughts on his party's presidential candidate. Ryan ended up making headlines for his Trump comments, but the Speaker's anti-poverty plan was largely overlooked.
And while that must have been frustrating for the Republican leader, in a way, it may have been a blessing in disguise – because if the public fully understood what Ryan was recommending with regard to poverty, he'd probably have an entirely different controversy on his hands.
…The plan is based on faulty assumptions and it ignores obvious anti-poverty measures such as the minimum wage. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities called Ryan's blueprint "disappointing," adding, "Most of its proposals are so vague that it's hard to figure out how they would work or affect low-income people. And in some cases where the plan provides more specificity, the proposals would likely do more harm than good, risking increases in poverty and even homelessness among poor families with children."
…How many low-income families, struggling to pay rent and put food on the table, are going to see a material difference in their lives if Paul Ryan makes it easier for finance-industry professionals to change the standards for retirement investments to benefit firms over consumers?
What's more, let's not miss the forest for the trees. The Speaker of the House has been eager, if not desperate, to show that he and his Republican conference are serious about governing – so serious that they've spent months crafting a detailed, six-point agenda that they're rolling out this election year. More than five years after claiming the House majority, GOP leaders have declared they're finally ready to demonstrate Republicans' preparedness to lead.
From Slate:
… Most of the agenda is a rehash of, or at least a variation on, material Ryan has trotted out before…
So far, so dull. But then, buried deep on the second-to-last page, is a bit so obviously craven that I haven't been able to stop chuckling about it for the past hour or so. In the name of fighting poverty and encouraging upward mobility, Paul Ryan and the House GOP want to make it easier for financial advisers to screw over their clients.
Specifically, Ryan and the GOP would like to abolish the Department of Labor's recently released "fiduciary rule,"…
This is silly…The basic consumer protections offered by the fiduciary rule aren't going to deprive anybody of essential financial advice, and fighting it is an obvious sop to a powerful industry. Trying to cloak it in the language of an anti-poverty effort is as sad as it is hilarious.
From CNN:
Facing unrest over Donald Trump's rhetoric, Republican leaders are eager to seize control of the GOP away from their party's standard-bearer, with the unveiling of Speaker Paul Ryan's agenda this week…
The growing fear within the GOP is that Trump's candidacy will tear away the core coalition built by Ronald Reagan, who pieced together social conservatives, defense hawks and free market backers to help him win two terms in the White House. And they worry that his provocative statements -- the latest over the Mexican heritage of a federal judge overseeing a Trump University lawsuit -- will undermine the GOP with key voting blocs critical in swing states.
…it's a tall order for Republicans on Capitol Hill to distance themselves completely for Trump, given that many have endorsed their party's presumptive nominee...
But as House GOP leaders they try to change the subject to their platform they are still being pressed to explain how they can back a nominee who is playing the kind of identity politics they decry.
Trump completely ignored Ryan's remarks, and criticism from other top GOP leaders, and reiterated his comments about the judge in interviews that aired over the weekend. He also went further in one television interview saying he'd also have concerns about a Muslim judge showing some type of bias towards him.
From The Daily Beast:
…the House speaker is getting a glimpse of his future with a man who puts his dreams before anyone else's.
Tuesday's press conference, was suppose to highlight Ryan's latest attempt to turn the page away from the insanity of the presidential election and back to the serious business of lawmaking. He has spent the past few weeks cutting campaign-style videos teasing the release of a series of proposals from House Republicans.
The sad irony of all this is that Trump actually paid lip service to Ryan's anti-poverty plan when he appeared on CBS's Face the Nation on June 5.
"Paul Ryan—well, I think we will agree on—as an example, he really focuses on poverty," Trump told host John Dickerson. "He wants to take people out of poverty. So do I. And we're going to come up with a plan."
But that comment was totally drowned out by the criticism Trump drew for saying on the same show that a Muslim judge would probably be just as unfair to him as a judge of Mexican ancestry.
From The Atlantic:
Republicans Struggle to Make Their Anti-Poverty Plan Heard
The unveiling on Tuesday morning of the House Republican plan to combat poverty—the first in a series of policy rollouts this month—went about as well as Speaker Paul Ryan probably expected.
And then a bunch of reporters asked Ryan if Donald Trump was a racist.
…Ryan's challenge is Trump, whose penchant for creating distractions and dominating news coverage hasn't diminished a bit in the year since he launched his presidential candidacy.
…
By and large, these are proposals that Republicans have made before, and in some cases tried to pass into law…
From The Hill:
…that agenda is at risk of being overshadowed by Donald Trump, the party's polarizing standard-bearer with a reputation for going his own way.
In recent days, the celebrity businessman has dominated the airwaves by arguing that a federal judge presiding over a case against Trump University cannot be impartial because "he's a Mexican."
…House Republicans insist that that they will be able to pivot to the Ryan agenda when voters or reporters ask them about the Trump controversy du jour.
From ThinkProgress:
…In the past, he's blamed poverty on a "culture problem" in "inner cities," where he says black men are "not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work." He has also argued that marriage is the cure for poverty, not government programs, and refused to allow any actual poor people testify at his hearings on poverty. He seemed to back away from some of the more racially loaded rhetoric in March, saying he was wrong to refer to people stuck in poverty as "takers."
Despite the change of heart about his rhetoric, Ryan is apparently sticking to his guns on policy. Ryan's previous poverty plans have targeted the federal safety net, and the new proposal seems just as fixated on the idea that people are abusing benefits. The proposal asserts that "for low-income families, it may not always pay to work," echoing a longtime conservative theory that poor people choose not to get jobs because it's more lucrative to rely on government benefits.
From Salon:
The Republican focus on poverty issues comes at a time when the party's image is in desperate need of a makeover, but also at a moment when that makeover really just isn't possible. The Republicans would like to shed their "party of the rich" image without actually going to the trouble of changing their policies, and the anti-poverty push is part of that – they're going to gut social programs that are working as they should be, all the while claiming that they're "fixing" a problem that doesn't really exist. It's more about reducing government spending than it is about helping the less fortunate.
From Washington Post:
Seven white men and a white woman, Republican members of Congress all, boarded vehicles on Capitol Hill on Tuesday morning for a voyage deep into Anacostia, a largely black and poor section of Washington.
Their mission: to reassure nonwhite voters frightened by Donald Trump, their party's presumptive presidential nominee.
Their odds of success: exceedingly low.
The lawmakers must have perceived their mission to be risky, for they traveled with a veritable arsenal: a Capitol Police "mobile command center" truck, a canine unit, four or five squad cars and a half-dozen black police vans. Police closed the street to traffic, and security officials wearing plainclothes and earpieces kept a watchful eye in all directions as a white van disgorged the lawmakers at the residential addiction-treatment program they were visiting. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan zoomed up moments later in his two-Suburban motorcade.
…if Ryan thinks his outing to the Anacostia shelter is going to offset the yuuuuge damage Trump is doing to the party with Latinos, African Americans, women, immigrants and others — well, to borrow a favorite Trump epithet, he's a loser.
The first six questions for Ryan after his remarks at the shelter Tuesday were about Trump's racist campaign to disqualify the judge in a fraud case against Trump because the judge is Hispanic…
…
The goal for now is to remove the taint of Trump. And it's going to take more than an armed tour of Anacostia.
After totally failing to pass a budget or meaningfully address any of the public health crises in America, Speaker Ryan is trying to distract focus from House Republicans' obstruction, radical discrimination and their reckless, presidential candidate's racist attacks by repackaging Republicans' tired, special interest priorities. It will not work.