Tag: Library of Congress

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Paul Ryan, in his farewell address to Congress on Wednesday, urged a more civil tone in the nation's discourse and said the difficult problems facing the country "are solvable if our politics will allow it." "That is to say, our problems are solvable if our politics will allow it." From congressional intern to speaker of the House, Ryan, 48, has experienced almost every aspect of Capitol Hill. He announced in April that he would retire this year after serving three years as the top House Republican, passing the mantle to California Republican Kevin McCarthy when the first session of a new Congress convenes with Democrats in control of the chamber. Dec. 19, 201801:35 “Certainly one Congress cannot solve all that ails us. Earlier this year, he had said as much in an interview with C-SPAN, expressing regret that "we have yet to reach bipartisan consensus on comprehensive entitlement reform when all of us know that this is necessary to get our debt and deficit under control." In 2017, Republicans in Congress passed a massive tax cut — an issue Ryan championed during his two-decade career on Capitol Hill, and one of his key achievement as speaker. Though they lost, Ryan's standing in the party grew, becoming a leading voice on Capitol Hill. Meanwhile, Ryan’s relationship with President Donald Trump has been a complicated one. He said in an interview with The New York Times’ Mark Leibovich in August that he was able to avoid "tragedy" while working with Trump.

Paul Ryan’s farewell tour is going about as well as you might imagine. The retiring speaker of the House, who made a career out of promoting his aw-shucks humility, has presided over the revealing of not one but three painted portraits of himself. In less-controlled settings, his interviews with media outlets have, rather than provide a victory lap, only served to highlight the emptiness of Ryan’s words and the failures of his time in office. Speaking of those empty words, Ryan was also set to leave us with a formal farewell address at the Library of Congress earlier this week ? until George H.W. It was yet another reminder that history has rarely been on Ryan’s side. Not surprisingly, that’s not Ryan’s own assessment of his time in public life. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, Ryan threw his sermonizing into overdrive, appearing nonstop on Fox News and other conservative outlets to warn about how the new president’s budget plans would drive the economy into a ditch, as if he hadn’t helped Bush do just that for the previous eight years. Instead, Ryan rolled over for Trump, allowing and even protecting his worst abuses of office. Too bad that throughout his career, Paul Ryan showed he was not so much a policy genius as he was a political hack. It’s just that in the eyes of a Republican Party that has capitulated to Trump at almost every turn, those are one and the same.