Paul Ryan announces he won’t run for reelection

Is Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy launching a coup?

Congress has been buzzing with reports that allies to McCarthy, the heir apparent to the Republican speakership, have “entertained a plan to push House Speaker Paul Ryan out of his post over the summer” in conversations that have even reached President Donald Trump, the Weekly Standard’s Haley Byrd first reported. White House budget director Mick Mulvaney publicly confirmed conversations to that effect and further speculated such a move would have the added benefit of embarrassing House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, whose caucus has grumbled about her iron grip on Democratic leadership.

I’m not a big Paul Ryan fan, but one particular kick in the pants the speaker of the House is getting on his way out the door is unfair. It’s simply not the case that he sold out to Donald Trump or compromised his principles in any way. If anything, it’s just the opposite — Trump abandoned his stated views on a wide range of policy issues in order to bring himself into close conformity with Ryan’s ideology and policy agenda.

Writers sending off Ryan, like Tim Alberta at Politico and Josh Barro at Business Insider, argue that the speaker’s career has had a tragic arc in which, in Albert’s words, “the battle for the GOP’s heart and soul is finished,” with Trump the victor and Ryan the loser.

In the race for House Speaker Paul Ryan’s seat in Wisconsin’s First Congressional District, one Democratic candidate has gotten a lot of national attention. But there’s another Democrat in the race: Cathy Myers, though lower profile, is running a serious campaign.

Myers is a school board member and part-time teacher from Ryan’s hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin. She’s running a tough race against fellow Democratic candidate Randy Bryce, the ironworker and union organizer who goes by “IronStache.”

Randy Bryce, the Democratic frontrunner for Wisconsin’s First Congressional District, got into the race in the middle of the failed Republican effort to repeal and replace Obamacare last summer.

Now, as Bryce likes to say, he’s successfully repealed one of the men who led that effort: House Speaker Paul Ryan, who announced Wednesday that he will retire from Congress at the end of his term. But he still wants to replace Ryan.

Paul Ryan will be remembered for a lot of things — his rise to fame as President Barack Obama’s most prominent critic in Congress; his 2012 run for vice president; his role leading the Republican establishment as it accepted Donald Trump as its nominee and then president.

But he deserves to be remembered as the person who, more than anyone else, committed the Republican Party to an extreme libertarian vision of government in response to Obama’s election. In doing so, he ended up achieving little of the party’s priorities — and created an opening that helped propel Trump to the White House.

If you want to understand why Paul Ryan isn’t running for reelection and will leave Congress at the end of the year instead, don’t think about his Democratic challenger, Randy Bryce (a.k.a. “IronStache”). Think about his erstwhile Republican primary opponent, Paul Nehlen.

Nehlen ran against Ryan for not disliking foreigners enough. He asked Ryan to debate him on a proposal to deport all Muslim Americans from the US. He once showed up at Ryan’s house with a group of women whose children had been killed by unauthorized immigrants. After his 2016 defeat, Nehlen got deeper and deeper into white nationalism — these days, he can usually be found posting pro-Trump, anti-Semitic memes on the alt-right social network Gab.

House Speaker Paul Ryan announced he is on his way out — and he’s defending Donald Trump’s presidency until the bitter end.

Ryan told reporters Wednesday morning that he will not run for reelection this November, following a standard framework: He wants to see his kids more, and be a present husband. But his final remarks at the press conference were perhaps the most poignant. Asked if Trump’s reshaping of the Republican Party played a role in his decision, Ryan said, “Not at all.”

Paul Ryan once famously said that he had dreamed about overhauling Medicaid since he was “drinking out of a keg.” But with the news that the House speaker will retire at the end of this year, it appears Ryan will leave Congress without achieving his lifelong ambition.

At least not directly. But if you look at the steps the Trump administration is taking to dramatically shrink Medicaid — the nation’s largest insurer, which covers more than 75 million Americans — it’s clear that Ryan’s dreams are alive and well. Through work requirements and other restrictions, President Donald Trump could eventually oversee the most significant rollback of Medicaid benefits in the program’s 50-year history.

Paul Ryan isn’t ducking out of a November election because he’d lose his House seat. Paul Ryan is retiring because he can see what is becoming increasingly obvious: In November, congressional Republicans are, for all intents and purposes, screwed.

And if Ryan stuck around, he’d return to a House very likely overrun by Democrats and end up handing over his speaker’s gavel.