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Undated: Paul Davis Ryan Jr. (born January 29, 1970) is an American politician serving since 2015 as the 54th Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. He was the 2012 vice presidential nominee of the Republican Party, running alongside Mitt Romney.
He chaired the House Budget Committee from 2011 to 2015 and briefly chaired the House Ways and Means Committee in 2015 prior to being elected Speaker of the House following John Boehner's retirement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ryan
-- 2018 --
January 21: House Speaker Paul Ryan collected nearly $500,000 in campaign contributions from Charles Koch and his wife after helping usher through a massive tax reform law.
According to a recent campaign finance report filed Thursday, Koch and his wife Elizabeth each donated $247,7000 to Ryan’s joint fundraising committee.
Five other donors, including billionaire businessmen Jeffery Hildebrand and William Parfet, each contributed $100,000 in the last quarter of 2017, according to the records, which were first reported by the International Business Times.
Ryan was a major proponent of privatizing Social Security in the mid-2000s. In the 2010s, his proposals "The Path to Prosperity" and "A Better Way" advocated for the privatization of Medicare, block granting of Medicaid, repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and significant tax cuts. As Speaker, he was instrumental in the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. His other major piece of legislation, the American Health Care Act of 2017, passed the House but failed in the Senate by a single vote. Ryan did not seek re-election to the House in the 2018 elections.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/paul-ryan-gets-massive-donations-from-billionaires-after-helping-pass-tax-reform-report
January 25: Paul Ryan Is the Silent Partner in Trump’s War on the Rule of Law
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/paul-ryan-silent-partner-in-trumps-war-on-the-rule-of-law.html
April 11: US House Speaker Paul Ryan to retire in blow to Republicans
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43729218
April 11: Paul Ryan's Unexpected Exit Is a Warning Sign for Republicans
House Speaker Paul Ryan and White House chief of staff John Kelly made the obligatory small talk as they shared an elevator in a hotel in Austin in early April. They asked about each other’s families, groused about allergy season and complained that hotels are always too air-conditioned. But hanging in the air between them, Ryan told friends, was a mutual sympathy for their shared burden: President Donald J. Trump.
There wasn’t much to say, really, or much to be done. Both have found working with the President to be an infinitely frustrating task. Both had resigned themselves to trying to limit the damage.
http://time.com/5236804/paul-ryan-retire-decision/
April 11: Donald Trump Takes Out Paul Ryan, and ‘It’s Going to Be a Civil War’
Ryan and his caucus hoped to run on the tax cut, the economy, and infrastructure. All of these messages now will be swept aside. Ryan owns his share of the blame; too often, he behaved as if he was some deferential junior VP at a Trump resort and not the leader of the House of Representatives in a co-equal branch of government. The idea, popular among the House leadership, that a diet of ass-kissing and deference would make Trump into a normal president who didn’t need the political equivalent of Depends was always a strategic mistake.
Ryan is now paying the price. The rest of his caucus will pay in the fall.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-takes-out-paul-ryan-and-its-going-to-be-a-civil-war
April 12: Paul Ryan Is Poised to Earn Millions When He Retires Next Year
http://fortune.com/2018/04/12/paul-ryan-net-worth/
July 16: Paul Ryan contradicts Trump: 'No question that Russia interfered in our election'
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/07/16/house-speaker-paul-ryan-contradicts-trump-says-russia-meddled-2016/789061002/
October 17: Paul Ryan worries tribal identity politics is "becoming the new norm" for both sides
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/paul-ryan-worries-tribal-identity-politics-is-becoming-the-new-norm-for-both-sides/
November 30: Paul Ryan questions California's 'bizarre' vote-counting process
House Speaker Paul Ryan questioned the legitimacy of California’s ballot-counting process Thursday, adding to claims from many Republicans that the state’s election procedures are flawed.
“It defies logic to me,” Ryan told the Washington Post. “We had a lot of wins that night, and three weeks later we lost basically every contested California race. This election system they have, I can’t begin to understand what ballot harvesting is.”
"Ballot harvesting" is when a third party collects completed ballots from voters and hands them over to election officials. The practice was legal for the first time in California this year.
Ryan has not accused California of any wrongdoing.
Alex Padilla, the state's top election official, fired back at Ryan on Twitter, saying the state makes sure "every ballot is properly counted and accounted for. That’s not 'bizarre,' that’s DEMOCRACY.”
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/paul-ryan-questions-californias-vote-counting-process-as-bizarre
December 6: By congressional tradition, three separate portraits of Ryan have been painted (paid for by private funds and not taxpayers) and are being unveiled before he goes back to Wisconsin after two decades as a lawmaker.
One canvas will hang in the hearing room of the House Budget Committee, which Ryan chaired for four years. Another will go to the Ways and Means Committee, where Ryan was chairman less than a year. The third will commemorate Ryan’s three years as House speaker and will hang in the Speaker’s Lobby, just off the House floor.
The budget committee likeness was unveiled in a low-key ceremony last week in the oft-used Rayburn Room, with light hors d’oeuvres and drinks. Ryan mingled with guests and friends. His brother Stan was there. The mood was light and celebratory.
But there was a bittersweet subtext, even a bit of sadness. This was not the ending Ryan and his allies had imagined. The 48-year-old Wisconsinite’s conservatism, ascendant just a few years ago, has been curb-stomped and cast ignominiously aside by President Trump and his followers.
https://news.yahoo.com/paul-ryans-bittersweet-exit-shows-limits-ideas-politics-100010783.html
December 11: 'Double standards': Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says Paul Ryan was hailed as a 'genius' when he was elected at 28 but she gets called a 'fraud'
"Double standards are Paul Ryan being elected at 28 and immediately being given the benefit of his ill-considered policies considered genius; and me winning a primary at 28 to immediately be treated with suspicion & scrutinized, down to my clothing, of being a fraud," she wrote.
Ocasio-Cortez was replying to a tweet from Ezra Klein, Vox's editor at large, who shared an article about the increasing federal deficit under Ryan and argued that Ryan had fallen short of his early promises.
https://www.businessinsider.com/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-paul-ryan-elected-28-2018-12
December 12: Paul Ryan blocks House from taking up Yemen bill
House Speaker Paul Ryan on Wednesday pushed language through the House that will prevent lawmakers from taking up any resolution to end U.S. support for the war in Yemen this year.
The language was passed just as the Senate was set to start debate on a resolution that aims to end U.S. involvement in Yemen, a response to anger over Saudi Arabia's involvement in the death of dissident Jamal Khashoggi.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/congress/paul-ryan-blocks-house-from-taking-up-yemen-bill
December 12: Paul Ryan’s Compromised Legacy
The retiring House speaker leaves behind a near-trillion-dollar debt and a Trumpian GOP.
As he readies his escape from the wreckage wrought by the blue wave, Paul Ryan is patting himself on the back for a job well done. During an exit interview on November 30, the lame-duck House speaker and Republican leader declared: “I’d say we became a pretty good governing party … I think history is going to be very good to this majority.”
His self-assessment is not universally shared. The ex-Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, who rarely minces words, likely spoke for many when he shared this perspective last April, on the day Ryan announced that he would bail in December: “Paul Ryan’s monument will be the putrid and smoldering ruins of the Republican Party and conservative movement that he betrayed with his complicity and cowardice. He lacked the guts to stand for decency and the wisdom to confront the threat of Trumpism.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/12/paul-ryans-legacy-compromised-his-trump-support/577942/
December 14: As new deficit figures arrive, Paul Ryan sails away on a sea of red ink
The U.S. budget deficit for the last fiscal year, which ended in September, was $779 billion, up 16% from the previous year. As we recently discussed, that deficit was the fifth largest in modern American history – in non-inflation adjusted terms – and stood at 3.9% of GDP, up from 3.5% a year prior.
Just so we’re clear, the budget deficit for 2019 is already over $300 billion. In the not-too-distant past, that would’ve been a fairly significant budget shortfall over a 12-month span. Now it’s the deficit over just the first two months of the fiscal year.
“As he prepares to leave office, Ryan says that debt reduction is one of those things ‘I wish we could have gotten done,’” Vox’s Ezra Klein wrote this week. “Ryan, the man with the single most power over the federal budget in recent years, sounds like a bystander, as if he watched laws happen rather than made them happen. To understand the irony and duplicity of that statement, you need to understand Ryan’s career.”
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/new-deficit-figures-arrive-paul-ryan-sails-away-sea-red-ink
December 15: Paul Ryan Pushing Through Thousands Of Irish Visas Before Leaving Office
The House speaker previously blocked efforts to help Dreamers.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/speaker-paul-ryan-pushing-through-thousands-of-irish-visas-before-leaving-office_us_5c154703e4b009b8aea7c0fa
December 20: Paul D. Ryan ended his congressional career in the Great Hall of the Library of Congress, beneath a stained-glass vaulted ceiling whose grandiosity emphasized the smallness of the ceremony below.
It was small in a good way, as in intimate and humble. The retiring House speaker made his goodbye speech Wednesday to fewer than 200 family members, congressional staffers and public officials — “all my friends and colleagues,” he said.
And it was small in a less good way, as a reminder of Ryan’s vanishing power over the past two years. Once hailed as the intellectual leader of his party and the fiscal savior of a debt-ridden United States, he became speaker in 2015 only to see his party and country fall into the hands of President Trump, as the debt swelled and Democrats seized the House in the midterm elections.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/paul-ryans-small-sad-goodbye/2018/12/20/40f69d80-0466-11e9-9122-82e98f91ee6f_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.11c5612d15a6
December 25: Democrat introduces bill to close gym during shutdown, singles out Paul Ryan
Rep. Bill Foster, D-Ill., introduced the Shutdown Prioritization Act (SPA) following the partial government shutdown Friday at midnight which resulted from President Trump and Congress' inability to reach a deal on funding for a border wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. Nearly half a million federal workers who are considered “essential” are expected to work without pay, while nearly 400,000 government employees are being furloughed without pay.
He then blasted Republican leadership for supposedly deeming “the Congressional spa used by Members of the House of Representatives to be ‘essential.’”
Foster in particular singled out House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who has gained a reputation for his rigorous workout routine.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/democratic-rep-introduces-bill-to-close-congressional-spa-during-shutdown-singles-out-paul-ryan
-- 2019 --
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