Back on Hill, Ryan Remains a Fiscal Force

Representative Paul D. Ryan, in Washington last week,
resumes his post as the House Budget Committee chairman.

WASHINGTON — Gone is the private jet and the motorcade that swept him from the tarmac to the private hotel entrances. His security staff has been reduced to a few Capitol Police officers, soon to fade away. Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin is back to driving his own truck back home, and walking to the House floor here for votes alone, like everyone else.

But while the campaign trappings and the high profile of the national campaign are behind him, Mr. Ryan now finds himself at the center of one of the biggest fiscal negotiations in a generation

Speaker John A. Boehner has tapped Mr. Ryan, who has returned to his post as the House Budget Committee chairman after an unsuccessful run for vice president, to help strike a deal to avoid big tax increases and spending cuts by the end of the year, and to bring along fellow Republicans.

“He helps us toward creating a product,” said Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, “and he helps sell the product.” 

The test will be whether Mr. Ryan — who declined last year to sit on another Congressional committee charged with taming the deficit, in large part because doing so might have hurt his prospects for national office — can make the transition from House budget philosopher to governing heavyweight who can help negotiate a bipartisan deal and sell it to his colleagues.  READ MORE

Paul Ryan's Top 10 Falsehoods and Outrages... from Just His First Week on the Campaign Trail

Ryan's early roll-out for campaign 2012 has been quite the disaster.

August 22, 2012

1. Ryan’s position opposing abortion even in cases of rape, and his attempts to define cytoblasts as legal ‘persons’ (which would outlaw all termination of pregnancies and some forms of birth control) came under scrutiny when  Republican Todd Akin, running for the Senate in Missouri, provoked a furor.  Akin said he opposed abortion even in cases of rape because in ‘legitimate rape’ the woman’s body rejects fertilization. Akin’s insensitivity to a situation that affects a third of a million American women every decade, plus his ignorance of Biology 101, drew widespread condemnation. Mitt Romney put out a statement that both he and Ryan believed abortion was permitted in case of rape.  Problem: Ryan has repeatedly opposed that position and appears to agree  with Akin more than with his running mate.

2. Ryan keeps attacking Prsident Obama’s stimulus program now . But in 2002 when then President George W. Bush proposed stimulus spending, Ryan supported it. “What we’re trying to accomplish today with the passage of this third stimulus package is to create jobs and help the unemployed,” Ryan told MSNBC in 2002.READ MORE
3. Even more embarrassing,