House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) listens to testimony during a hearing on
For someone who was his party's vice-presidential nominee just a year ago, Rep. Paul Ryan has not been all that visible in the current bout of Republican hostage-taking that's shut down the government and is threatening default. But fear not! He's still the same old Paul Ryan, ever eager to attack Medicare and Medicaid and, in a House Republican meeting, keep pressing on some of the issues that helped him to victory ignominious defeat in 2012. Ryanwhipped up opposition to Sen. Susan Collins's "compromise" bill,
... saying the House could not accept either a debt-limit bill or a government-funding measure that would delay the next fight until the new year.
According to two Republicans familiar with the exchange, Ryan argued that the House would need those deadlines as “leverage” for delaying the health-care law’s individual mandate and adding a “conscience clause” — allowing employers and insurers to opt out of birth-control coverage if they find it objectionable on moral or religious grounds — and mentioned tax and entitlement goals Ryan had focused on in a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
Putting employers between women and their doctors is one of the reasons House Republicans forced the vastly unpopular shutdown to begin with, but gosh, it's comforting to know that Paul Ryan is still on the case, isn't it?
Even if you want to put employers between women and their doctors and keep health insurance ridiculously expensive, the idea that the United States of America defaulting on its debts is appropriate leverage for those goals is so absurdly disproportionate. He's actually arguing that possible economic collapse is a fair trade for giving bosses power over women's birth control choices! The absolutism here is mindboggling. What's next, using the threat of nuclear war as leverage to privatize Medicare?