When Speaker of the House and sentient Excel spreadsheet Paul Ryan announced his retirement from Congress earlier this year, he probably felt as if a tremendous weight had been lifted off his shoulders. At last, he thought, as a few of his colleagues mumbled tepid statements of appreciation before throwing themselves headlong into the power vacuum created by his looming departure, I will be free to while away my waking hours moderating the F.A. Hayek subreddit in peace.

Alas, Ryan was as correct about this forecast as he was about the public's appetite for his Affordable Care Act repeal attempts, because as the GOP prepares for what is expected to be a tough midterm election season, those politicians who aren't fleeing Washington in disgrace seem determined to make his existence a living hell. Over the past few weeks, a cohort of moderate Republicans joined all 193 congressional Democrats in signing a discharge petition that would have forced votes on the DREAM Act, among other bipartisan immigration reform proposals. A bitter intraparty fight over Donald Trump's favorite subject is the last thing that the fractured GOP needs right now, and a bill making it to the House floor despite the objections of the man who ostensibly controls it would have led to just that.

On Tuesday, the petition came up a mere two signatures short, and Ryan ensured its defeat only after promising to hold votes next week on a Trump-backed far-right immigration reform proposal, and on what the Times calls a "moderate compromise bill" that has yet to be actually written. Even so, it is remarkable that after years of tolerating Ryan's craven refusal to acknowledge the existence of popular legislation because of his mortal fear of a Freedom Caucus-led rebellion, 23 Republicans—perhaps realizing that their jobs are on the line and Paul Ryan's is not anymore—elected to openly defy their leader in an effort to get something done.

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As internal attempts to make Ryan irrelevant inch closer to success, the majority he continues to babysit is digging in further on the positions that made it unworkable in the first place. Steve King, a virulently anti-immigration congressman from an Iowa district that really needs to get its shit together, finally transitioned this week from standard American racism to retweeting literal neo-Nazis. To be fair, Steve King is not the Speaker of the House. But he isn't a fringe lunatic, either. Once again, casual racism from a party stalwart—which, again, took the form of promoting Nazis—drew no condemnation from the man who is Speaker of the House, because there is nothing Paul Ryan won't tolerate in his efforts to avoid a humiliating, lame-duck ouster.

This is going to get harder before it gets easier. Instead of backing more centrist candidates in 2018 and returning the GOP to something resembling a mainstream political party, many voters are latching on to whoever bears the strongest resemblance to Donald Trump. In purple Virginia, Corey Stewart, a former (?) birther conspiracist who dabbles in white nationalism and earned notoriety for his willingness to stump for Confederate statutes, just earned the party's 2018 nomination for Tim Kaine's Senate seat. "Nothing is worse than a Yankee telling a Southerner that his monuments don't matter," he wrote in 2017, which is an interesting stance to take for a man born in Duluth, Minnesota. (It is almost as if something other than an appreciation for history motivates his burning desire to be associated with symbols of slavery!)

Paul Ryan's political career didn't have to end this way, trapped in the middle of a bridge that his fed-up colleagues are angrily dismantling from both ends. If he wanted, he could have been just another Republican Speaker of the House who worked tirelessly to make life harder for poor people. But as single-issue bigots became the dominant force in GOP politics during his time in office, Ryan never summoned the courage to say anything about it. For him, tacit acceptance of the country's grossest impulses was an acceptable price to pay for retaining the speakership, even though his grasp on power, as a result of his tradeoffs, was too weak to accomplish much of substance. This is how he will be remembered: as a failed legislator and leader for whom just about everyone, for one reason or another, eventually felt mostly contempt.