Pierce writes: "The ghost, it was given up around 3:30 on Thursday afternoon, at least for 12 hours or so. Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, took one in the chops when a vote of his well-camouflaged tax-cut bill was postponed until Friday morning."



Paul Ryan. (photo: Getty Images)

Sad Paul Ryan Is Sad

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

he ghost, it was given up around 3:30 on Thursday afternoon, at least for 12 hours or so. Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, took one in the chops when a vote of his well-camouflaged tax-cut bill was postponed until Friday morning. This came after a frenzied 48 hours in which Ryan and the president* were pulled around by the nose by the more lunatic members of their party who thought the dead-fish Ryan had sent to the House wasn't tough enough on poor people.

Finally, rather than face the revolt of the wingnuts, Ryan and the Republican leadership pulled the vote, opting for a meeting of the Republican conference and a possible vote on Friday. This sent the House side of the Capitol into a positive whirlwind of rumor, speculation, and undeniable flopsweat. Buttonholed outside the House chamber, Congressman John Ratcliffe, a Republican from Texas who is a radical conservative, but not a Freedom Caucus cultist, was honest about the whole business. The president* carried Ratcliffe's district with 76 percent of the vote, and Ratcliffe would like to stay in Congress.

"If I had more news, I'd give it to you," Ratcliffe said. "There's a meeting tonight and there might be some kind of vote, or maybe not. That's where it stands."

The sticking point remains with the Freedom Caucus, the political S&M cult led by Mark Meadows, Republican of the newly insane state of North Carolina. Meadows comes from a jerry-rigged district in the western part of the state. He's one of the beneficiaries of the radical redistricting plan cooked up in 2011 by the North Carolina legislature, the plan that's so nakedly awful that it is currently under review by the Supreme Court. So he's largely immune from the fact that, according to this handy map from the Kaiser Foundation, the premiums for the people in the counties he represents will increase by an average of 16 percent if the new bill as it's currently designed will pass. Of course, Meadows doesn't think the bill as it's currently designed allows enough freedom for those folks, so he has his heart set on making it worse. And he's willing to blow up the House to do it.

"I just have one vote," he said, oozing counterfeit sincerity from every pore. "My voting card only has one picture on it. Mine. I don't bring anything to the Congress except the voice of one district in western North Carolina."

I don't know how many new ways they can find to screw this up, but I'm sadly convinced that none of them will pay any price for it.

UPDATE—Oh, look. The Congressional Budget Office has stopped by to call again.

Smaller savings.

More uninsured.

But $999 billion more in tax cuts.