Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin and first runner-up in the last vice-presidential pageant, has some plans. They are not all that different from his previous plans, which generally called for making permanent the consistent upward transfer of the nation's wealth to which he has dedicated his entire political life. That is, the portion of his life that was not financed by you, me, and our uncle Fud through the Social Security survivor's benefits that Ryan now believes to be destructive to the work ethic of millions of people who are not him.

You're welcome, dickhead.

Anyway, Tiger Beat On The Potomac informs us that Ryan's new plans call for impoverishing the poor, the sick, and the old on an accelerated schedule. This ambitious charlatan, who literally was laughed off the national stage by Joe Biden in 2012, has decided to go all Uncle Joe Cannon on the federal budget and all Genghis Khan on the social safety net.

Ryan peeled back the curtain on his strategy at a news conference last week after a reporter suggested he would struggle to implement his ambitious agenda next year. After all, it was noted, Republicans are certain to lack the 60 votes needed in the Senate to break Democratic filibusters on legislation. So Ryan gave a minitutorial on congressional rules and the bazooka in his pocket for the assembled reporters. "This is our plan for 2017," Ryan said, waving a copy of his "Better Way" policy agenda. "Much of this you can do through budget reconciliation." He explained that key pieces are "fiscal in nature," meaning they can be moved quickly through a budget maneuver that requires a simple majority in the Senate and House. "This is our game plan for 2017," Ryan said again to the seemingly unconvinced press.

Surely, you can see where this is headed. For all the talk about "disruption" and the "populist moment" and how economic anxiety is pushing Republican voters to share memes about how the president is a gorilla, the basic fight over the national economy is the same one that Ronald Reagan launched with his first budget in 1981. It combines an assault on the concept of a political commonwealth with fanciful mathematics, magic asterisks, and other mechanisms of camouflage for the reality, which is that Ryan and people like him want to establish for the foreseeable future the dynamic of a New Gilded Age.

At New York, Ed Kilgore is not fooled.

It's unclear why the press is "seemingly unconvinced" that the budget reconciliation process is indeed a "bazooka in his pocket." It's been around as a device to package and speed through Congress vast policy changes since Ronald Reagan and his allies used it in 1981 to rewrite the tax code and enact far-reaching budget cuts and program changes. Republicans had the same revolutionary plans for its use four years ago if Mitt Romney had won and the GOP held on to the Senate. And they conducted a dry run at the very beginning of this year by enacting a sweeping reconciliation bill that nobody paid much attention to because they knew Obama would veto it. President Trump would not.

One major reason congressional Republicans conducted this dry run was to set a precedent that reconciliation could be used for seemingly non-budget items like repealing key elements of the Affordable Care Act (notably the individual mandate and purchasing subsidies). The GOP-appointed Senate parliamentarian, ostensibly the traffic cop whose job it is to stop non-germane riders, waved it on through. Democrats can whine about it, but if the GOP wins the trifecta in November, they will not be able to do a thing. So a future reconciliation bill would not only cripple Obamacare and strip millions of Americans of health coverage obtained via the exchanges, but also kill the Medicaid expansion and throw millions more out of coverage. Indeed, there is zero reason to think it would not include turning the original Medicaid program into a block grant to the states (probably along with the food-stamp program), as both Trump and congressional Republicans have proposed, while implementing Ryan's own controversial plan to voucherize Medicare.

Back in 1980, when I was covering my first presidential campaign as a baby alternative journo, there was a feeling in the land, stoked in part by clueless progressive who had as little use for President Jimmy Carter as Jill Stein has for Hillary Rodham Clinton, that what the Reagan people were proposing was mere campaign bloviation and that, if and when he was elected, Reagan would have to moderate his dependence on, say, supply-side economics, which even Republicans thought was a lunatic's excuse for an economic policy.

But, out in Youngstown one day, in a bar on Steel Street, an old union guy told me that this was a mistake. He remembered literally fighting the oligarchs of his day and he told me that, when they say what they want to do, they mean it. He was right.

Make no mistake when you vote this year. If they get the chance, Paul Ryan and the Republicans will do what they say they want to do. They are true believers, cult-like in their allegiance to the money power, and religious in their devotion to the alleged character-building benefits of poverty. They are not committed to building a viable political commonwealth. They are committed to something very much darker.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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