
Paul Ryan raked in a healthy thank-you gift from the Koch brothers following the passage of the tax scam bill. Ryan's challenger Randy Bryce made sure it didn't go unnoticed.

The billionaire Koch brothers were apparently quite pleased with the passage of the GOP's tax scam bill.

In fact, as International Business Times reports, Charles Koch handed House Speaker Paul Ryan a nearly $500,000 thank-you gift mere days after the House passed its version of the bill.

The report notes that five other wealthy donors also contributed $100,000 each to Ryan's joint fundraising committee in the last quarter of 2017.


And Ryan's Democratic challenger, ironworker and military veteran Randy Bryce, made sure that these massive gifts and the context around them did not go unnoticed.

Paul Ryan passed a 1.5 trillion dollar tax bill that takes from working people to give to the super rich. Days later, he got $500,000 in Koch contributions.https://t.co/mctzh9RYu8 — Randy Bryce (@IronStache) January 21, 2018

Ryan would be hard-pressed to claim that these donations had nothing at all to do with the passage of the bill, considering the Koch brothers spent millions on the effort to sell the scam to the American people.

And Mike Pence made his pathetic plea for wealthy business owners to bully their employees into backing the bill at a retreat headlined by a Koch-backed organization.

Bryce has been taking Ryan to task from the beginning for the GOP's inability to actually get anything substantive done that benefits everyday Americans and for refusing to defend the nation from Donald Trump's dangerous rhetoric around North Korea and potential use of nuclear weapons.

It's no wonder Ryan, who has held his House seat since 1999, is embarrassingly close to the relatively unknown Bryce in early polling, and why he may even be considering retiring after this year.

Accepting massive donations from the super-rich just days after inflicting the tax scam bill on working Americans is unlikely to widen that gap in Ryan's favor.