COMMENTARY

BRUMMETT ONLINE: Mum’s the word …

Don’t say anything good about Paul Ryan. Don’t say anything at all about Paul Ryan.

That, according to an article in the Washington Post, has been what mainstream Republican congressmen have been saying lately to their Democratic colleagues who know Ryan to be, while conservative, a reasonable and good-faith negotiator.

It means that reasonable Republicans fear it would amount to a kiss of death for Ryan’s effectiveness with the hard-right element of the House Republican caucus, and thus as speaker, if Democrats expressed optimism that Ryan is someone with whom they can deal to achieve negotiated settlements on vital issues like the budget and the debt limit.

Let’s be clear on what we’re saying here: Reasonable Republicans don’t want reasonable Democrats to let unreasonable Republicans know that they respect Ryan, because Ryan might not survive it.

And from that adolescent dynamic we’re supposed to get a functioning Congress somehow.

It’s getting ever-zanier on the hard right.

Some in the 40-member Tea Party-ish Freedom Caucus — those who drubbed John Boehner from the speakership because being a Newt Gingrich disciple was entirely too left-wing — have accepted Ryan’s consensus-seeking candidacy and declared it a step in the right direction.

For that, they have been attacked at home, on social media and by right-wing radio blowhards for turning out to be traitorous sellouts — dreaded RINOs, meaning Republicans in name only, who are willing to settle scandalously for steps, mere increments, for less than full right-wing revolution.

Ryan has negotiated a couple of deals with Democrats over the years. And he has behaved favorably toward some sort of immigration settlement that would permit paths to citizenship. And Vice President Joe Biden told 60 Minutes that Ryan was the kind of guy with whom the White House could work.

Those are unforgivable sins. They are “establishment.” They are “Washington as usual.” They are “appeasement.”

Wanting to cut taxes for the rich and corporations and to destroy Medicare with vouchers — the greater themes of Ryan’s politics — are not nearly conservative enough for these “apocalyptic” types.

“Apocalyptic cult” is what a veteran former Republican staffer named Michael Lofgren called these hard-right conservative congressman in a semi-famous essay on the occasion of his exasperated departure from congressional employment in 2011.

By “apocalyptic,” he meant persons who are so zealous in their right-wing rigidity that they believe the world will end calamitously if they get anything less than everything they want.

It’s like the religious fundamentalists and evangelicals who think they’re the only ones going to heaven, and that the only path to heaven is theirs, and that the rest of us will burn eternally for the unpardonable sin of holding views not in line with theirs.

It’s getting to be the same dynamic in Arkansas.

I was implored during the legislative session of 2013 to stop writing nice things about the private-option form of Medicaid expansion. It was because, I was told, Republicans could never muster a three-fourths majority for the appropriation if the newspaper Satan was praising that which they were being asked to support.

The Arkansas replica of Ryan — and of Boehner before — is Gov. Asa Hutchinson.

He’s a reasonable and deal-making Republican, a perfectly valid conservative trying never to so alienate the hard right as to gin up primary opposition for his more reliably reasonable Republican legislative allies.

Groups like the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity and the further-right Conduit for Action threaten to back GOP primary challengers to any RINOs acceding to the liberal concept of arithmetic and agreeing to solve the highway funding shortage by raising highway-user taxes or fees.

A vivid case in point: The young Republican state legislator I extolled as the most impressive in the General Assembly, largely for his ability to help design and then explain and sell the private option … well, his name is John Burris. And he is now a former legislator.

He was sufficiently conservative to be Tom Cotton’s political director, which is to say too conservative.

But he was not conservative enough to survive my kiss of death in a Republican primary from a private-option opponent ridiculing him for the disgrace of being admired as an effective bipartisan leader by forces of darkness over in Little Rock.

Apparently the best hope for bipartisan solutions in both Washington and Little Rock is for no one to dare speak of it.

John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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