Kenosha---1st District Rep. Paul Ryan is fighting back against the popular notion that nothing’s getting done in Congress, saying that good deeds and newly-enacted, important laws are being overshadowed by presidential politics and even blizzards.
Ryan, the top Republican in the House by virtue of the fact that he's Speaker, made a pair of appearances in Kenosha Friday afternoon.
He spoke first for about 20 minutes to Shalom Center volunteers and their supporters at a luncheon that was held at the Woman's Club. Then he spent about 50 minutes addressing several hundred people at a Kenosha Area Business Alliance lunch meeting held at Snap-On Tools.
At Snap-On, Ryan listed a half dozen or so things that have been achieved under his short tenure as Speaker, including passage of a multi-year transportation bill and replacement of the Common Core K-12 standards, the latter of which he said got short-changed in the spotlight by Washington’s big blizzard and a camera that his staff set up to capture the event. "We got more media, more clicks on the internet, more mentions in the national news for a stupid blizzard cam that we did for rewriting our K-12 education laws," Ryan complained.
At the Woman’s Club, Ryan assured the crowd that good things are still happening in Washington. "When you see the TV and you see all the yelling and the screaming and the 'feel the Bern' and the Trump stuff and whatever.. just know that there are men and women in both parties who care a great deal...who are working hard to try to make a difference," he said.
That's as close as Ryan came to commenting on presidential politics. Although he took four questions from the KABA audience, none pertained to the presidential race.
Ryan has been mentioned as a possible candidate himself in a brokered convention. But he's also picked up some criticism as of late for failing to do much more than his predecessor, John Boehner, in unifying members of his own party in the badly-splintered House.
For example, Ryan admitted this week that he didn't have the Republican votes to pass a budget.
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