Voting Record: Paul Ryan's Tea Party Problem

[Lakhota]

By John Hrabe

Remember Sen. John Kerry's infamous quote from the 2004 campaign, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it." Here's Rep. Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney's vice-presidential choice, doing his best to outdo the failed Democratic presidential nominee.

"Madam Speaker, this bill offends my principles, but I'm gonna vote for this bill in order to preserve my principles." This Ryan flip-flop comes from his 2008 House floor speech in support of TARP, the $700 billion Wall Street bailout package.

Say again? Oh, you thought Ryan had a reputation as the philosophically principled budget-hawk. A Tea Party darling. A conservative golden boy. A Republican rising star. The party's moral compass. The Wall Street Journal editorial board believes he "represents the GOP's new generation of reformers."

"More than any other politician, the House Budget Chairman has defined those stakes well as a generational choice about the role of government and whether America will once again become a growth economy or sink into interest-group dominated decline," the paper wrote this week.

Ryan has earned that reputation because of strong principled speeches in defense of limited government. "Too much government inevitably leads to bad government," he passionately told the crowd at a town hall forum on ABC's This Week. "When government grows too much and extends beyond its limits, it usually does things poorly."

But, Ryan's voting record doesn't match his lofty conservative rhetoric. He's a big government hypocrite that has repeatedly turned his back on the principles of the Tea Party movement. In 2010, the Daily Caller's Matt Lewis wrote what could be Ryan's conservative obituary:

Though he talks like Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, some of Ryan's most high-profile votes seem closer to Keynes than to Adam Smith. For example, in the span of about a year, Ryan committed fiscal conservative apostasy on three high-profile votes: The Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP (whereby the government purchased assets and equity from financial institutions), the auto-bailout (which essentially implied he agrees car companies - especially the ones with an auto plant in his district--are too big to fail), and for a confiscatory tax on CEO bonuses (which essentially says the government has the right to take away private property--if it doesn't like you).​

More: John Hrabe: Paul Ryan's Tea Party Problem: Voted for Bailouts (Before He Was Against It)

Paul Ryan BEGS Congress to Pass TARP ( PATHETIC ) - YouTube

 

[Moonglow]

It does seem troubling that this fiscal conservative voted for so much govt. monies to loan and give away during a recession, not to mention his support fot the GM bailout.

 

[Moonglow]

So when do we get to see ryans birth cert., and Mittens?