Get Ready For Speaker Ryan?

by JASmius



He's in....if everybody else in the House majority caucus is also, by Friday:

Representative Paul Ryan said he’d be willing to run for Speaker of the U.S. House if Republicans unify behind him now, end leadership crises and let him continue spending time with his family.

“If you can agree to these requests and if I can truly be a unifying figure, then I will gladly serve," Ryan, forty-five, of Wisconsin-1 said Tuesday he told fellow House Republicans in a closed-door meeting. "This is not a job I’ve ever wanted," he told reporters, but added that he "came to the conclusion that this is a very dire moment."

Ryan said he wants an answer from fellow Republicans by the end of the week. "It’s in their hands," he said. [emphasis added]

Which is to say, it's in the HFC's hands, because the other five-sixths of the GOP caucus are already on board.  The part about "ending leadership crises" was aimed squarely at them, a throwing down of the gauntlet not in any kind of personal sense - and it had become personal between them and John Boehner - but essentially challenging them to decide if they even want to be in the House Republican caucus as part of the team or if they want to be honest with their erstwhile colleagues, leave the party and go independent, and REALLY throw the House into higgledy-piggeldy pandemonium.

This is, I think, a bluff-calling moment.  Will House Tea Partiers do the right thing for themselves, their cause, and the caucus and back Ryan - whose leadership philosophy sure sounds a lot like what they claim to want - since Daniel Webster has no chance at the Big Gavel, or will they prove that their mission isn't to "save the party" from "hordes of statist infiltrators" but is to actively destroy GOP control of the House of Representatives in an all-out "purity" purge?  We'll know the answer by the end of the next seventy-two hours.

Exit fascinating factoid: According to no less a TP source than Freedom Works itself, Paul Ryan has a lifetime voting score of 80, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy's is 70, and Daniel Webster's is....63.  And yet the HFC is looking down their noses at Ryan and willing to go to the mat for the guy with a FW voting rating seventeen points lower?  What am I missing?