http://www.nationalreview.com/node/425599/print What’s Driving Conservative Opposition to Paul Ryan
By Elaina Plott — October 15, 2015
It was beginning to look as though Republicans had fashioned a semblance of unity in the House. They would rally around Paul Ryan, urging him to step up and fill the void left when Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy dropped out of the race for the speaker’s gavel.
It didn’t last long. The tide has shifted this week, with many grassroots conservatives saying Ryan won’t do. The man who was once the party’s fresh-faced vice-presidential nominee, lauded for his aggressive calls to overhaul Medicare and Medicaid and portrayed by Democrats as the arch-conservative villain who would toss Granny off a cliff, now finds himself the latest target of some of conservative media’s biggest stars.
That’s mostly a result of Ryan’s support for comprehensive immigration reform, perhaps the one position most guaranteed to breed distrust and ill will among much of today’s conservative base. With such animosity suddenly bubbling to the surface, some of the same people who rallied around Ryan during the 2012 presidential race are now working to thwart his bid for House speaker before it’s even begun. It’s a testament both to the outsize role the issue of immigration has taken on within the Republican party and to the ever-widening chasm between the grassroots and establishment.
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Radio hosts Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham, and Fox News’s Sean Hannity are among those speaking out against a prospective Ryan speakership. Levin issued a warning on Twitter the moment House Republicans began floating Ryan’s name last Thursday: “NOT SO FAST!” he wrote. “Ryan [is] an amnesty advocate.” Ingraham, an outspoken opponent of comprehensive immigration reform, situated him alongside other establishment picks: “They tried Eric Cantor,” who also earned the ire of conservatives for his views on immigration. “They tried McCarthy. The only ‘Young Gun’ left is Ryan,” she wrote on Twitter. Hannity urged the rebels in the conservative House Freedom Caucus to “work to get somebody that will fight the fight that you are looking to engage in.”
The political landscape has changed a great deal since three years ago, when some of these same figures were lauding Romney’s selection of Ryan as his running mate. Reacting to Ryan’s nomination on her radio show, Ingraham called it “the best news that we’ve received in this campaign.” She said that when she found out, “I literally thought that I was dreaming.”
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