Today, Paul Ryan gave a fascinating speech at Heritage Action, a tea party-allied organization that has fashioned itself as the guardian of conservative purity. The speech called for unity. “To quote William Wallace in Braveheart,” he said, “we have to unite the clans.”
But his speech was actually a repudiation of everything the tea party has done. Not only that, Ryan also took shots at the congressional Republican leadership, and even the current GOP presidential candidates. He didn’t call anyone out by name, but if you understand what’s happening now and the conflict that has roiled the Republican Party for the last seven years, the critique was hard to miss.
[...] It’s hard to tell where Ryan draws the line between real issues and distractions, but every time you define an issue as the latter, you’re telling some major Republican constituency to shut its mouth.
[...] Ryan also says: “we can’t let how you vote on an amendment to an appropriations bill define what it means to be a conservative.” This, too, is a direct shot at the tea party. The argument they’ve made over and over is that things like how you vote on an amendment do indeed define what it means to be a conservative. Since ideological differences within the party have been reduced almost to nothing, those kinds of decisions are what supposedly separate the believers from the apostates.
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