The Republican party continues to gnaw at its intestines, as can be seen in the reactions of some of Trump’s supporters to his formal endorsement of House Speaker Paul Ryan. This is from RawStory:
The trio of endorsements – especially the one for Mr. Ryan – shocked some of Mr. Trump’s diehard supporters.
“He has broken our heart doing this tonight,” said Trump supporter Sue Payne, a conservative activist working to defeat Mr. Ryan.
“We finally thought we had a voice to stand up against the RINO establishment. He sold us out,” she said. “What happened tonight is the establishment got their claws in him and they are pulling the strings. What do we believe now?”
Speaker Ryan was described by Nate Silver at the time of his selection for nominee for VP, in 2012:
Various statistical measures of Mr. Ryan peg him as being quite conservative. Based on his Congressional voting record, for instance, the statistical system DW-Nominate evaluates him as being roughly as conservative as Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.
By this measure, in fact, which rates members of the House and Senate throughout different time periods on a common ideology scale, Mr. Ryan is the most conservative Republican member of Congress to be picked for the vice-presidential slot since at least 1900. He is also more conservative than any Democratic nominee was liberal, meaning that he is the furthest from the center. (The statistic does not provide scores for governors and other vice-presidential nominees who never served in Congress.)
The deployment of the epithet RINO – Republican in Name Only – against the most conservative House Speaker in living memory, and most likely since the Civil War, as if he were working with the Democrats, either correlates with the extremist views of Ms Payne and her compatriots, or with their thirst for power. In either case, to label them as ‘conservative’ seems like a typo.
I do not recall if I’ve suggested this before, but I believe that one of the tactical moves the GOP organization must make if it is to persist as a national party is to take action whenever one GOP member deploys the term RINO against another GOP member: return their dues, kick them out of the party, and publicize it. Otherwise the party will continue its accelerating race to extremist positions with which most true conservatives cannot, as a moral matter, be associated.
Eventually, it’ll be party of two people, and one will be on probation.
