The real reason Paul Ryan is quitting

| 7:07 pm EDT April 11, 2018
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Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has announced that he’s quitting Congress at the end of his current term and will not seek reelection in November. While there has been buzz about this for several weeks, it’s nonetheless a stunning development. Although Ryan’s Democratic challenger Randy Bryce is popular and has a good shot, this is a very red district, meaning Ryan would have had pretty strong odds of reelection. So this isn’t merely about the possibility that Ryan would have gotten caught up in the Blue Wave. Let’s talk about what’s really going on here.

The first and most straightforward explanation would be that, even if Paul Ryan did run for reelection and retained his seat, he’d have lost the Speaker role if the Democrats take the majority in the House. But would that alone have been enough to chase him away? He didn’t seem to want the Speaker job when it was first foisted on him by his party, so it’s difficult to imagine that he’s walking away simply because he might not get to be Speaker of the House anymore. There has to be more to it.

So this takes us back to a pair of crucial stories involving Paul Ryan and the GOP that have been sitting on the backburner but are as relevant as ever. The first is that Ryan was caught on tape swearing his fellow House Republicans to silence after Congressman Kevin McCarthy half jokingly accused Donald Trump of being on Vladimir Putin’s payroll. Maybe Ryan was just being overly paranoid in general, or maybe he knew something specific about the Trump-Russia plot. If Ryan knew that Trump was rigging the election, he’s in deep trouble, and it’s going to come out eventually. There’s more.

On March 29th it was revealed that Robert Mueller is investigating the Trump-Russia plot at the Republican National Convention to alter the Republican Party platform in Russia’s favor. As Palmer Report explained at the time, it was going to be difficult for Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, as the leaders of the party, to make the case that they didn’t know it was going on. Now just two weeks later, Paul Ryan suddenly says he’s quitting.