October 31, 2018

Paul Ryan Just Discovered What Happens When You Disagree With Trump

For once the House Speaker had the temerity to comment on the news of the day.

Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

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Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has come up with every possible excuse to avoid commenting on the news of the day. 

“I’m not going to take the bait this morning,” he said when asked about Donald Trump’s support for torture. 

“I haven’t paid that close attention to it,” he said when asked about Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency’s scandal-plagued ex-administrator. 

“I haven’t seen the details yet,” he said when asked about a remarkably optimistic White House budget.  

So when the Speaker of the House, who is not running for reelection, finally decided to chime in on Donald Trump’s threat to eliminate birthright citizenship for undocumented immigrants by executive order—something legal scholars have roundly described as unconstitutional—it seemed only fitting that the president would retort that Ryan “knows nothing about” the topic. 

A spokesperson for Ryan did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Trump’s tweet, but the Speaker once told reporters: “I’ve decided I’m not going to comment on the tweets of the day or the hour. I haven’t seen them all, to be candid with you.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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