What Paul Ryan Personifies
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Speaker Ryan’s decision to leave Congress after his current term is a sad moment for the Sun. It will be interpreted by the Democrats as a signal that the Republicans are to be swept from the majority. The Speaker, whose father died when his son was 16, insists he merely wants to spend time with his own children while they are still teenagers. In any event, we have admired Mr. Ryan as a solon of substance and, on occasion, almost iridescent integrity.
The latter we wrote about in an editorial called “Paul Ryan’s Finest Hour.” It was about the hearing at which the congressman from the Badger State told the head of the IRS that he didn’t believe his testimony to Congress. Even that wasn’t as devastating a moment as when, at a hearing of the Budget Committee he would later chair, Mr. Ryan put to the chairman of the Federal Reserve, then Ben Bernanke, the question of the collapse of the value of Federal Reserve notes.
At the time, the value of the Federal Reserve one-dollar note had plunged to the then all-time low (a 1,220th of an ounce of gold). Most people would view the collapse “as a vote of no confidence against fiat currencies,” Mr. Ryan suggested. Mr. Bernanke gave an astonishing reply. “I don’t fully understand the movements in the gold price,” the head of the world’s premier central bank either claimed or confessed (for whichever turns out to be worse, he’ll be remembered).
Little more than five years later, right after Mr. Ryan acceded to Speaker, the House sent to the Senate what we think of as the most important measure advanced in the Ryan era. That was the Fed Oversight, Reform, and Modernization Act. It would have required the Fed to set publicly a non-binding monetary rule. It included Audit the Fed, giving Congress expanded oversight of Fed operations. It also included a monetary commission to study reforming the Fed.
That and related measures died in the Senate. Which isn’t Mr. Ryan’s fault. He and the House he led did their part. Mr. Ryan today did speak of tax reform and the beginning of the rebuilding of our military readiness, both important achievements that may yet prove historic. He expressed appreciation for the President’s leadership on those issues. The Wall Street Journal this evening credited Mr. Ryan for, among other things, his modus vivendi with the President.
Mr. Ryan, the Journal noted, criticized the President when Mr. Trump deserved it but refused to curry favor with the Trump-hating press. Why is that? Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne seems to think that the Speaker was the “personification of conservatism’s decline.” Our guess is that Mr. Ryan eschewed the self-indulgence of some of the Never-Trumpers because he had too much respect for voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania — the American heartland. That’s what Paul Ryan personified.