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All about Congressman Paul Ryan and Congresswoman Michele Bachmann

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Rep. Paul Ryan - GOP Ideas Man
Rep. Paul Ryan

About Paul Ryan:

Conservative Credentials:

Republican Congressman Paul Davis Ryan has represented Wisconsin’s first House district since 1999, and in his sixth term he began to emerge as the new face of the Republican Party. Despite the heavily Democratic demographic of his home district, Ryan ran as a conservative in 1998 and won, beating the Democratic favorite by 15 percentage points. Before running for Congress, Ryan worked for several conservatives, including Sen. Sam Brownback and former housing secretary Jack Kemp. In 2009, Ryan offered conservative alternatives to both the 2010 Democratic Budget and Obama’s health care reform plan.

Early Life:

Paul Ryan was born Jan. 29, 1970 in Janesville, Rock County, Wisc., the youngest of Paul Sr. and Betty Ryan’s four children. He was raised Catholic. Sharing the same first name as his father, Ryan’s childhood nickname was “P.D.” Ryan attended Joseph A. Craig High School, and between his sophomore and junior year, his father died (Ryan was just 16). His father’s death provided Ryan with Social Security benefits until his 18th birthday, which he used to pay for his education at Miami University of Ohio. Ryan, a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity, graduated in 1992 with a degree in economics and political science.

Congressional Races:

When Republican House Rep. Mike Neumann announced he was running for Senate, Ryan decided to run for Wisconsin’s first House District, which Neumann was vacating. Although the district is predominantly Democratic, Ryan, a conservative Republican, was also a home-grown fifth-generation resident of Janesville. Ryan first faced 35-year-old beer distributor Brian Morello in the Republican primary and after beating him went on to a 15-point victory over Democrat Lydia Spottswood in the general election. For the next four races, Ryan would defeat Democrat Jeffrey C. Thomas. In 2008, he defeated Democrat Marge Krupp.

Work as Congressman:

One of the first things Ryan did as a Congressman was to convert an old truck into an office so he could hold office hours in the far reaches of his district. As a ranking Member of the Committee on the Budget, Ryan introduced HR 6110, “A Roadmap for America’s Future” a comprehensive proposal that tackles the interrelated crises in health care, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the tax code and the national deficit. In 2009, he joined other House leaders in introducing an alternative to President Barack Obama’s budget proposal for 2010.

Family:

Spending a large amount of his time serving his constituents in Washington, Ryan met tax attorney Janna Little, who lived in Arlington, Va. An Oklahoma native, Little graduated from Wellesley College and George Washington University Law School. In 2000, Ryan asked Little to marry him at Big St. Germain Lake in northern Wisconsin, one of his favorite fishing spots. The couple was married in Oklahoma City in December 2000. They have one daughter, Elizabeth and two sons, Charles and Samuel, in Janesville.

Ryan on Five Major Issues:

  1. Abortion: Has a 100 percent voting record with the National Right to Life Committee. Voted against allowing embryonic stem cell research. Voted against the transportation of minors across state lines for abortions. Voted against partial birth abortions except to save a mother’s life.
  2. Immigration: Voted in favor of building a fence along the Mexican border. Voted in favor of extending Immigrant Residency rules. Voted in favor of comprehensive immigration reform without amnesty.
  3. Civil Rights: Voted in favor of prohibiting job discrimination based on sexual orientation. Voted to protect the pledge of allegiance. Has expressed support for an amendment to ban flag desecration.
  4. Families: Voted to ban gay adoptions in Washington. Voted to constitutionally define marriage as between one man and one woman. Voted to reduce the Marriage Tax by $399 billion over 10 years. Voted to establish a nationwide AMBER alert system for missing children.
  5. Gun Control: Has an “A” rating by the National Rifle Association. In 1999, he voted to decrease gun waiting periods from three days to one. Voted to prevent gun makers, gun manufacturers and gun sellers from being sued for gun misuse.

Related posts

Rep. Michele Bachmann

About Michele Bachmann:

Elected in 2006, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann is the first Republican woman to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Minnesota. In only her first term, Congresswoman Bachmann developed a reputation as a “principled reformer” who stays true to her conservative beliefs while pushing for real reform of the broken ways of Washington. And, her strong advocacy for her constituents earned her a second term in Congress in November 2008.

She is a leading advocate for bipartisan earmark reform and tax relief and is a staunch opponent of wasteful government spending. She is among the leaders in the U.S. House pushing for increased energy exploration in the U.S. to provide much needed relief at the pump for hard-working Americans and put our nation on the path to energy independence.

Prior to serving in the U.S. Congress, Bachmann served in the Minnesota State Senate. She was elected to the Minnesota State Senate in 2000 where she championed the Taxpayers Bill of Rights. And, prior to that, Bachmann spent five years as a federal tax litigation attorney, working on hundreds of civil and criminal cases. That experience solidified Bachmann’s strong support for efforts to simplify the Tax Code and reduce tax burdens on family and small business budgets.

Congresswoman Bachmann currently sits on the Financial Services Committee. This committee is tasked with the oversight of numerous financial sectors including housing, real estate and banking. This also gives the Congresswoman keen insight into the housing crisis and credit crunch, leading her to be a staunch opponent of the taxpayer-funded bailout of Wall Street. The 6th Congressional District of Minnesota contains parts of six counties, stretching from Stillwater past St. Cloud, including suburbs of the Twin Cities, which encompasses one of the nation’s largest financial services sectors, making Congresswoman Bachmann’s position on the Financial Services Committee particularly important.

Congresswoman Bachmann is a graduate of Anoka High School and Winona State University. Bachmann and her husband, Marcus, live in Stillwater where they own a small business mental health care practice that employs 42 people. The Bachmanns have five children, Lucas, Harrison, Elisa, Caroline, and Sophia. In addition, the Bachmanns have opened their home to 23 foster children, which has inspired Congresswoman Bachmann to become one of Congress’ leading advocates for foster and adopted children, earning her bipartisan praise for her efforts.

Here is a collection of news stories about Representative Michele Bachmann:

News

Is Barack Obama a socialist? What is his connection to socialism?

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Are Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez very different?
Are Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez very different?

Here is an interview with Stanley Kurtz of National Review regarding his new book exploring the real Barack Obama and his past interest in socialism.  (H/T Muddling Towards Maturity)

The answers to this interview are too awesome to quote here. So I will quote some of the questions, and you should click through and read the WHOLE THING.

Questions:

LOPEZ: Why was the 1983 Socialist Scholars Conference “so formative an influence on Obama’s political career”?

LOPEZ: What actual evidence do you have that Obama attended the annual Socialist Scholars Conferences in New York between 1983 and 1985?

LOPEZ: What is socialism? What is socialism to Barack Obama? How has that changed since 1983? How has it stayed the same?

LOPEZ: How important is black liberation theology to understanding Barack Obama? And where does Jeremiah Wright fit in here?

LOPEZ: Was Bill Ayers his mentor or not?

LOPEZ: How important is ACORN to understanding Barack Obama and the Democratic party today? Is ACORN still a factor?

LOPEZ: Barack Obama wrote in Dreams from My Father: “Political discussions, the kind that at Occidental had once seemed so intense and purposeful, came to take on the flavor of the socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union or the African cultural fairs that took place in Harlem and Brooklyn during the summers — a few of the many diversions New York had to offer, like going to a foreign film or ice-skating at Rockefeller Center.” You read a lot into “diversions.” How? Why? Is he really that smart?

LOPEZ: So is Saul Alinsky really, truly important to understanding our president?

LOPEZ: What does the Midwest Academy have to do with the milestone health-care legislation the president signed this March?

LOPEZ: Do you have insights into what exactly Barack Obama makes of the abortion debate and where that fits into a full picture of him? Despite a radicalism there, he’s been stealth about it, somewhat consistently, in his national career.

OK, here is an excerpt from the interview.

LOPEZ: What actual evidence do you have that Obama attended the annual Socialist Scholars Conferences in New York between 1983 and 1985?

KURTZ: Obama tells us himself in Dreams from My Father that he attended socialist conferences at the Cooper Union. Detailed evidence from socialist archives shows that there was only one socialist conference at the Cooper Union, and that was the Socialist Scholars Conference of 1983. Obama’s name also appears on a list of pre-registrants for the 1984 Socialist Scholars Conference. There is less evidence that he attended the Socialist Scholars Conference of 1985, although I think it’s likely that he did. Not only did Obama attend the previous two conferences, evidence indicates that in 1985 he was studying the writings of Harry Boyte, an important theorist of community organizing who spoke at the 1985 conference. Boyte, by the way, advised Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. I carefully dissect the evidence for Obama’s conference attendance in the book.

LOPEZ: What is socialism? What is socialism to Barack Obama? How has that changed since 1983? How has it stayed the same?

KURTZ: These are the big questions. In the 1980s, the failure of Sixties and Seventies radicalism and the ascent of Ronald Reagan forced America’s socialists to take another tack. They de-emphasized strategies of nationalization and focused instead on local organizing as the way to move the country toward socialism. Now, instead of nationalizing a company, the idea was to get community organizers onto boards of directors, or to force banks to run loans through groups like ACORN. This was socialism “from below,” and it is the strategy that captivated Obama.

Obama’s socialist community-organizing colleagues followed French Marxist theorist André Gorz. Gorz advocated a strategy he called “non-reformist reforms,” proposing a series of seemingly minor tweaks to the system that were in fact designed to undermine capitalism and usher in socialism over time. This led Obama’s socialist mentors to devise an early version of the “public option,” although at the time they applied the idea to the energy sector, not health care. The socialism of Obama’s mentors was incremental and intentionally disguised. In the book, I argue that Obama follows many of his socialist mentors’ ideas to this day.

OK, here is ONE MORE answer at the end of the interview.

LOPEZ: If there’s one thing you could drive home to Americans about the president, what would it be?

KURTZ: He hasn’t been telling us the truth about his political convictions.

We need to start to understand Democrats by looking at their voting records, the policies they push, their positions, their past affiliations, and their life experiences. You don’t know anything about Barack Obama until you read books like these that go beyond the mainstream media puff pieces and Comedy Central slapstick interviews. You need to delve into who the man really is and what he intends to do to this country. The prosperity, liberty and security of your children depends on your diligence today. Inform yourself and persuade others.

And don’t forget to vote on Tuesday, and then buy the Stanley Kurtz book and the David Freddoso book. Then read them.

Commentary

MUST-READ: WORLD magazine puts Paul Ryan on the front cover

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Rep. Paul Ryan

This is the best evangelical news magazine out there. The same one that profiled Michele Bachmann a while back.

Here’s the cover story. (H/T Muddling Toward Maturity)

Excerpt:

While a student at Miami University in Ohio, Ryan thought he’d become an economist. He read the likes of Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand and envisioned a life of theories. But he eventually learned that public policy is the arena where ideas really live or die. “That is what built this country—good ideas,” he says.Post-graduation stints as a speechwriter for Jack Kemp, at a conservative think tank, and as legislative director for Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas led to Ryan’s successful run for an open House seat in 1998. He was just 28.

After almost a decade of near anonymity in Congress, Ryan’s 2007 ascension as the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee gave him the staff resources and the clout to let out his inner economist. He now also is senior member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee. From those perches he has crafted a roadmap to privatize Medicare and Medicaid, provide vouchers for many federal programs, replace employee-sponsored health insurance plans with individual tax credits, and impose tough controls on federal spending.

The Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan number crunchers, determined that Ryan’s roadmap delivered on its promises of balanced budgets and smaller deficits (unlike its projections for Obamacare). Under current policies, the CBO concludes that the nation in 2080 will devote 34 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) to government spending; under Ryan’s plan, the CBO predicts that federal spending in 2080 would fall to less than 14 percent of the GDP while the government would enjoy a 5 percent annual surplus. And all without raising taxes. In fact, Ryan proposes a flat tax of two rates: 10 percent and 25 percent.

Better read it quick, before it goes behind the pay firewall.

Lately, I have been busy working my way through the Indivisible e-book that the Heritage Foundation published. The e-book is about 85 pages long, and features leading fiscal and social conservatives, writing from the point of view that they do not normally adopt! In the e-book, Paul Ryan, a huge fiscal conservative, writes about the right to life. Check it out. I just ordered 5 more copies of Indivisible from the Heritage Foundation along with some of their new booklet on Regulations.