President Paul Ryan?
The thick, thick irony of it all. The man who never wanted to take the relatively thankless and difficult job as Speaker of the House because he wanted to become President one day may yet become the 46th President of the United States of America afterall.
Allow me to explain. In short, there is a line of succession for the office of the President. First in line is the Vice-President - in this case Mike Pence. The thing is that Mike Pence has a few legal problems -like his boss President Trump. He’s hired outside legal counsel, but that really doesn’t protect him from impeachment because impeachment is really a political act of Congress. The true calculus being made by the Republicans is how damaged Trump and Pence will get throughout the course of this Special Counsel Investigation. Will they be able to withstand the eventual public disclosures into their actions during the 2016 campaign, and post-election actions regarding their handling of the numerous and varied FBI investigations into multiple members of their administration?
The catch here is in the irony of Representative Paul Ryan being Speaker of the House. Impeachment begins in the House of Representatives, and very broadly and generally speaking, the Speaker of the House controls what gets considered and what happens there. So, the guy who took the job of Speaker for the proverbial Republican team, now gets to pull the trigger on whether he takes a short trip down the road to occupy the Oval Office as the 46th President of the United States. If that isn’t incentive enough for him, and the Republican Party members of Congress, to impeach Trump and Pence, I do not know what is.
Now granted, if the impeachment is sequential instead of simultaneous -where Trump goes first and Pence is left standing for a bit, then Pence would get to pick the new VP but that pick would have to pass by a majority vote in both the House and Senate, per the 25th amendment. But remember how hard it was to get a new Speaker voted in in the first place? I don’t think it would be any easier to get a new president voted on - hence I strongly suspect it would still be Paul Ryan who would get voted in.
Speaker Ryan is the new generation of conservative: telegenic, seemingly reasonable in comparison to the current White House occupant, seemingly moral and virtuous, kind to women, minorities, and furry animals in at least a fake brand-ish kinda way. Policy-wise some might put him just to the left of Attila the Hun, but like President George W Bush swing white male voters will want to have a beer with him.
Speaker Ryan bemoaned the extra fundraising time that would take him away from his family. Now he’d have a home office. The Republican Party would not only get the person most likely to actually pass their agenda, but would also gain a guy who would stand a chance of serving 10 years as President depending upon when Trump and Pence go.
On the other hand if they chose not to kick out Trump and Pence, they risk Democrats retaking the Congress ...never say never... . Instead - in another irony of ironies - the misogynist Trump, who beat the woman who would have been the first female POTUS, could directly cause the first woman to become POTUS after all - namely next in line of succession to the presidency, Speaker Pelosi.
Doesn’t it just boggle the mind that the Democrats - who send out all kinds of fundraising appeals - have yet to latch on to the fundraising appeal of a President Pelosi? ...Someone is going to get a talking to over missing that one.
The other possibility is that the Russian interference with the Congressional races was coordinated with the full knowledge of Speaker Ryan. In which case, say hello to Senate president pro tempore Orrin Hatch of Utah.