"Ryan shook his head in exasperation. "Oh, good grief," he said." [View all]

[Miles Archer]

As Ryan earnestly touted his party’s work on “landmark federal IT reform legislation,” there was a grim, haunted look in his bright-blue eyes, and it wasn’t hard to imagine why. What ought to have been the salad days of Republican-led government had instead become a ceaseless, disorienting swirl of scandal, 120 days of self-inflicted chaos and crisis.

At the fifth question of the press conference—what was his view on the idea that Republicans might be better off with the vice president, Mike Pence, in the White House instead of Trump?—Ryan shook his head in exasperation. “Oh, good grief,” he said. “I’m not even going to give credence to that.”

“But your members are saying that!” the reporter said. Republican members of Congress were buzzing about this idea, openly wondering, as the presidential mess threatened to consume their careers and priorities, whether it might be possible to remove the president and move on.

Congress, Ryan insisted, was perfectly capable of doing its job. “I know people can be consumed with the news of the day,” he said, as though a potential impeachment were the latest celebrity scandal, or the time everyone was up in arms for 24 hours about avocado toast. “But we are here working on people’s problems every day. We have all these committees that do different jobs, and our job is to make sure that we still make progress for the American people, and we’re doing that. It’s just not what we’re being asked about.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/trumps-washington-congress/528426/