Episode #98: Saving Paul Ryan

The Democrats held their first debate and, as expected, the differences among the candidates over foreign policy played a major role. Jane Harman, a former Democratic congresswoman who now heads up the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, talks about how foreign affairs are playing in the presidential race in both major parties. Lawmakers have fled the Capitol for their Columbus Day break, and Republicans are still no closer to having a consensus candidate for speaker. Many in the GOP are pleading with Paul Ryan, the chairman of the Ways & Means Committee and Mitt Romney's 2012 running mate, to run for the post. But as Siobhan Hughes of the Wall Street Journal notes, being speaker of the House has become a thankless job. And perhaps not a good stepping stone if Ryan wants to eventually run for president, as some think. The former congresswoman from Minnesota Michele Bachmann weighs in on the Republican leadership battle.  We spoke with her last weekend at Politicon, a conference of political junkies that stressed the confluence of politics and comedy. Bachmann, who once headed up the Tea Party Caucus in the House, likes what she sees in the revolt by the conservatives in Congress. Finally, in our "this week in history" feature, we go back 28 years to when President Ronald Reagan pushed for the Senate to approve his nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Bloomberg News editor, Ethan Bronner, the author of a book that captured the Bork controversy, talks about how the nomination split the country, and the Senate, in two. Photo via John Boehner This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License