Paul Ryan says "the left is out of gas," his opponent raises $430,000 to prove him wrong

During a recent interview, Ryan defended his party’s plan to repeal Obamacare and give tax cuts to the rich by attacking “the left.”

“I think the left is out of gas,” he said. “I think they just basically decide ‘resist, resist, resist.’ They want government-run health care. Government-run health care is collapsing while we speak. It’s not working. And so what are we doing? We’re replacing it with a law that will actually work.”

Actually, the Republican plan won’t work. That is, according to everyone from the Congressional Budget Office, which predicts that millions of Americans will lose their coverage under the GOP plan, and to the Economic Policy Institute, which estimates that more than a million workers will lose their jobs under the plan.

In other words, the GOP plan will kill jobs and patients. That’s a strange definition of “working.”

But that’s not the only thing Ryan is wrong about, as Wisconsin ironworker Randy Bryce, a Democrat seeking to unseat Ryan, has proved by raising a whopping $430,000 for his campaign, in just 12 days.

Bryce kicked off his campaign with a powerful video, in which he talked about the importance of expanding access to health care, rather than shrinking it, as Ryan wants to do. Ryan even absurdly claimed that the 22 million Americans who would lose coverage under the GOP plan wouldn’t really lose it — it’s just that they “will choose not buy something they don’t like or want.”

Bryce, on the other hand, called out Ryan and his fellow Republicans for trying “to take health care away from millions of us, to make it cost more and cover less, and to allow the protections we’ve gained to be stripped away.”

It seems that more than 16,000 Americans agree with Bryce and have donated to his campaign. Meanwhile, Ryan remains in hiding, refusing to hold town halls where he might be confronted by constituents who want to know why he’s trying to take away their health care.

And he’s not the only one. Plenty of Republicans are trying to avoid their constituents, refusing to meet with voters and even having their constituents arrested. This comes on the heels of a “new” idea from Republicans to simply repeal Obamacare now and worry about a replacement plan later.

Except that’s not really a new idea at all. It’s the same tired idea that Ryan and his fellow Republicans have been pushing for nearly eight years, and on which they held dozens of votes. And it’s just as bad an idea now as it was the first time Republicans tried it years ago.

Clearly, there is a contingent who is “out of gas” — and out of ideas. But it’s not “the left.” It’s Ryan and his Republican Party, running on the same failed idea that has only become even more unpopular.