Paul Ryan Celebrates 'Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity' of Total GOP Control

Updated 3:15pm EDT:

Hammering home the Republican Party’s current mood, in an address to Congress after he was re-elected to Speaker of the House on Tuesday, Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) gloated over the GOP majority, saying: “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. This is the kind of thing that most of us have only dreamed about. I know, because I used to dream about this a lot.” 

“Now. Today. This Congress,” Ryan continued. “Let us not be timid, but rather reach for that brighter horizon and deliver.”

Earlier:

As the official swearing-in ceremony for the 115th Congress was underway on Tuesday, Republicans lawmakers and pundits said they were “beside themselves” with excitement over their unparalleled new power to enact the party’s regressive agenda—making it clear they are willing to play dirty every step of the way.

“It is bare knuckles time for GOP in Congress,” Milwaukee Country, Wisconsin’s controversial Sheriff David Clarke tweeted late Monday. “Punch [Minority leader Sen. Chuck] Schumer in the mouth metaphorically, let him taste his own blood,” Clarke added.

Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) told The Hill that his “Republican colleagues were ‘almost giddy’ about the new session that’s beginning,” and Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) similarly told a local radio station that GOP lawmakers are “beside ourselves” with excitement.

Cole said that President-elect Donald Trump has “really reached out to Congress in the transition…We know if we can get things to the president’s desk that they’ll be signed.”

Cheering the lawmakers on from the sidelines are the hordes of conservative pundits, like radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt, who encouraged Republicans on Tuesday to “Go Big. Go Far. Go Fast.”

Hewitt wrote that the Congressional GOP “needs to embrace a Hamiltonian vision of big ‘internal improvements,'” which includes “infrastructure investments,” such as “a sweeping immigration overhaul centered on the long, strong, double-sided fence, a 350 ship Navy and resupplied [U.S. Marine Corps], and massive tax and entitlement reform.” 

“And it must do so all at once,” Hewitt advocated. “As part of one big, early package of bills. Of course repealing Obamacare is part of that package, but the more moving parts—the more carrots and sticks—on the table, the more the new unified GOP government can make it happen at a dizzying pace.”

In a column entitled, “Today the GOP begins taking back America,” conservative pundit Erick Erickson similarly wrote at Fox News on Tuesday: