Steil v. Bryce

Introducing the Republican candidate for Paul Ryan's seat in Congress, Bryan Steil (rhymes with guile).

Steil wasn't particularly well known outside of Republican insider circles before declaring his candidacy in the spring. A member of the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents, the 37-year-old Janesville native is a former legislative aide to Congressman Ryan and more recently general counsel to a company that makes polythene film for packaging.

He seems to be an affable, establishment Republican, and his own TV ads have pushed the usual GOP message of cutting taxes and deregulating business, while claiming his current job as experience creating jobs.

His opponent is union leader Randy Bryce, who wowed the Netroots Nation last year when it was assumed that Ryan would run again this year. Bryce's candidacy was a long shot then: the incumbent was and is Speaker of the House, and since 2000, the statehouse has carved the First Congressional District into a majority Republican stronghold. Even before that, when an incumbent has been on the ballot, the incumbent has won all but one race between 1972 and now.

So with Ryan out of the race, 2018 should have been the Democrats' best shot, such as it is, at reclaiming the 1st CD.

I don't know what kind of vetting Netroots Nation does, but they seem to have missed the fact that Bryce's checkered past includes an arrest record, mostly for intoxication- and vandalism-related offenses. That didn't escape the attention of primary rival Cathy Myers, who warned that Republicans would use Bryce's criminal record against him. It does seem to have escaped the attention of Candidate Bryce, who showed up at a protests against Immigration & Customs Enforcement at offices of Congressman Ryan and Senator Ron Johnson, where he and several others were arrested in front of the cameras.

Well, surprise, surprise. A PAC associated with Ryan, Congressional Leadership Fund, has begun airing two television ads featuring all that convenient footage of Mr. Bryce being arrested and packed into a paddy wagon.

The spokesman in one of the commercials is Bryce's brother James, a Milwaukee police officer, who endorses Steil and calls Randy a cop-hating criminal who promises an illegal immigrant in every garage. Their mother has told the Journal Sentinel that she wants the ad pulled, to which James has responded that Randy is taking advantage of an old woman. Mama shot back that she knows what she said and she meant every word.

The Bryce clan Thanksgiving dinner could be pretty tense this year; but then, I imagine it's pretty tense there every year.

The Bryce campaign has responded to the CLF ads with one in which Randy Bryce says he's repented of the mistakes he made "in the past" (a phrase he uses rather awkwardly three times). He stands in front of the camera to tell viewers that he has "owned up to" bad things he's done in the past and it's "a shame" that anyone would hold what someone's done in the past against him in the present.

He wasn't about to sit on the Senate panel questioning Mr. Kavanaugh anyway.

I assume, furthermore, that the Democrats haven't found any misbehavior in Mr. Steil's record in the past at UW that they were planning to use against him.

Hashtag Iron Stache

There was a flurry of internet interest in liberal/progressive circles earlier this week in the announcement of a declared candidate for the Democratic nomination to run against Congressman and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. Randy Bryce isn't the first candidate to announce in the 2018 race; there is also David Yankovich and Charlie Breit on the Democratic side, and Tea Partisan Paul Nehlen to challenge Ryan a second time on the Republican side.

Yankovich was the first Democrat to announce candidacy for the seat, but has only very recently moved to Wisconsin's First Congressional District from his home state of Ohio, so I think it's unlikely that he has much support here. Breit, who lives in Pleasant Prairie, is a member of Forward Kenosha, and Bryce is a longtime union activist from Caledonia, so the race for the nomination is probably between the two of them. (But see postscript below.)

Iron worker Bryce, who tweets under the hashtag "Iron Stache," has run for school board, State Assembly, and State Senate, but never successfully. He stood no chance in the 2014 State Senate race, given the Republicans' redrawing of district lines in 2011; he came in a distant second in the primary for the 2012 Assembly race (the unopposed Republican received more than three times the combined total of the two Democrats' votes), and also fell short in the ten-way 2013 school board primary.

He was ejected from the Senate chamber in Madison in 2015 for yelling that Wisconsin was "turning into a banana republic." He told the press that he had planned to testify against a so-called right-to-work bill, but when Senate leaders prematurely shut the meeting down, shouting was the only option he had left.

He wasn't the only person to get hauled out of the State Capitol since the Republican putsch of 2010, but that, and his very emotional inaugural campaign ad did help him raise $100,000 in the first day of his congressional candidacy. My own Facebook feed included some progressives and liberals who Ain't From Around Here talking about contributing to his campaign; we'll see how long that lasts.

Because Ryan can raise $100,000 over brunch.

P.S.: Janesville School Board Vice President Cathy Myers has now become the fourth Democrat in the race. Janesville is on the opposite end of CD-1 from where I live, so I don't know anything about her; but that is Ryan's hometown, and she has the endorsement of her State Senator.