How Much SUV Could A Woodchuck Chuck...

...if a woodchuck could chuck Paul Ryan's SUV?

Winter in Wisconsin is tough.

So tough, in fact, that living creatures might go searching for shelter in unlikely places.

House Speaker Paul Ryan explained Thursday that a family of woodchucks moved into his Chevy Suburban recently, eating the wiring, and rendering the car useless.

"My car was eaten by animals," Ryan said, to laughs from an audience at an event hosted by the Economic Club of Washington D.C. "It's just dead."

The car was parked at his mother's house in his hometown in Wisconsin, and when she came back from her annual trip to Florida for the winter, it wouldn't start. As a top congressional leader Ryan has a security detail and hasn't been allowed to drive in three years.

"So I towed it into the dealer, they put it up, and they realized that a family of woodchucks lived in the underbody of my Suburban," Ryan said.

Ryan told the story after giving a speech about how he feels Republican policies, like last year's tax overhaul, have helped the economy. He disagreed, however, with President Trump's decisions to impose tariffs on a number of nations, most recently on China.

"The rule book for the global economy of the future is being written right now," Ryan said. "The question is whether the United States will be holding the pen."

Much like Paul Ryan's SUV, the United States has an vicious orange rodent underbody problem.  Besides, the only pens these clowns deserve to get are the federal kind with the decidedly substandard housing options.  For right now, he's too busy running interference for Trump and the rest of the GOP's vast stable of serial sexual abusers.

House Speaker Paul Ryan on Wednesday indicated he opposed a congressional ethics probe into fellow Republican Rep. Jim Jordan after numerous former Ohio State University wrestlers alleged the lawmaker ignored reports of sexual misconduct when he was an assistant coach at the school in the 1980s and 1990s.

The House Ethics Committee, Ryan said, "investigates things that members do while they’re here, not things that happened a couple of decades ago when they weren’t in Congress."

Ryan said he called Jordan over the weekend to discuss the allegations, as well as to "check in on" the Ohio Republican following news that his nephew had been killed in a car accident.

"I have always known Jim Jordan to be a man of honesty and a man of integrity," Ryan said during a weekly press conference alongside other GOP House leaders.

The retiring speaker's remarks came after President Barack Obama's ethics czar, Norman Eisen, and another government watchdog filed a complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics calling for a "preliminary inquiry" into whether Jordan's response to the allegations.

"If Rep. Jordan’s recent statements — that he had no knowledge that student wrestlers under his supervision were being sexually abused — are false, his present conduct in connection with this serious matter would fail to 'reflect creditably on the House'" in violation of House rules, their letter to the OCE says.

But Ryan will certainly land on his feet somewhere in the vast Right-wing Noise Machine come 2019.  There's no way a former House Speaker doesn't cash in on K Street or FOX News, and he'll have plenty of money to buy a new SUV or six.

The rest of his former constituents in Wisconsin, well, not so much.