And, perhaps most importantly, he shows he thinks you’re stupid in the many ways he protects President Donald Trump from accountability. On Monday night, during a CNN-moderated town hall event in Wisconsin, he offered the following justification for opposing a congressional resolution that would censure Trump for coddling white supremacists:

I will not support that. I think that would be—that would be so counterproductive. If we descend this issue into some partisan hack-fest, into some bickering against each other, and demean it down to some political food fight, what good does that do to unify this country?

Ryan, who was recently gearing up for years’ worth of partisan investigations of President Hillary Clinton, says censuring Trump for coddling Nazis would be too partisan for his taste. What he hopes you’ll overlook is his own power to determine what is partisan and what is not. If a censure resolution passed the House overwhelmingly—reflecting a broad rejection of Trump’s comments after the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia—it wouldn’t be partisan. What makes censuring Trump “partisan” is Ryan’s view that Trump doesn’t deserve it.

But Trump does deserve it. Not only does he deserve it on a basic and obvious moral level, but he deserves it because significant, symbolic rebukes to white supremacy are effective means of driving it back into the discredited silence where it belongs. Ryan is fortunate, in a way, that the events in Charlottesville, and Trump’s response to them, occurred amid a lengthy congressional recess, with Republican elected officials scattered across the country rather than gathered in Washington, D.C. That is the one thing insulating Ryan and his party from answering for their apparent determination to see Trump clear of the political consequences of siding with neo-Nazis. But the winners who will benefit from Ryan’s good fortune aren’t Republicans in Congress or in the White House—they are the racists who will take note when the censure resolution fails.

This isn’t theoretical. White supremacists were pretty happy with Trump’s initial response to Charlottesville, undeterred by his second, and absolutely thrilled with the unhinged defense of Nazi marchers he offered on the third go.

By contrast, after upwards of 10,000 peaceful counterprotesters dwarfed a dismal gathering of white supremacists in Boston over the weekend, the anti-Muslim group ACT canceled scores of “America First” rallies scheduled for Saturday, September 9.