House speaker Paul Ryan’s April 11 announcement that he will not seek reelection was unusual but it wasn’t surprising. Unusual because House speakers don’t typically make themselves lame ducks seven months before an election. Unsurprising because back in December, Politico’s Tim Alberta and Rachael Bade first reported that “Ryan has made it known to some of his closest confidants that this will be his final term as speaker” and that in interviews with “three dozen people who know the speaker . . . not a single person believed Ryan will stay in Congress past 2018.”

Ryan and his team tried to dismiss much of the story as speculative, but they couldn’t bring themselves to flatly deny it. Ryan said in interviews with The Weekly Standard and others that he wouldn’t make a decision about reelection until he’d talked it over with his wife in the spring, a clear indication he was considering leaving office. The outstanding question was whether Ryan would announce his retirement before Wisconsin’s June 1 congressional campaign filing deadline or after the November election, which Politico reported Ryan preferred in order to help Republicans in the midterms.