It is my belief that Lord Acton’s Axiom was initially uttered about the Pope and the Vatican. Lord Acton was one of many English Catholics who were in his time excommunicated. I read about him in Thomas S. Bokenkotter’s A Concise History of the Catholic Church, which was my son’s 9th grade religious studies’ main text book. As soon as my son’s final exams were over I grabbed the book and read it on the subway in one week. One of the main themes in the book is how the Vatican, once well esconced in power (with that nasty Avignon business aside), has not been the source of any new thinking within the Church, and has, on the contrary, squelched all such new movements (including an English Catholic resurgence after the schism) which included Lord Acton and his peers.
The other point I need to make is that Paul Ryan is not and has not ever been a Policy Wonk. Only in the modern Dixiecrat - GOP where any expertise is scoffed at as effete, and the only expertise allowed is Heritage Foundation vetted fake science, social science, economics and history, could a person as shallow and vapid as Paul Ryan (whose big intellectual claim to fame is having been an Ayn Rand fan as a youth) claim to be an intellectual policy wonk. It is like when he claimed to have run great Marathon times. All bullshit.