He was supposed to be the idealist — the brainpower behind the new GOP conservative movement rather than the legislative brawn or the crafty campaign strategist. But Rep. Paul Ryan now finds himself on the cusp of becoming speaker, the top constitutional job in the House.
The Wisconsin Republican is expected to gain House Republicans’ nomination Wednesday, then win a vote in the full House chamber Thursday confirming him as the new speaker, second in the line of presidential succession behind the vice president, and referee for some of the GOP’s fiercest internal policy battles.
It’s a role he repeatedly said he didn’t want and, his colleagues say, that’s one reason he’s right for it.
“There is something to be said for reluctant leadership,” said Rep. Rob Woodall, Georgia Republican. “It’s an awful job, and folks have to know that going in, but the conversation so often back home is, why are Republicans so bad at communicating? I don’t think [retiring Speaker] John Boehner relished that national spokesman role in the way Newt Gingrich relished that role, but Paul Ryan has proven himself in that role, whether he wanted to be in that position or not.”
Mr. Ryan, 45, will become just the second speaker in 90 years never to have served as an elected member of leadership beforehand. The other, former Illinois Rep. J. Dennis Hastert, was chief deputy whip — an appointed position — before winning the speakership in 1999 after the resignation of Mr. Gingrich and the collapse of the candidacy of would-be successor Rep. Bob Livingston.
For years Mr. Ryan had been what Capitol Hill aides term “Roll Call-famous” — important within the policy circles of Congress, but not well known outside Washington.
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That changed in 2009, when, as the top Republican on the House Committee on the Budget, he became one of the public faces of the new Republican opposition to President Obama’s expansive government agenda.
In 2010 he and Reps. Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy wrote a book titled “Young Guns,” announcing themselves as the vanguard of a movement to restore the GOP’s limited-government philosophy, after what they said was years of drift under President George W. Bush.
In an introduction to the book, conservative columnist Fred Barns assigned them their roles in the revolution: “Cantor the leader, Ryan the thinker, McCarthy the strategist.” Tellingly, Mr. Barnes predicted both Mr. Cantor and Mr. McCarthy might be speaker someday, but had no such prediction for Mr. Ryan.
Indeed, that’s the way it appeared to many — until Mr. Cantor lost his seat in a 2014 primary, falling victim to a tea party-fueled challenger. Mr. McCarthy, meanwhile, appeared poised to succeed Mr. Boehner until just a few weeks ago, when he abruptly withdrew his name from consideration.
That left all eyes on Mr. Ryan, the third and most cerebral of the Young Guns.
“Poor Paul — it’s the last job in the world he wanted,” said Rep. Tom Cole, a backer of Mr. Ryan’s who proudly notes that Mr. Ryan’s wife’s family is from his own Oklahoma district. “Unfortunately, when the call of duty came, they didn’t know anything else other than to say yes, because they’re that kind of people.”
Mr. Cole said the explanation for Mr. Ryan’s rise could be as simple as his record of accomplishment.
“Honestly, he’s just in many ways a more experienced legislator, and I say this with great admiration for Eric and Kevin, both of whom I supported and think highly of,” Mr. Cole said. “Neither of them ever chaired a committee. Paul Ryan has chaired two of the most important committees in the House. There’s nobody on this team that’s as smart as, let alone smarter than, Paul Ryan — nobody better prepared, no better image we could have.”
Record as chairman
Mr. Ryan is currently chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means, which could be considered the most powerful panel in the Capitol, since all tax legislation must start there and because the panel also oversees the big entitlement programs and trade deals.
Earlier this year Mr. Ryan scored a major legislative victory when he shepherded the Trade Promotion Authority, granting the president fast-track trade negotiating powers, through the House, winning a strong bipartisan vote.
But he made his name as chairman of the Committee on the Budget from 2011 to 2015, where he developed his signature Path to Prosperity blueprint — a document that won repeated approval from his House colleagues.
That’s critical to Mr. Ryan’s ability to unify what has been a fractious House GOP. Most of them have already walked the plank with him when they backed his budgets in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014, including eventual major changes to Medicare, severe limits on discretionary spending, repealing Obamacare and putting limits on the growth of Medicaid.
Those blueprints, however, have also drawn fierce criticism, including one now-famous 2011 video from the Agenda Project, a progressive advocacy group, that showed a Ryan-like figure pushing a grandmother down a forest path — and straight over a cliff.
“The idea that Paul Ryan is a moderate and a unifier is patently ridiculous,” said Erica Payne, founder of the Agenda Project, who said she spotted Mr. Ryan as a rising star years ago, and made the ad to try to dent him before he gained too much power.
“He released the budget, and all anybody could say was it was bold, bold, bold, bold,” she said. “As though bold were inherently a good thing. We think that, in this case, ’bold’ equated with virtual eradication of the policy as Americans understand it. For that reason we wanted to very aggressively amplify the eradication message in order to beat the bold message.”
The video was deemed controversial — and therefore was repeatedly played on news programs, garnering what Ms. Payne said was tens of millions of dollars of free advertising. PolitiFact, a self-proclaimed political ad referee, deemed the ad “mostly true.”
“I see Paul Ryan as a bigger threat to Medicare now as the future speaker of the House of Representatives than I did when we cut the ad,” Ms. Payne said. “For that reason you will see us over the next several months, if not years, continue to highlight as aggressively as possible the extreme position he has taken on a program that protects literally millions of seniors.”
For conservatives, though, the budgets provide a reassurance that he’s one of them ideologically.
Indeed, the National Journal, a publication that covers Capitol Hill politics, said Mr. Ryan would be the most conservative House speaker in 50 years based on his voting record.
That makes it all the more interesting that Mr. Ryan was also the overwhelming choice of centrist Republicans, while facing some resistance from the most conservative wing of the House GOP caucus.
“Paul has long been a thoughtful leader and reformer in Washington, a unifier in the House Republican caucus, and someone who is willing and able to work across the aisle to achieve results for the American people,” the leaders of the Tuesday Group, the moderate GOP caucus in the House, said in endorsing Mr. Ryan last week.
The first intraparty disagreements surfaced Tuesday as those centrist Republicans fought to renew the authorization for the federal Export-Import Bank, a New Deal-era institution that provides government financing aid to some U.S. exporters who say they can’t find credit for their products elsewhere.
Mr. Ryan opposed the centrists, calling the bank an example of “crony capitalism” that rewards the well-connected at the expense of average taxpayers.
“I think there are plenty [of] other ways to expand opportunity in this country, and corporate welfare is not one of them,” he said.
He lost the fight, as 127 Republicans joined all but one Democrat in voting to renew the bank’s charter.
To win the speakership, Mr. Ryan also had to make promises to his colleagues — including saying he wouldn’t tackle immigration while President Obama is in office.
He’s also promising a different kind of speakership, winning agreement from his colleagues that he can forgo the grueling travel schedule of previous speakers who scoured the country to recruit candidates and raise money. In exchange, they’re counting on him to forge the ideological unity that’s been lacking.
“I never thought I’d be speaker. But I pledged to you that if I could be a unifying figure, then I would serve — I would go all in,” Mr. Ryan wrote in his letter to colleagues last week announcing he would seek the speakership. “After talking with so many of you, and hearing your words of encouragement, I believe we are ready to move forward as one, united team. And I am ready and eager to be our speaker.”
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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