On the morning of October 29, 2015, 236 members of the House of Representatives rose and voted for Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) to be their next speaker.
After five years of tumult under the gavel of House Speaker John Boehner, Ryan made a promise to his diverse and divided conference: it might be harder, it might be uncomfortable and it could mean sometimes Republicans would not see the result they wanted, but Ryan was bringing back the elusive regular order – the process in which bills would come out of committee and then onto the floor, where amendments could freely be voted on.
“I know this sounds like process. It’s actually a matter of principle,” Ryan said that morning. “Only a fully functioning House can truly represent the people and if there were ever a time for us to step up, this would be that time.”
Ryan took the gavel despite the rift that had hampered House Republicans for years. Caught up in their own disagreements, they had squandered opportunities to pass conservative bills because some on the fringe deemed them not pure enough. On everything from the farm bill to must-pass funding measures, the GOP’s infighting had forced Boehner to rely on Democrats. Ryan promised to mend those fences, and restoring regular order was a part of that. But over the last several months it has become apparent that even Ryan’s bedside manner–his open dialogue and open door policy– have not been enough to bridge the underlying divide.
Ryan has remained popular and well-liked within his conference, but his overtures have done little to win him actual negotiating power. The far right is just as rigid and unwilling to bend for Ryan as it was for Boehner.
Ryan’s decision whether or not to endorse Trump is merely a complicating factor the speaker has to contend with. Many of the individuals who are in the Freedom Caucus are as skeptical of Trump as Ryan has been. Likewise, some of the moderates have questioned why Ryan’s been so resistant to backing Trump and uniting the party.
At the time he was sworn in, Ryan could hardly have anticipated the new political circus he’d be facing, of course. Even as prepared to balance the antics of the Freedom Caucus with the wishes of the moderates, Ryan was focused on imagining his job in the context of Congress. He likely never imagined a world where he’d have to contend with Donald Trump as his party’s nominee – a man who in their first serious meeting, according to Bloomberg, looked the GOP’s policy wunderkind in the eye and told him that a decades-worth of work on entitlement reform was politically stupid.
“There’s no way a Republican is going to beat a Democrat when the Republican is saying, ‘We’re going to cut your Social Security’ and the Democrat is saying, ‘We’re going to keep it and give you more,'” Trump told Ryan soberly in that first interaction according to Bloomberg.
The 46-year-old speaker now faces a summer of reckoning. Ahead, he won’t just have to decide whether he can embrace Trump in the name of party unity. He’ll have to decide if his grand vision of how to run the House of Representatives is even tenable in a time when the very definition of conservatism is so in flux.
Last week, Ryan’s open and optimistic appropriations process came to a grinding halt as Democrats succeeded in adding an anti-LGBT discrimination amendment to the energy funding bill, but then turned around and voted against the underlying legislation. Democrats wouldn’t vote for the bill because of a cadre of conservative provisions they didn’t like including roll backs to the Clean Water Act. Socially conservative Republicans, meanwhile, wouldn’t vote for the bill with the new LGBT protection.
Rep. Rick Allen (R-GA) actually recited scripture blasting homosexuality in a conference meeting before the vote upsetting some moderate members and once again thrusting Republican schisms into the open.
Af a presser following the vote, Ryan blamed Democrats for “sabotaging” his open process. He announced his conference would meet after the recess to examine how to move legislation in the future. But the incident raised serious questions about how Ryan could continue to play the middle ground between letting his conference have their way all the while wanting to accomplish something.
“Despite Paul Ryan’s many moves to accommodate Freedom Caucus members, bringing them into the leadership fold and consulting with them regularly, they have given him the middle finger on spending bills, holding firm against any change in the sequester numbers,” AEI scholar and congressional expert Norm Ornstein wrote earlier this month in the Atlantic about Ryan’s problems with his conference. “To get the Freedom Caucus members to go along, Ryan will have to make concessions, which will lose other Republicans and allow Democrats to rip the bills apart with their own amendments. That means no bills with Republicans alone, and no stomach to bring up bills that will only pass with support from a passel of Democrats.”
Appropriations are not the only thing Ryan’s struggled to pass and Ryan’s woes cannot be blamed entirely on the Democrats. The architect of the GOP’s blueprint for years, Ryan has not been able to unite his conference around a (mostly symbolic) Republican budget this year as conservatives want the speaker to set lower spending caps. It’s quite possible that the closest the House comes this year to pushing their agenda will be releasing a series of policy plans over the summer that Ryan himself has said aren’t meant to be voted on.
When Ryan took the gavel from Boehner last October he declared that “we have nothing to fear from honest differences honestly stated.”
But, now Ryan is about to find out what happens when those differences cannot be resolved. All eyes are on him as the former vice presidential candidate still hasn’t endorsed his party’s nominee. Ryan can’t sustain the facade as the Republican peacemaker much longer. At some point, something’s gonna have to give. So what will it be, can Ryan reject Trump and hold steadfast to regular order or is it easier to embrace Trump and bring back the ways of Boehner?
