House Speaker Paul Ryan said he “will not tolerate” another sit in on the floor of the House of Representatives like the one Democrats staged on gun control last week.
“We are not going to handle it the same way,” Ryan warned in the interview, which was highlighted by the Hill newspaper. “We will not take this. We will not tolerate this.”
Ryan drew the line in an interview with local news program WISN’s “UpFront with Mike Gousha.
Ryan did not explicitly detail how a Democratic sit-in would be different next time around.
In another interview also flagged by the Hill, Ryan told WGTD radio this week that the reason he did not arrest Democrats last week was that he had heard it was what Democrats were hoping for,
“They said they were hoping to get arrested and hauled off the floor. They told a number of my staff that and so I did get a brief heads up about it,” Ryan said.
In the last month, Ryan has struggled to keep Democrats from using the floor to push their own agenda and endanger his leadership in the House. Democrats most recently took to the floor to demand a vote on gun legislation, but a separate push for an amendment on appropriations bills that blocked federal contractors from discriminating against LGBT workers also had upended Ryan’s plans and forced him to restrict House rules.