Ryan meets with tea-party hard-liners as he moves closer to speaker decision - The Washington Post

 

Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) moved closer to becoming House speaker Tuesday, answering a flurry of calls from fellow Republicans who see him as the best hope to unite his party’s warring factions on Capitol Hill.

“If Paul Ryan can’t unite us, no one can. Who else is out there?” said Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), a moderate. “That’d be a sign of utter dysfunction, total madness.”

After days of deliberation, Ryan neared a decision on whether he was willing to serve as House speaker, associates said. Three years after Mitt Romney chose him as the GOP’s vice presidential nominee, Ryan once again finds himself being urged to lead his party amid mass unrest in its ranks.

Ryan met Tuesday evening with tea party hard-liners and later with the larger group of House Republicans. His allies said they expected him to make clear that he will move to formally seek the speaker’s gavel only if he has the nearly unanimous support of his GOP colleagues, arguing that a speaker who starts with uncertain political capital would face a constant threat of intraparty reprisals.

Ryan, 45, is expected to continue meeting Wednesday with House Republicans to explore his reluctant candidacy for speaker, evaluating whether the groundswell of enthusiasm that has greeted him in recent weeks can be sustained over the long haul.

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At the top of Ryan’s list of demands, his associates said, is a desire to lead the House GOP as its spokesman and agenda setter without the threat of revolt from the right, halting a dynamic that has dominated the tumultuous speakership of John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), who announced last month that he would leave Congress at the end of October. Another aim would be to delegate some of the job’s travel and fundraising demands so that Ryan could spend enough time with his wife and school-age children.

“My only caution is that he should go very slow and make sure that the whole conference is coming to him,” said former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R). “Don’t underestimate the degree of getting chewed up. We are not like the Democrats right now. They are relatively cohesive. . . . We are a movement in enormous ferment, with enormous anger and enormous impatience.”

Looming over Ryan’s deliberations is a churning frustration among Republicans nationally about the party’s ability to oppose President Obama and a presidential primary field led by anti-establishment outsiders who have made common cause with the House GOP’s right flank.

Those conservative House members have pushed for a suite of rules changes, ranging from an overhaul of the party’s internal steering committee to a more open process for considering legislation. Ryan, they say, would not be exempt from those demands, which, if adopted, could give the new speaker less control.

Ryan’s allies say his conditions for becoming speaker are likely to include an understanding that he would have a free hand to lead without a constant fear of mutinous reprisals.

Peter Wehner, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, said Ryan wants House conservatives to make clear that they would not seek to “cripple him” from the start.

“He doesn’t have a moral obligation to get Republicans out of the rubble they’ve created for themselves,” Wehner said. “Asking for their goodwill is completely reasonable.”

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is being tapped to become the next speaker of the House, even though he doesn't seem to want the job. Who is this guy? (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)

Wehner added that Ryan envisions his possible speakership as one that would be buoyed by his own political capital and shaped by an aggressive Republican policy agenda, rather than one consumed by catering to the whims of tea party back-benchers: “He’s got a vision for the party that he can articulate. He knows policy, philosophy, and where the party should go intellectually.”

But Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), a member of the hard-line House Freedom Caucus who has expressed measured support for Ryan as speaker, said Ryan could not expect to unify Republicans without making some procedural concessions.

“The displeasure with the way the House has been managed since 2011 is pervasive and crosses all sorts of philosophical boundaries within the party,” Mulvaney said. “The appetite for a new way of doing business is real, and whoever wants to be the speaker is going to have to speak to that.”

Most GOP lawmakers have hailed Ryan as the only candidate who could unite a House Republican majority deeply divided over how to best wield its power, but Ryan’s conservative bona fides have also been called into question on conservative talk radio and Web sites and in town-hall meetings.

Among his purported apostasies are support for the Troubled Asset Relief Program during the 2008 economic crisis, brokering a spending deal with Democrats in 2013 and — most crucially — being a leading Republican proponent of immigration reform packages that would give illegal immigrants a path to legal status.

“There are people who have sort of bought the narrative that the speaker’s race is about trying to get someone who is more conservative, and for those folks Paul is not acceptable,” Mulvaney said. “But there are other folks who believe, and this is what I’ve been telling them, that it’s not about people, it’s about process.”

A new poll released Monday by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal showed strong support for Ryan among Republican primary voters, with 63 percent “comfortable and positive” about Ryan taking over the post. Twenty-eight percent said they would feel “skeptical and uncertain” if he became speaker.

Should Ryan decide not to seek the post, it would set off a free-for-all that has already attracted roughly a dozen potential candidates who have expressed interest in running if Ryan does not.

They range from powerful committee chairmen such Homeland Security’s Michael McCaul and Agriculture’s K. Michael Conaway, both of Texas, to Darrell Issa (Calif.), the high-profile former Oversight Committee chairman, to up-and-comers such as Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.), who has played a lead role in the GOP’s recent fight against Planned Parenthood.

But many Republicans believe — or at least hope — that melee will be avoided as Ryan has shifted from being averse to being inclined to succeed Boehner. The change is largely a result of a wave of encouragement and lobbying from officials and influential conservatives, as well as a sense of duty to his embattled party.

House Republicans convened Tuesday in the Capitol basement for a conference meeting focused on their “October agenda.” They will meet again Wednesday morning.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), a conservative who is backing long-shot speaker candidate Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.), sighed Monday when he heard about the previously unscheduled Tuesday session and said it signaled that the leadership was ready to get behind one of their own.

Ryan meets with tea-party hard-liners as he moves closer to speaker decision - The Washington Post