Paul Ryan is just who the Republicans need now
House Republicans have an embarrassing problem.
They have 247 members (Democrats have only 188) and no speaker. But they may snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who just last week was refusing to consider running for speaker, has now changed his mind. A party with Paul Ryan as speaker would be powerful indeed.
The House Freedom Caucus, a group of 40 conservative Republican House members under the leadership of Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, decided on Wednesday night to back Ryan, ensuring his election.
Until House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California decided not to run for speaker, leaving the party rudderless, Ryan insisted he did not want the job. It is a stroke of luck for Republicans that he will likely be the next speaker.
It’s not just that Ryan is young, providing a vivid contrast to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California. It’s not even that he is photogenic and articulate. Ryan’s advantage is that he is the source of many of the most innovative policy ideas in the Republican Party. His election would transform the Republicans from the Party of Disorder to the Party of the Future.
Ryan has a sound grasp of issues and budget numbers from his time as a speechwriter for former presidential candidate Jack Kemp and a staffer to then-Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas. Politicians often leave legislative details to their staff, and focus on telephoning donors to ask for dollars and making speeches.
But Ryan was a staffer in charge of the numbers, so he has the skills and confidence to present a convincing argument for reforming government, reducing the path of government spending and cutting taxes. He was the only Republican who took on President Obama at a bipartisan meeting on health-care proposals in February 2010.
By choosing Ryan, Republicans have a greater opportunity to focus on policies that encourage economic growth and appeal to voters.
Ryan dispels the liberal argument that the GOP is the enemy of the middle class and that upward mobility is a fantasy. Ryan’s father died when he was a teenager, and he drove a Wienermobile, a vehicle shaped like a hot dog, in order to make money. He lives close to the house where he grew up in Janesville, Wisc.
In 2011, when the Republicans won a majority in the House, Ryan became chairman of the House Budget Committee. He ran as Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential nominee in 2012, and became the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee in 2015.
Ryan’s success has been the result of his vision and ideas. In 2008, Ryan unveiled the Roadmap for America’s Future, a plan to free America from debt. Instead of vague ideas on lower taxes and entitlement reform, Ryan proposed an in-depth, detailed proposal on how exactly to clean up America’s fiscal mess.
In 2011, when the Republicans won a majority in the House, Ryan became chairman of the House Budget Committee. The Roadmap grew into the Path for Prosperity, adopted by the House of Representatives as its budget plan.
Although Harry Reid has said that he supports Ryan for House speaker, in the past Democrats have greeted Ryan’s boldness with derision and mischaracterization. They have suggested that Ryan would rather that the elderly and the ill just died in order to cut costs. One TV advertisement in 2012 featured a Paul Ryan look-alike pushing an elderly woman in a wheelchair off a cliff.
One of Ryan’s proposals was to let those who were 55 and younger in 2013 have an option to keep traditional Medicare or choose another government-approved plan when they retire. That would make traditional Medicare compete with private insurers. Ryan proposed to increase the support that is now offered to lowest-income seniors.
More recently, Ryan proposed consolidating 11 means-tested welfare programs into one block grant, known as an Opportunity Grant, for a select number of participating states. Opportunity Grants would give states and localities access to federal-government resources in order for them to better serve their residents’ needs, while encouraging them to experiment with different ways of providing services.
The larger truth is that the Ryan approach — including across-the-board tax-rate reductions — would reinvigorate the economy, foster job creation, restore optimism and put America back on the right track.
Paul Ryan is the intellectual leader of the Republican party. He was easily re-elected with more than 60% of the votes in one of the most politically balanced districts in the country.
Ryan wants the House to change its rules and require a supermajority to bring a motion to vacate, a procedural move that forces the resignation of the speaker. Such a motion by Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina brought an end to the term of Speaker John Boehner. Ryan also wants to delegate the traditional travel and fundraising functions of the speaker to others in order to continue to have time for his children.
As Ryan spokesman Brendan Buck said in an email to the Weekly Standard: “Our next speaker needs to be visionary: more focused on communicating our agenda and laying out big ideas. The next speaker needs to use the platform to create a clear policy choice for the country.”
House Republicans don’t know how lucky they are.
This piece originally appeared in WSJ's MarketWatch