Less than a month
on the job, House Speaker Paul Ryan tries to establish his rhythm overseeing a raucous caucus of Republicans.
Paul Ryan is a bit of a control freak: Each day should have a similar rhythm, each meeting should begin on time, each day should end like the day before.
All of which makes his new job as speaker of the House, overseeing a raucous caucus of 246 Republicans, an odd fit for this very Type A personality. Last week was an early test. “I’m really kind of into routines, so I’m still working on getting a routine established,” Ryan, R-Wis., told reporters Thursday in a roundtable discussion.
Ryan, 45, whose German mother instilled a rigid discipline in him, can’t even get over the fact that the speaker, by tradition, skips most House votes to conduct more meetings in office suites off the chamber floor: “I just like having routines, and I can get more done that way.”
With a little less than a month under his belt as speaker, Ryan has learned that the routine business of Congress can turn on a dime, for almost any reason. He’s aware that his words carry more weight now, and he’s aware that some weeks he’s not going to be able to live up to his promise of letting the House conduct business in a completely transparent fashion.
One week he was promoting a wide-open, freeflowing system of dozens of amendments for a highway funding plan, winning an impressive bipartisan vote. The next week brought the exact opposite, with a rushed bill to tighten screening requirements for Syrian refugees after the terrorist attacks in Paris. No committee considered the legislation, no amendments were allowed, and the bill was made public about 40 hours before it was voted on by the House.
That inflicted whiplash on some lawmakers, but it demonstrated that Ryan understands that the ultimate judgment of his tenure will be based on results as much as, if not more than, the process used to achieve those results.
In the 35-minute session on the Syrian refugee bill, Ryan said that the decision to rush the legislation was driven by lawmakers themselves. Despite their repeated outcries for an open process, once they saw the impact of terrorism in Paris, lawmakers reverted to their most basic political instinct and demanded that something be approved before they left Thursday for a 10-day recess over the Thanksgiving holiday.
“Most members said, ‘We need to act before we leave; we need to act before the recess,’ ” Ryan said. “People came from intelligence briefings saying, ‘You need to do something.’ ”
So Ryan obliged, setting up a process he admitted was “outside the realm of regular order,” and scored a big political win, getting more than a two-thirds majority, enough to overrule a presidential veto. He said that, with so much fear of terrorist attacks, the public just needed to see Congress get something done.
“If we had a free-for-all on the floor, who knows what the outcome would be, and I think that the country is very worried and the country wants to see us doing something,” he said. But he also ran into some familiar partisan turbulence.
House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md., mocked Ryan’s quick turnaround to flush a bill through the House so quickly, suggesting that the increasingly conservative tone of the Republican presidential primary campaign would “reflect” the congressional dysfunction and boost Democrats in next year’s election. Some GOP presidential hopefuls called for a full stop of any Syrian refugees, while some also called for allowing only Christian refugees.
The speaker said that his motivations were based on what he heard from House Republicans on Capitol Hill.
“I don’t even know all of their positions, to be candid,” he said of the presidential aspirants. “I’ve been busy doing my job.”
Once Congress returns after Thanksgiving, Ryan’s routine will revert to what the speaker dismissively calls “the chores”: passing a compromised version of the highway bill through the House and Senate; approving a new K-12 education program; and, finally, by Dec. 11, a massive funding plan for federal agencies.
Each is either many months, or many years, behind schedule, so Ryan views them as cleaning up other leaders’ messes. Those issues will again test his ethos for opening up the House, a demand from the conservative flank that so bedeviled his predecessor, John Boehner.
Ryan says that he is one of those far-right conservatives, that he is of their ilk and not trying to force them to bend to his will. “You have to understand, I come from the conservative wing of the party, I’m a movement conservative who comes from this part of our party. People know that, you know. So a lot of these guys are pretty good friends of mine,” he said.
If only he can figure out a routine again, he might make it work: “Time management has always been challenging. It’s just even more challenging.”