With ‘Better’ GOP agenda, Brady’s star rises
Woodlands lawmaker’s partnership with Ryan could put him in public eye
WASHINGTON — Early one June morning, with Donald Trump poised for victory in California’s GOP primary, Texas U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady made his way to one of Washington’s poorest neighborhoods to roll out an anti-poverty agenda with House Speaker Paul Ryan and other Republican leaders.
Carrying the first of six policy planks for a new GOP election platform in November, the entourage featured two of the most understated policy wonks in Congress: Ryan, the boyish budget wizard, and Brady, the balding tax expert.
There, standing outside a faith-based drug and alcohol rehab center, they sought to rise above the clamorous scrum of the presidential election and inject a dose of substance into the 2016 political arena. It would be the start of a separate House governing document filling in many of the policy details lacking in the sweeping campaign pronouncements of the party’s presidential nominee.
There was talk of expanded work requirements, streamlining programs, developing skills and lifting people off their dependence on welfare programs. But they could not escape the creeping shadow of Trump.
The first question from reporters was about the billionaire’s remarks on whether a federal judge presiding over lawsuits against his now-defunct Trump University could be impartial because of his “Mexican heritage.” Ryan’s answer calling Trump’s remark “the textbook definition of a racist comment”
relegated the policy rollout — and Brady — to the shadows of the day’s news cycle, not an unfamiliar place for the 10-term congressman from The Woodlands.
As the presidential election lumbers forward with Trump as the presumptive GOP nominee, Brady is positioned to occupy an outsized behind-the-scenes presence of Ryan’s ambitious Republican agenda for 2017 and beyond.
Whether a political maverick like Trump will embrace mainstream Republican orthodoxy on trade, immigration and entitlement reform remains an open question.
As details of Trump’s governing agenda remain elusive, Ryan and his leadership team have been working to fill the idea vacuum with their own version of an “optimistic” Republican program, dubbed “A Better Way.”
‘Key priorities’
Brady, the newly installed chairman of the taxwriting Ways and Means Committee, has been intricately involved in formulating three of the six white papers that make up the body of Ryan’s policy push — welfare reform, repealing Obamacare and streamlining the tax code.
The partnership of former rivals for the Ways and Means gavel means that Brady’s star will be irrevocably hitched to Ryan’s, no matter where the project leads. Ryan, as speaker and the GOP’s 2012 vice presidential nominee, long since has cemented his reputation as the party’s big-picture policy guru.
In Brady, he gets a genial workhorse who can keep his head down, manage Capitol Hill egos and drive the agenda through the labyrinth of congressional lawmaking and consensusbuilding.
“Kevin Brady and I sat next to each other on the Ways and Means Committee for 16 years, and I have learned so much from his decency and sense of fairness,” Ryan said in a statement to the Chronicle. “He is exactly the right person to help lead this charge to tackle some of our country’s most intractable problems, whether it’s poverty or our broken tax code.”
For Brady, a former Chamber of Commerce executive in Texas, the project is a chance to put his imprint on the basic framework on which Republicans will campaign this fall.
“It isn’t a 50-point plan for solving global issues,” Brady said in an interview. “It is key priorities for House Republicans to turn this country around. We’re going to lay these ideas out, run on them this election, and if we return as a majority, we’re going to act on them.”
The six-volume agenda laid out this month touches on a familiar set of Republican policy prescriptions, such as cutting tax rates, easing regulations, overhauling poverty programs, bolstering national security and checking executive power. Much of that agenda — along with repealing Obamacare — enjoys near universal support in the House and Senate GOP caucuses.
While Ryan frequently uses words like “bold” and “aspirational” to describe his vision, GOP leadership aides acknowledge that issues that divide Republicans — notably immigration and trade — intentionally were left out.
Trump, in particular, is running on nationalistic fervor in direct opposition to free trade, a mainstay of GOP economic theory. Meanwhile, his hard-line position on immigration runs counter to the Chamber of Commerce embrace of legal foreign labor.
Trump also has waxed skeptical of changing Social Security and Medicare “in any substantial way,” putting him seemingly at odds with Ryan and Brady’s plans for reforming the popular programs to put them on more stable financial footing.
Separate agendas
Mindful of the distance between Trump and GOP leadership on some core ideas, Brady said he is planning to meet with the billionaire businessman “in the near future” to bring him on board.
“I hope to make the case that free trade and economic freedom are critical to job growth in America, and that we need to act to save our Social Security and Medicare,” Brady said. “I’m hopeful he’s open to us leading on the solutions in these areas with him as president making the case in the White House that the status quo doesn’t work.”
Whatever GOP leaders’ reservations about Trump, they have made it clear that they have more in common with him than Hillary Clinton. Nonetheless, by setting their own agenda, they have partially untethered their fates from that of their party’s nominee.
“While we didn’t know how the presidential race would all fall out, we believed we needed to lay out our ideas in bold vision for the country, and run on it,” Brady said. “So, now we have our nominee… We’re going to make the case to the American public that if you want to see these types of new ideas, elect Republicans up and down the ballot.”
Democrats, for their part, have sought to tie the House Republican agenda firmly to Trump.
“Republicans’ tired, trickle-down agenda is not a better way; it’s the wrong way,” said Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. “Donald Trump has exposed the true heart of House Republicans’ agenda of recklessness, obstruction and discrimination. Republicans’ half-hearted rebrand of their special interest priorities will do nothing to distract from the radicalism of (the) Republicans’ standard-bearer.”
The flak not only has come from the left. One of the centerpieces of the “Better Way” agenda — a longawaited plan to replace Obamacare — relies heavily on individual tax credits to help people buy coverage from private insurers, but it leaves open how much that would cost.
While welcoming the new initiative, Michael Needham, head of the conservative group Heritage Action for America, said the plan “suggests replacing some of Obamacare’s regulations with similar regulations at the federal level, and it proposes a new refundable tax credit without any discussion of how that new spending program would be financed in a post-Obamacare world.”
Those discussions and others like them likely will fall under the purview of Ryan’s committee chairs, foremost among them Brady as head of Ways and Means, which will be left to hash out the sorts of reforms needed to deliver on the promise of lower or “flatter” tax rates.
Under Ryan, Brady said, the new Republican caucus is less centralized, giving committee chairmen like him more weight. “It’s a generational change,” Brady said. “He’s giving lawmakers like me a green light to bring forward the boldest solutions on the biggest issues facing the country.”
‘Patience, intelligence’
With the final rollout of the tax reform blueprint on Friday, Brady took the lead on a renewed GOP effort to lower tax rates for individuals and business while preserving popular deductions for mortgage interest and charitable contributions. The challenge ahead will be navigating the complexities of special interest tax loopholes, a challenge that has made tax reform an elusive goal for decades.
“Kevin has incredible patience and intelligence, and it takes both, because he manages a lot of personalities,” said Republican Majority Whip Steve Scalise. “There are a lot of different ideas. Everyone’s got their own idea of how to improve the tax code.”
In the cautious world of Congress, it is risky business. After facing the strongest primary challenge of his career this spring, Brady knows the perils of pragmatic deal-making, not just with Democrats but within the fractious House Republican caucus.
With another reelection all but assured, the 61-yearold Texan sees more upside than down, no matter who wins the White House.
“The biggest political risk,” he said, “is to do nothing.”