Freedom Caucus supports Ryan
Hard-liners stop short of endorsing him for speaker
WASHINGTON — The hard-line House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday it is supporting Rep. Paul Ryan for speaker of the House, all but guaranteeing he’ll get the job if he wants it and potentially heralding a new start for a deeply divided House GOP.
The group of around three dozen rebellious conservatives, who have caused fits for the GOP leadership, stressed that their support for Ryan was not an official endorsement because they couldn’t muster the 80 percent agreement such an announcement would require. Yet members of the rebellious group made clear that their intent was to unite behind Ryan and give him the consensus he has said he needs to seek the speakership.
“A supermajority of the House Freedom Caucus has voted to support Paul Ryan’s bid to become the next speaker of the House,” the group said in a statement. “Paul is a policy entrepreneur who has developed conservative reforms dealing with a wide variety of subjects, and he has promised to be an ideas-focused Speaker who will advance limited government principles and devolve power to the membership.”
Support from the group was not certain since they’ve repeatedly opposed GOP leaders and pushed the current speaker, John Boehner, to announce his resignation. And their backing fell short of the official endorsement Ryan had sought. There was no immediate word from Ryan’s office as to whether the announcement would suffice.
Yet, given the Freedom Caucus’ pattern of causing headaches for leadership, and the concerns raised by individual members ahead of Wednesday night’s meeting, the decision to announce support was significant.
It amounted to a rare peace offering from hardliners in the caucus to the establishment-minded lawmakers they’ve battled for years. It was also a chance to unite a party at war with itself on Capitol Hill and the presidential campaign trail.
Rep. Raul Labrador, RIdaho, said the choice was now up to Ryan, who must decide “whether he wants to really lead the conference.”
“I think he’s a good man,” said Labrador, who said he voted for Ryan at the Freedom Caucus meeting. “I think he’s that somebody who could bring the Republican Party together.”
The Wisconsin congressman, a reluctant candidate for the post, was asked to run by mainstream party leaders seeking to resolve a crisis set in motion when compromise-averse conservatives pushed Boehner to resign and then pressured his likely successor into withdrawing.
The same intraparty divide is roiling the Republicans’ presidential campaign, with outsiders led by Donald Trump dominating the field for months.
On Wednesday, some House members took issue with Ryan’s suggested changes to congressional rules and even his desire to balance family life with the demands of the job.
Freedom Caucus members said that, in offering their support for Ryan, they were not embracing the changes he sought.
“No other speaker candidate came in and said, ‘Here’s the list of my demands, either meet those or I’m not going to do this,’ ” Rep. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, a member of the hard-line caucus, said the day after Ryan outlined the conditions for his candidacy. “Speaker’s a big job. And it’s not a 9-to-5 job. So there are a lot of questions to be answered.”
At the top of Ryan’s demands is one to make it harder for conservatives to deploy one of their most powerful tools: calling a procedural vote to oust the speaker, which led to Boehner’s early retirement and warned Kevin McCarthy of California off the job.
Ryan reportedly told fellow Republicans he was willing to take “arrows in the chest, but not in the back.”
The Freedom Caucus announcement came as Ryan was making the rounds to the three major House caucuses whose endorsements he was seeking as a condition for running for speaker.
It’s a job the 45-year-old never wanted but is exploring, he says, out of a sense of duty after Boehner announced his resignation and McCarthy abruptly withdrew from the running to replace him.
Ryan has made clear that he does not want to be the latest victim of Republican dysfunction and will run only if it becomes clear he can unify the House GOP.
“I won’t be the third log on the bonfire,” he said.
Boehner, who hopes to leave Congress at the end of this month, sought to move the process forward, scheduling secret-ballot House GOP elections for Oct. 28, to be followed by a floor vote in the full House the next day.
“If I can be a unifying figure in our conference, I’m willing to step up and be one, it’s just that simple,” Ryan said ahead of the Freedom Caucus announcement. “If not, then it’s OK, I’ll just go back to Ways and Means.”