In 2012, when Paul Ryan accepted the Republican vice presidential nomination in front of the Battleship Wisconsin in Norfolk, Va., it was seen as a unifying moment for the party, bringing together conservative elites who respected his policy chops and grassroots activists who cheered his crusade against the profligate ways of Obama era Washington.
When Ryan leaves Congress at the end of the year, he will be doing so as a much more divisive figure in a radically changed party. By embracing President Trump in hopes of advancing his policy agenda, Ryan alienated a lot of conservative intellectuals, while at the same time, his overtures did not win him fans among those who tagged him with the dreaded “globalist” label in the face of a populist tide on trade and immigration.
Now, Ryan will be giving up his job as speaker before fulfilling the central aim of his political life — the one that brought him to national stardom — overhauling our nation’s broken entitlement system that threatens to crush future generations with unsustainable debt.
Ryan’s 20-year career in Congress is a story of a man constantly torn between his desire to advance ideological policy goals and his ambitions as a politician who knew when to play the role of a loyal party soldier. Throughout his time in Washington, he has tried to fuse the two impulses, with a mix of successes, failures, and some awkwardness.
Elected in 1998, Ryan came to town as a devoted limited government conservative and Jack Kemp protege, at a time when the party was growing weary of Clinton era spending fights, and George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” was soon to take over Washington.
As a young congressman in the Bush administration, Ryan spoke about free markets and reforming entitlements such as Social Security. In the end, he voted for all of Bush’s major big government initiatives, most notably, his Medicare prescription drug plan. Years later, when I asked him how he could reconcile such a vote with his small government rhetoric, Ryan cited some of the free market elements in the bill (such as health savings accounts).
“You don’t get to take the vote you want in Congress,” Ryan lamented to me. “Sometimes you have to take votes that you don’t want to take, but they’re the best of the two choices.”
During the Obama era, such compromises were unnecessary. Obama took office amid talk of another New Deal and what followed was a massive Keynesian stimulus, a drive for national healthcare, and trillion dollar deficits that brought debt to levels not seen since World War II. A crisis environment in which limited government fervor suddenly merged with the short-term partisan electoral goals of a party in opposition was tailor made for Ryan.
As the ranking minority member of the House Budget Committee, Ryan used his understanding of numbers and policy and penchant for graphs to dissect Obama’s fiscal policy and warn of the looming debt crisis, which he called, “the single most predictable economic disaster in the history of the nation.” He outlined a sweeping plan to overhaul entitlements and put the U.S. on a sustainable fiscal trajectory. It was a message that could resonate whether you were a libertarian, a policy wonk, a Tea Party activist, a partisan who wanted to win elections, or just somebody who plain hated Obama.
When a Republican wave of 2010 gave Republicans control of the House, Ryan took over the Budget Committee in 2011, and to his credit, used his sway to convince the party to get behind his brand of entitlement reform, or at least the part of it that would transition Medicare into one in which seniors could choose among competing plans and Medicaid would get block granted to the states. This was an example of Ryan’s compromises over the years (his decisions to suck up his reservations and play the loyal soldier) bringing him power that he then used to push the party in a more far-reaching conservative direction ideologically.
Ahead of the 2014 elections, Ryan told me that Republicans shouldn’t assume they would be swept into power in a wave and urged them to outline a clear agenda. “I for one think you need to run on something,” he said. “That’s why I wrote and passed four budgets in a row. That’s why I put ideas out there on a whole host of issues.”
As he rose through the ranks and reached the position of speaker, he had to swallow more and more to perform the role as a loyal party soldier, overseeing a fractured coalition in the House, while advancing less and less of the agenda he supported. With each short-term budget deal that blew past spending set by the 2011 debt ceiling agreement, he kept doing what he chastised other politicians for having done — kicking the can down the road.
In 2016, Ryan’s conflict between being a party soldier and advancing his ideals faced its most difficult test when Trump captured the Republican nomination. Trump is in many ways a polar opposite of Ryan. Whereas Ryan prides himself on getting into the details of policy, Trump eschews them and prefers to speak in broad strokes. Though Ryan has been a staunch free trader and relatively moderate on immigration, Trump has driven the party in a more protectionist position on both issues — and Trump ran against entitlement reform even as Ryan made it a central goal. Moreover, Ryan, the devoted Catholic and family man who conducted himself civility in politics, could not be more different than Trump — the brash, womanizing, thrice married, political brawler.
After a very public hemming and hawing, Ryan ended up embracing Trump during the campaign and during his presidency, and has engaged in the awkward dance of defending him. Ryan made the pragmatic calculation that Trump was and is his only chance of advancing any of his agenda items, and he has been willing to justify all of his actions in these terms.
Now that Ryan is leaving office, what does he have to show for it?
Republican fiscal policies under unified control of Washington have increased by about $2.2 trillion the debt the Congressional Budget Office projects for 2027, when compared to what they expected just before Obama left office.
In a press conference touting the “big things” he accomplished as speaker and thanking Trump for being in a position to sign them, he touted as the two major achievements increasing military spending and the large tax cut passed last year — both of which added to deficits.
Was sacrificing principles to embrace Trump ultimately worth it for the sugar high of tax cuts and increased military spending? While conservatives may want both policies, Ryan knows better than anybody that neither of these achievements will be sustainable without the passage of entitlement reform — which is much harder work.
Ryan, on Wednesday, touted the fact that the House passed entitlement reform, and pointed the finger at the Senate for not acting. “More work needs to be done and it really is entitlements, that’s where the work needs to be done,” he said. “And I’m going to keep fighting for that.”
But Ryan, who claimed he wanted to tackle entitlements this year, will now leave his job unfulfilled.
In the final analysis, then, the cynic has to wonder where genuine spending reform ranks in Ryan’s hierarchy of beliefs, relative to tax cuts, military spending, and short-term Republican political calculations. The cynical view of Ryan has always been that his high-minded rhetoric on debts was always empty, as evidenced by the fact that in practice, he consistently voted to increase spending while lowering taxes. Having announced he was retiring from Congress without pursuing entitlement reform any further will only bolster the cynical view, and in the process, further undermine the claim of Republicans as the party of limited government and fiscal restraint. This, in turn, will likely mean that future fiscal battles will be fought on the terms of those who want to raise taxes to support even larger government.
