Ryan: GOP voters having a ‘panic attack’

“I think on the Republican side there is just a panic attack,” he said. “An anxiety, that we are losing the Constitution, losing the rule of law. We are losing government by consent, free enterprise and self-determination. That’s what I feel, so it’s extremely frustrating.”

In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Ryan laid out his top five priorities and discussed the types of reforms he sees the Congress attempting to achieve in this shortened election year.

Washington Examiner: The House Republican Conference is negotiating a fiscal 2017 budget right now. Where do things stand and when might the House vote on a budget?

Ryan: We’ve been meeting with various members of our conference and finding out where consensus lies on how to write the budget. This is the same process I did the four times I wrote a budget in the majority and four times when I wrote a budget when we were in the minority. We started it earlier though. I wanted to get a head start on the budget this year given that we lose half of July [due to the political conventions]. I moved everything up a month. Usually you do the budget in April, we’re trying to do it in March.

Examiner: Are you committed to the budget number of $1.07 trillion Democrats and Republicans agree upon last year? There is a lot of debate about whether you should stick to that deal.

Ryan: I’m going to be one of those people who goes with the will of the conference. I’m not one of these top-down, cram-it-down-people’s-throats type of speakers.

Examiner: But you agreed to the deal.

Ryan: We agreed to it. That was the number we passed. But we are going to see what our budget resolution is. The whole thing is a work in progress. We haven’t finished writing it yet.

Examiner: Republicans are talking about reducing entitlement spending. Which entitlement is in the most urgent need of reform?

Ryan: This is what our task forces are working on now, to lay out an agenda for what we really need: a new president to help us put in place in 2017. And we are going to lay all this out in great detail, later in the spring. We want to lay out our replacement vision for Obamacare. We’ve proven that we have the votes to repeal Obamacare. We also have to demonstrate what we would replace it with.

Want me to go through our five points? One is economic growth. So that’s tax reform, and energy development and regulatory reform. Number two is repeal and replace Obamacare. That’s entitlement reform. Number three is upward mobility: poverty, welfare, how do you move welfare to work? Our welfare entitlement programs aren’t working. They are in many ways trapping people in poverty and we have to have solutions to make sure they are moving people out of poverty. That’s a big part of our platform.

The fourth one is national security. We really don’t have a national security strategy, nor a military that is complementing that strategy. So we have to have a national security military strategy. And the fifth one, that is becoming more and more a common concern, is how do you make sure we are a self-governing country? That we have government by consent? That is another way of saying, let’s make sure it’s Congress writing our laws and not unelected bureaucrats. This new fourth branch of government that’s not accountable to the people that don’t write laws.

So that is what we are going to be working on. Restoring the Constitution and the separation of powers. Those are all things our task forces are working on. We are not going to get these into law with Barack Obama. We know that. This is what we are going to take to the country and ask the American people, this is what we think is necessary to get the American ideal back in place, get the country back on track and give us a president we can work with to put this in place. That is basically going to be what our agenda is going to look like.

Examiner: How do you strengthen and preserve Medicare without making cost reductions or reining in costs somehow, which the public doesn’t always embrace?

Ryan: I don’t want to get ahead of what the task force is going to be putting out, but Obamacare caps Medicare. Obamacare puts a cap on Medicare. Then they have this board of 15 unelected bureaucrats who are in charge of putting cuts and price controls on Medicare. It’s price controlling and rationing by government, and denying people choices. That’s the future that we are currently on with Obamacare.

We believe in a more patient-centered approach. What we’ve been putting in our budgets before, which is, give patients more choice and more control. Oh, and by the way, in order to make sure people nearing retirement don’t see any changes in their benefits, phase these reforms in for those of us who are younger so they are there for us when we retire so we can guarantee the program stays as it is for people who are near retirement right now. We think that is a smarter way to go and we are going to be discussion in our task forces.

Examiner: Democrats call that the voucherization of Medicare.

Ryan: Yeah it’s not a voucherization. It is wrong. It’s a nuclear word they use to try to mischaracterize the plan. Premium support is what the Part D benefit is right now. Premium support is what the federal employees get their health insurance, where you have guaranteed choices and you have plans that you can pick from that have to compete for your business, that can’t deny you, and oh by the way, that compete against each other for your business and if you don’t like your plan one year you can fire it and go to another plan. It’s proven to bring down costs for beneficiaries and taxpayers and increase quality. So that we think is the solution to fixing Medicare in the future.

Examiner: I wonder just as speaker, you talk about the bottom-up approach, but are there limits on decentralizing power?

Ryan: I think the committees is the answer. It’s a bottom-up approach where everybody can participate in these task forces, but these task forces are being led by the committees of jurisdiction.

Examiner: Can international tax reform happen this year?

Ryan: I think it’s a possibility. I’ve told [House Ways and Means Committee Chairman] Kevin Brady to give it the old college try, see what you can do. I was doing this already. We were pretty close to finishing up a bill. He’s picked up were we’ve left off. The question I don’t know is will Democrats be willing to do it. Will Democrats support international tax reform, just on its own merits, to prevent [corporate] inversions from getting out of control? I don’t know the answer to that question. The answer has been no so far, but we’ll see.

Examiner: What about overall tax reform? Is that a top goal of yours?

Ryan: It is a top, top goal. We have to do it. We already lost our global competitiveness. Can we get it back is the question. And this is one of the biggest reason we have slow economic growth and slow income mobility. We have to do this for the sake of the fact that we have lost our global competitive edge, especially in tax laws. I come from Wisconsin and we compete with Canada. They tax their business at 15 percent. For 90 percent of Wisconsin businesses, their top tax rate is 44.6 percent. We are killing ourselves.

So, yes is the answer, high priority, but how do you get the ability to do that with the trifecta [of Republican control of the House, Senate and White House]? We haven’t done tax reform since ’86, so our theory is we need to run on it . We need to put it out in the election year, give it to the country and let the country choose because if you run on it and you win that election, then you have a mandate. That is what we are seeking. And, I don’t think you can do it any other way. You can’t just run on some vague platitudes and talk in generalities and then expect the country is going to support you and let you do something big and bold as comprehensive tax reform early in 2017 as we’d like.

Examiner: So Congress can get drowned out, and you’ve got one candidate supporting a value-added tax, another candidate, the front-runner, Donald Trump, is calling for tariffs. They are all over the map on tax reform. How does House GOP get its message out to the American people?

Ryan: First on their tax plans and I’ve reviewed them all, they all derive from the same principle which is, let’s get our rates down to make us more globally competitive. Let’s get rid of loopholes, broaden the base and lower the rates. Let’s get rid of crony capitalism in the tax code, the picking of winners and losers, and having a more efficient tax code. We all agree on that. What does that look like though? We kind of see ourselves as adding a keel and a rudder to the ship, which is floating all over the place. So we can actually help steer our ideas to a common destination, to bring to the country, to give this country a very clear an compelling choice.

We honestly think that is the best kind of election to have. My mentor Jack Kemp used to always tell me about this. He and his colleagues back then gave Ronald Reagan an economic agenda. At that time they called it pro-growth supply side economics. Ronald Reagan was running on winning the Cold War. Peace through strength. He wasn’t a pro-growth supply-sider until House Republicans brought this agenda to him. They merged their agendas, they ran on it in 1980. They got themselves a mandate, they won the election and they did it in 1981. They turned things around.

That is the kind of election we are seeking. And we believe in the House, that we are uniquely qualified to add some substance to this conversation. To add a rudder to this ship and get it steered in the right direction.

Examiner: There’s a Marquette poll out that has Donald Trump leading the polls in your state. What do you make of the popularity of the “outsider” candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sander?. As someone who ran for vice president, did you see this coming, and what do you think of it?

Ryan: Yes, I saw it on our side. I spent a lot of time with Republican voters in swing states. I did. I saw people panicked about the direction the country was headed. And basically right-of-center voters, Republicans, really worried about where the president was taking our country. It was a close race and we were going to take the county in a very very different direction then where it is headed now. I can speak from our side of the aisle. High anxiety. People don’t like the status quo. It’s not working well. People see this place as broken and in many ways it’s because it is.

We have a liberal progressive president and a conservative Congress. We’re not getting big things done. Why? Because this president wants to go in a direction we don’t want to go. Like it or not, people elected a divided government, and since 2010, we have had a divided government so they want to see progress on issues and they are not seeing any. They see divided government, getting nothing done and the direction we are headed, our side of the aisle, they want to see it change. And that is why I think outsiders are attractive because outsiders weren’t a part of this divided government impasse.