House speaker Paul Ryan’s April 11 announcement that he will not seek reelection was unusual but it wasn’t surprising. Unusual because House speakers don’t typically make themselves lame ducks seven months before an election. Unsurprising because back in December, Politico’s Tim Alberta and Rachael Bade first reported that “Ryan has made it known to some of his closest confidants that this will be his final term as speaker” and that in interviews with “three dozen people who know the speaker . . . not a single person believed Ryan will stay in Congress past 2018.”
Ryan and his team tried to dismiss much of the story as speculative, but they couldn’t bring themselves to flatly deny it. Ryan said in interviews with The Weekly Standard and others that he wouldn’t make a decision about reelection until he’d talked it over with his wife in the spring, a clear indication he was considering leaving office. The outstanding question was whether Ryan would announce his retirement before Wisconsin’s June 1 congressional campaign filing deadline or after the November election, which Politico reported Ryan preferred in order to help Republicans in the midterms.
Ryan said in an April 11 press conference that he decided against the latter option because it would be dishonest. “Just as my conscience is what got me to take this job in the first place, my conscience could not handle going out that way,” Ryan said. “For me to ask [my constituents] to vote to reelect me, knowing that I wasn’t going to stay, is not being honest.” Ryan argued that his retirement wouldn’t be a decisive factor in any House race. It’s true that there are many bigger factors at play in November, but the retirement of a healthy young general will likely demoralize his troops to some degree.
This past year was not the first time Ryan contemplated retirement. “After we got thumped by Pelosi in ’06, I was just sitting in my [deer-hunting] tree stand right after that election thinking about, you know, Why am I in Congress? What am I doing? Is it really serving a purpose?” Ryan told The Weekly Standard’s Steve Hayes in 2012. “I considered leaving. I was young, and I don’t want to be a lifetime politician. And I was thinking at the time: Is this worth it?”
To make it worth his while, Ryan returned to Congress and developed his reputation as a policy wonk who was willing to tell hard truths. He told the truth about America’s looming, entitlement-driven debt crisis and presented a serious plan to reform Medicare in 2008 and 2010 over the opposition of Republican party leaders and many in the rank and file. After Republicans took back control of the House in 2011, as chairman of the Budget Committee, he persuaded his colleagues almost unanimously to grasp the supposed third rail of politics and pass his Medicare plan. “My goal was to move the center of gravity in the Republican party on these issues,” Ryan told TWS in 2012.
Ryan, whose father died when he was 16, said on April 11 that the main reason he’s leaving office is to spend time with his three teenage children, who would only know him as a “weekend dad” if he served one more term. Ryan’s family concerns are obviously sincere, but his retirement underscores the fact that the Republican congressional agenda—defined as significant legislation that can actually become law—is over. Most of what could be accomplished by the current Republican Congress under existing rules—tax reform, repealing the individual mandate, increasing military spending, and reforming the Dodd-Frank banking law—has been accomplished.
What will Ryan’s legacy be? Was his roadmap to tackle the debt all for nothing? His biggest policy achievement was tax reform, albeit with a law that will increase the debt anywhere from $500 billion to more than $1.5 trillion, depending on the level of economic growth. (Ryan’s original plan was deficit neutral.) The House passed a bill in 2017 to partially repeal and replace Obamacare and reform Medicaid, but the narrow Senate GOP majority couldn’t reach a consensus on that issue or even consider Ryan’s bigger goal of reforming Medicare. As Ryan leaves office, the White House is occupied by a man who won the Republican nomination and presidency campaigning against entitlement reform.
While Ryan’s push to reform Medicare has failed for now, there is a case to be made that his efforts could advance the cause in the long run. After embracing Ryan’s Medicare plan, House Republicans nonetheless retained their majority in 2012, 2014, and 2016. Even the failure of the Romney-Ryan presidential ticket to unseat Barack Obama in 2012 showed that the politics of Medicare reform aren’t as toxic as many had believed. Mitt Romney beat Obama among Florida seniors by 17 points, even as he lost the state 49 percent to 50 percent. Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton among Florida seniors by an identical 17-point margin, as he won the state 49 percent to 48 percent. Florida senator Marco Rubio, who embraced Ryan’s Medicare reform in his first run for office in 2010, ran far ahead of Trump in 2016, winning reelection by 8 points.
If Ryan is right that entitlements math will eventually catch up with us, he has at least left behind a plan—an outline of which even liberal Democratic Oregon senator Ron Wyden embraced in 2011—to get ourselves out of the mess. But it is entirely possible that Ryan’s plan never goes anywhere. In either event, he’ll be able to say he told the truth about entitlements, and that ought to count for something in politics.
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Of course, American politics since Ryan reluctantly became speaker in October 2015 has not been defined by any particular policy issue but by the personality of Donald J. Trump. And telling the whole truth about the Republican standard-bearer and president has proven a much more complicated task for the speaker of the House.
In the late spring of 2016, Ryan delayed his endorsement of Trump for about a month after Trump had effectively wrapped up the nomination. Within hours of Ryan’s endorsement, Trump attacked an American judge as being unable to do his job because of his Mexican-American ethnicity. Ryan denounced the attack as a “textbook definition of a racist comment.” In October 2016, when the Access Hollywood tape surfaced in which Trump boasted of groping women by the genitals, Ryan said he would no longer defend or campaign with Trump.
Since Trump’s victory, Ryan has tried to focus on policy (most of which Trump has outsourced to Congress) and has been more circumspect in his criticism of the president. When Trump attacked immigrants from “s—hole countries,” Ryan said the remark was “very unfortunate, unhelpful” and said a similarly discriminatory view was held about his Irish-American ancestors who thrived in this country. Ryan has recently made the case against Trump’s tariffs, but he hasn’t pushed any legislation to take away the president’s authority to launch a trade war. Asked about the ongoing investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller on April 11, Ryan didn’t back any legislation to protect the investigation but said, “They should be allowed to do their jobs. We have the rule of law in this country, and that’s a principle we all uphold.”
To many of those who believe Trump is unfit to be president and toxic to the Republican party and conservatism, Ryan’s actions and rhetoric regarding the president have at times been disappointing. To his defenders, Ryan simply has been making the best of a bad situation, dealing with the world as it is rather than how he might wish it to be. Ryan’s handling of this fraught moment in American politics, like the success or failure of his policy agenda, will be more easily judged in the years to come.
