He was the last Republican vice presidential nominee, excitedly traveling the nation in a non-stop campaign to win the nation’s No. 2 political job. But Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan couldn’t be happier than as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.
“I can make a difference as chairman,” he said, “and I’m home on weekends.”
Ryan is chairman thanks to a six-year term limit on committee chairmen imposed when the GOP took charge of the House. “I think term limits are fantastic,” said Ryan, previously the House Budget Committee chairman.
Rep. Paul Ryan. Bryan Dozier/The Christian Science Monitor
The self-confessed policy junkie said the oft-mocked term limit “gets talent churning through the system, it encourages people to stay in the House.” Ryan offered himself as an example: “I passed on two or three Senate races in Wisconsin because I saw the chance to be a committee chair at a relatively young age in the House where I can make a big difference earlier on and I don’t have to stay in Congress for a lifetime.”
Compare that, he said, to the Democratic alternative of no term limits and lifetime chairmanships when they ran the House. He cited New York Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley who, like Ryan, first won his House seat in 1998.
Crowley is also on the Ways and Means Committee, but is “the second or third most junior member on the committee, and this is my second chairmanship,” Ryan said.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
