House Speaker Paul Ryan on Thursday voiced his disagreement with President Donald Trump’s decision to adopt the short-term timetable Democrats have advocated to raise the federal debt limit, a plan he called a “ridiculous idea” on Wednesday—but stopped short of criticizing the president himself.
“I personally believe, for the credit markets’ sake, we should have longer extensions of these—I just don’t think it’s good for the credit markets to have these short-term debt extensions,” Ryan told the New York Times.
But Ryan dismissed the idea that Trump intended the move as a slight to Republicans and said he understood the president’s motivations.
“What the president didn’t want to do is have some partisan fight in the middle of this,” Ryan said. “He wanted to make sure that in this moment of national crisis, where our country’s getting hit by two horrible hurricanes, that he wanted to have a bipartisan response and not a food fight on the timing of the debt limit attached to this bill.”
Ryan’s comments echo what seems to be the typical response from Republican leadership: wince privately at the latest blow from the president, then grit your teeth and try to pick up where you left off. For Ryan, that’s getting back to tax reform, which he still hopes Congress can accomplish before the end of the year.
“We want Americans to wake up on New Year’s Day 2018 with a new tax system,” Ryan said.
But Congress and the White House first need to get on the same page. The House Ways and Means Committee has yet to release their blueprint for the bill, and Ryan declined to say definitively that it would come out in September. Meanwhile, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are still working with different sets of numbers: The president has continued to advocate for cutting the corporate tax rate to 15 percent after months of Congress saying such a number is likely unfeasible.
“We will cut the business tax rate as much as possible. Ideally, we would like to bring our business tax rate down to 15 percent,” Trump said at a speech in North Dakota Wednesday afternoon. “All told, it’ll be the greatest tax reduction in the history of our country—greater than ever before.”
Ryan thinks that’s a little optimistic.
“He obviously wants to push this as low as possible,” he told the Times. “I completely support doing that. But at the end of the day, we’ve got to make these numbers work. At the end of the day, our goal is to be at or below the world average, which is 22.5 [percent].”
