House Speaker Paul Ryan could receive a less than stellar rating on Club for Growth’s annual congressional scorecard due to the difficulties he’s had forging a budget deal that satisfies House conservatives, the Club’s president said Friday.
“I’m a Paul Ryan admirer. I think he’ll be a good speaker. But I think this next budget is actually a test of whether he’s going to change directions from John Boehner or not, and so far, the signals are they don’t want to,” David McIntosh said in an upcoming interview for C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers.”
McIntosh has been the president of Club for Growth since 2014, when the preeminent free-market advocacy group engaged in a standoff with then-House Speaker John Boehner over a $1.1 trillion omnibus bill he had introduced in the House.
Now, the former Indiana congressman is afraid Ryan is “just going to keep running” with the two-year, $1.7 trillion budget agreement Boehner brokered before he resigned as speaker last fall.
“That’s a huge mistake and the Club will speak out against it and say Republicans ought to use the budget now to show their spending priorities,” McIntosh said. “Boehner conditioned people to not do that [and] to expand government to cater to the business interests, but then not worry about the conservatives in their districts.”
He continued, “So that’s where the Club comes in. We’ll speak out on it [and] oppose a budget deal if it doesn’t go back to the less spending. But we’ll also work hard to send more members [to the House] who will push from inside to get that done.”
If Ryan doesn’t continue to work with members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus and insists on maintaining the spending levels included in the current budget, McIntosh said he could adjust the Wisconsin Republican’s rating in the Club’s annual congressional scorecard.
The scorecard, created in 2005 under the leadership of former Club for Growth president-turned-Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, rates every member of Congress based on their voting behavior on economic legislation. According to the group, the scorecard “rewards free-market champions and exposes big-government, tax-and-spend politicians.”
Ryan’s last rating from the Club was in 2014 when he was chairman of the House Budget Committee. At the time, he received a rating of 83 on a scale of 0 to 100, which McIntosh claims is a “B-minus.”
“I’m still giving him his honeymoon period,” McIntosh said Thursday. “But if he keeps doing what he did last fall … it will slip down to a C or D pretty quickly.”
