Below is a transcript of an interview of House Speaker Paul Ryan by Stephen F. Hayes, editor in chief of THE WEEKLY STANDARD at the TWS Midwest Conservative Summit earlier Monday in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.
You can listen to the audio of the interview here:
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Hayes: I don’t mean to put you on the spot right away, but there’s obviously a very controversial, personnel decision in the news, and I’d like to just dispense with it right away: What do you make of Jordy Nelson’s departure from the Packers?
Ryan: We all adore him, we love him, he gave us great, great memories. But there was a salary cap issue. And they wanted to free up the salary cap and get some younger talent. And I understand the intellectual side behind it, but the emotional attachment is hard for us to lose. At least he didn’t go to Minneapolis or Chicago — that’s what I care about.
Hayes: So it really comes down to a deficit issue, for you? Is that what you’re saying? Leave it to you to make it a fiscal responsibility case.
Hayes: So let’s get to the other personnel question in the news. You recently fired House Chaplain Patrick Conroy. News reports suggest that you told the Republican conference on Friday that this was about pastoral concerns. He has told the news media, the NYT, and others, that it was not about pastoral concerns and was related to politics.
Ryan: First, let me just say a couple things. As Speaker of the House, one of your responsibilities is to be a guardian of the institution. It’s a responsibility I take very seriously. And sometimes you have to make decisions on behalf of the institution that may not be politically popular. Father Conroy is a good man and I’m grateful for his many years of service to the House. This had nothing to do — this was not about politics or prayers. It was about pastoral services. And a number of our members felt like the pastoral services were not being adequately served or offered. And so I made a decision on behalf of the House, on behalf of making sure we can have adequate pastoral services. And we’re going to have a bipartisan process to select the next Chaplain.
Hayes: Is this a decision you’ve been thinking about for a while?
Ryan: It is. It’s based upon feedback I’ve been getting for quite a while from members. And again, as a person who stands up for the institution, I just wanted to make sure that we have pastoral services that are being adequately offered on a go-forward basis for all of our members.
Hayes: Let me touch on something else that’s been in the news over the past 24-48 hours, and that was the comedian that was at the White House Correspondents Dinner. She took some pretty, pretty tough shots. Michelle Wolf took some pretty tough shots at Sarah Huckabee Sanders while she was sitting just a few feet away and it’s generated quite a bit of criticism, quite a bit of controversy.
Ryan: I didn’t watch it — never have. Again, I was at Infinity War in Janesville with our sons and my godson. And then we went to Culver’s to talk about the movie, which by the way, if you’re a Marvel fan, it’s pretty profound. I thought it was a pretty good movie. I don’t want to give away the ending. So candidly, I didn’t see it. I certainly have heard a lot about it. I’ve heard a lot from people who were there that it was extremely inappropriate. But I can’t really comment on the specifics, other than I heard from people I know, like, and trust, that it was very inappropriate.
Hayes: Let me ask you a big picture question about this moment in American politics. Mitch McConnell, your counterpart in the Senate, did an interview with Fred Barnes — my colleague and long-time mentor at TWS — not long ago, in which he said that for conservatives in Washington, this has been the best year since he’s been in Washington D.C. And I’d like you to tell me if you agree with his sentiment there, and not just in terms of actual, practical policy, but in terms of the conservative movement that you’ve been a part of for three decades now.
Ryan: One of the reasons why I felt comfortable retiring — First of all, you know my family situation. I don’t want to be an empty nester, only being a weekend dad. But the other big reason I felt comfortable retiring is we got a lot done that I came to do. And it is what Mitch was talking about, and I think I agree with that assessment. He’s been in Washington longer than I have. But ever since I was a think-tank guy — you and I knew each other way back in the day when I was working think tanks, trying to get tax reform moving and all this regulatory relief, worrying about the military and our foreign policy. We’ve passed more bills in Donald Trump’s first year in office in the House, than you saw pass in either Obama, Bush, Clinton, or Bush ’41. So we have passed over 500 pieces of legislation in the House. I mean we have been moving quickly, getting a lot done, big and small. And the Senate has a tighter majority with filibuster. But even with all of that, we still got a lot done. The regulatory reforms are truly impressive — it spans all sectors of our economy. We’re a few weeks away from getting our bill into law that rewrites the Dodd Frank law. We rewrote the tax code for the first time in 31 years in a far more comprehensive and profound way than the last tax reform, which was in ’86. That’s something I’ve been working on for my entire adult life, that we finally realized. And that’s gonna usher in a strong foundation of growth. You and I are what I guess we would call the defense hawks. I was really worried — especially since being Speaker because you get a lot of the briefings, and I spend a lot of time with our intelligence community and our military — I was very, very, very worried about the absolute hollowing out of our national security apparatus, namely our military and our intelligence community. And we have no rebuilt that. Now that’s underway, but I think that that’s extremely important for America, our national security, and our prosperity. And there are a whole multitude of other things. What Mitch talks about is in the Senate, they’re doing judges, and boy, are they putting some really good ones on the bench. Neil Gorsuch is probably the one you’re thinking of, but behind Neil Gorsuch are so many other, lower court, federal judges that are great judges that are now on the bench for a long time to come. So whether it’s rewriting the regulatory state, re-limiting the government in that area, rewriting the tax code, rebuilding the military, getting constructionist on the bench, it’s a really good year. The one thing that got away from us, which is my other signature issue, is entitlement reform. I’m encouraged by the fact that the House, every term, has passed a budget that balances the budget, pays off the debt, cuts trillions in spending. We’ve not been able to get that kind of budget through the Senate, let alone supported by a president. This current president supports that kind of a budget, but we couldn’t get that kind of a budget through the Senate. So we brought our health care entitlement reform bill through, which would have saved trillions in the long run of debt reduction, and moved us more toward a patient-centered healthcare system, which would have lowered premiums and cost for everyone. That bill passed the House and I’m really encouraged by the fact that we did our job in the House. And it is discouraging that it failed by basically a vote in the Senate. Had that gotten done, we would have done it all, more or less. But even with that not getting through, we then went to an incremental stage on that — we got rid of the individual mandate in tax reform, we got rid of the independent payment advisory board, which is the price controlling body, which is kind of the intellectual architecture of Obamacare in the caps agreement. So we’re making pretty good incremental progress on healthcare all the same.
Hayes: Although, if I can push back: When you and I talked in 2012 — you probably spent more time with me than you care to remember, and we spent most of that time talking about entitlement reform. And then, your argument was that this was a crisis, it’s an urgent crisis. If we don’t address medicare, social security, medicaid, we’re in trouble and we’re in trouble really soon. And since then, it’s been in the House budgets, but nothing has happened.
Ryan: I know.
Hayes: Medicaid was expanded. The president created an additional new entitlement in Obamacare, and even if you’re dismantling pieces of it, it’s not gone. We seem to be moving in precisely the opposite direction and if you look at that and think about the tax reform package that you told me was your best day in Congress, the day that passed. Aren’t we exacerbating this problem? And the president doesn’t agree with you on entitlements, probably not at all.
Ryan: I wouldn’t say that.
Hayes: He said that you were the reason that Mitt Romney lost. Maybe because of Medicare.
Ryan: Yeah, I don’t know if he said it exactly like that. He and I have talked a lot about this. I’ve shown him charts and graphs and all that stuff. First, there’s two things you need to do to get our debt under control: You need to have a growing economy where people have good jobs that pay good wages where we have tax revenues coming at a good clip — that’s really important. That’s why regulatory reform and tax reform are so essential. I fundamentally believe if we had not done tax reform, that would have exacerbated our debt problems going into the future. Look, Johnson Controls was the biggest, publicly traded company in this town, in this state. They’re now an Irish company. You were gonna see more and more of those kinds of transactions. Another big insurer in this town was in the midst of becoming a foreign company while tax reform was being debated. Once tax reform was done they withdrew from that transaction, they’re staying a Milwaukee company. So what you would have seen was a bleeding of the tax base and a shrinking of the economy if we didn’t do tax reform. You have to have growth. But you’re exactly right. So, your brother Dan used to do these videos with me on this stuff. The Hayes boys — you’re a pretty talented family. I’ve been talking about this for a long time. And again, I agree. And I’m pleased that the House did this. The House took 2 of our 3 — the big drivers of our debts are Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare. Social Security is one of those drivers, but it’s not nearly as profound in its impact as the healthcare entitlements. This bill we passed took 2 of those 3 healthcare entitlements and fixed them. Fixed them in such a way that they would have grown at defined rates, at gradual rates that would have been absorbable, and more importantly, would have had more market choice in competition, which would have brought down cost for consumers and would have had more competition in the workplace. It was basically giving the state — I see some of the state legislators here — we would have said, here’s Medicaid, you guys do Medicaid, it’s gonna grow at a certain rate and we’re pushing it back to per capita. For Obamacare, we were gonna unlock Obamacare, let everyone buy what they want to buy if they want to buy it. Give people health savings accounts to buy insurance they want regulated at the state level. We’re proud of that bill. It passed the House. But you’re right: and yet, it didn’t pass the Senate. So you’re right: There is unfinished business, no two ways about it.
Hayes: Is it still a crisis?
Ryan: Oh, absolutely.
Hayes: What does the president — you say you’ve shown him charts and graphs in May of 2016, but he wasn’t terribly interested. That’s one of your kind of legendary stories. He hasn’t made it one of his big issues.
Ryan: He has made healthcare reform one of his big issues, and that is one way at getting at this problem. If you reform healthcare by having more choice and competition, you can get at the root cause of health inflation which is a big driver of this. Let me put it this way, we’ve got about a 90 percent increase in the retirees of this country, with the Boomers retiring. But we only have a 19 percent increase in the people following them into the workforce. And so you’ve got this big slug of boomers coming into retirement, 40 million to 77 million. And the benefits they use that they earned, grow far faster than inflation. Therein lies your problem from a debt standpoint. We can borrow money to absorb the retirement of the baby boomer generation as a country. The question is: Can we get it to a manageable level where we have reforms that reform this expenditure, all this healthcare spending, so that they can have the benefits that they’re entitled to and we can meet the mission of health and retirement security without bankrupting the country and the next generation? These reforms that we passed are designed to do that and I believe they do do that. But they need to go into law and that’s where we’re not at yet.
Hayes: So, you’re not going to be around to shepherd this issue anymore. I mean, you pushed it and got the Republican party on board. I think you deserve a lot of credit for doing that. It wasn’t an easy thing to do. It took a fair amount of political courage, which is in short supply in Washington these days. The president is not going to pick this up. I mean, let me ask it this way: If the president is reelected in 2020, do you expect that he’s gonna tackle entitlement reform, in the way you would, in his second reform?
Ryan: I have no reason to believe he would not do that. I don’t want to speak for the president, I’m not gonna get out in front of him, but he knows the math. I’ve had so many conversations with him about this. Let’s go back to one thing you said: You and I talked about this back in 2012. Our party wasn’t even touching this stuff, our party wasn’t even willing to touch this stuff. So I wrote budgets when I was budget chair, doing this, specifically and with great detail, forcing members to vote on this stuff. I wanted to do that. I wanted to force members to take tough votes so they would go explain it and go out there and, what I call, “normalize the idea.” Now, we’ve been doing that in the House ever since 2007. So, House Republicans, they’ve been going out and talking about how to fix entitlements specifically, and they’ve voted for this stuff. So I do believe we have built a foundation for entitlement reform among grassroots Republicans and House Republicans. That foundation I had hoped would have realized the success by now. And again, 2 of the 3 were gonna be done with our Obamacare replacement bill, and one vote in the Senate cost us that. I very much regret that, but I do believe we’ve moved ourselves so much farther than where we were before. And the question I don’t know the answer to is: When are we going to finally realize this? And we’re going to have to for the sake of the debt, for the sake of healthcare entitlements not being able to fulfill their promises. And I think the president is getting around to that idea. Will he do this in 2021? I don’t know the answer to that question. But I do know he’s familiar with the problem and did support us. He helped us pass this bill in the House — he did a lot to help us pass it, actually — to solve 2 of the 3 entitlement problems.
Hayes: Let me ask a big picture question on Congress. You’ve been in Congress for a long time, despite the fact that you’re relatively young. There is a good case to be made that Congress is a lot uglier today than it was when you started.
Ryan: Yeah, I think that’s right.
Hayes:Whether you’re talking about political polarization, cross-party attacks, intra-party frustrations. What’s the biggest thing that you’ve seen change in today’s Congress with you as the leader, since the days when you were a backbencher?
Ryan: I think it’s funny, I kind of got thrown into this job. I wasn’t looking for this job. But I ended up being the only one who had the votes to take it, so I took it out of a sort of duty and obligation. Knowing that this job more than doubles your time away from home, it’s one of the reasons I’m going to do it for 3 years and not 5 years. But it was a symptom of what you just described, my coming into this job. I think, and I’ve given it a good deal of thought, it’s one of the reasons I’m spending my time trying to focus on the institution of Congress, making sure that it’s better off than when I found it and that it’s in a good place. I think it’s the rise of technology, generally speaking, on top of the fact that moral relativism has become so pervasive in society, combined with the fact that identity politics is being practiced on all sides these days, that has gotten us to where we are. So, when I came in — I got elected in ’98 — and it was just so different. Constituents would fax or call with concerns. And it usually was somebody affected by a specific piece of legislation. If you’re a car dealer, you would call or fax or write a concern about car dealer legislation. if there’s a big issue before congress, a general constituent interested would call or fax. Now, it’s instantaneous. The volume is more. But what I’ve learned is there is a business model out there on all sides of issues to sell controversy, to sell and appeal to darker emotions — anger, fear, envy, you name it. And that anxiety sells. It’s good for ratings, it’s good for clicks, it’s good for hits — it’s a business model.
Hayes: It sounds like you’re blaming the media.
Ryan: No, it’s just technology and culture. The media is just in a transition. Newspapers aren’t doing well, even cable is under duress by the Internet. So I think there’s a ratings chase that is for survival. I just see the whole combination of the moral relativism pervading society, which if you ask me the biggest problem — the debt is high up there — but I think relativism is the biggest. It’s hard to tackle all these other things if relativism is so pervasive. And then you add on top of that identity politics. And then you add on top of that 21st century technology, and there you have a very combustible mixture — not just within parties, just within the country. So you have more polarization, you have more anxiety. And that bubbles up in Congress. That bubbles up into public service as a vocation. It’s something I want to spend a lot of time thinking about — I’m busy doing the FAA bill and the WRDA bill and personnel decisions and, you know, all the things you do running Congress — but this is something I care a great deal about. I’ve put a good deal of thought into it and I want to spend more time thinking about this.
Hayes: Let me ask you about that: You’ve got kids, I’ve got kids. You made no bones about the fact that in May of 2016 you had some real problems with the way Donald Trump had been behaved, you were concerned about it. Throughout your time as Speaker you’ve occasionally spoken out when you’ve seen something you disagreed with — after Charlottesville and other things. Would you say that the president is typical of the challenges of moral relativism that you described?
Ryan: Nice try.
Hayes: Is he a cause or a result of that?
Ryan: You think I’m gonna take that?
Hayes: In all seriousness, how can you talk about what you’re describing with the media, and playing on fears, without saying that?
Ryan: We have different political temperaments, we have different political styles, for sure, no two ways about it. What I’ve learned in my particular job is: Where does my effort produce the best results? Is it in being some scold on TV? Is it trying to score points in the media? By the way, parenthetically, I do a better job talking to the president than if I were going to go out into the media and talk about the president. I think I can get more done that way. But secondly, I’m not a writer for TWS, I’m not on TV. I’m trying to take ideas that we as conservatives believe in and get them into law to make a big difference in this country. That’s my job. My job is to make sure that this Article 1 branch of government works and that we get as much done as we can. We’ve had unified government as Republicans — this is our third time in a century. And the other 2 times were basically war times. Now, we’re technically at war, but we’re not consumed with it. And so, I have this window of opportunity, where we can take the things we believe in and make them into law, and that’s my focus. And so, that’s where I need to spend my efforts — not trying to score political points and look good among the chattering classes. I don’t care about that. And that’s why, frankly, we ran on a very specific agenda. Remember the Better Way agenda that I got all House Republicans to run on? We’re almost done executing it. We’ve done the regulatory reform, we’ve done the tax reform, we’ve done the rebuilding of the military. With infrastructure, we just passed a big FAA bill the other day, we’re gonna do a water bill now. And our welfare-to-work program, which is our workforce development, that’s up next. We believe able-bodied people receiving welfare benefits ought to go to work, or at least go to school, and that should be a condition of receiving those benefits. Because what we realized is that when you make that a condition of receiving welfare benefits, people go to work, people go to school, people get out of poverty. This is who we are and what we believe. We did this in Wisconsin in ’96 with welfare reform, and we’re trying to do it again. So we’re on the cusp of achieving these things. That’s where my efforts ought to be focused as Speaker of the House.
Hayes: What is likely to get done in the remaining time you have in Congress? Obviously, there are a number of bills that you’ve passed in the House that have gone to the Senate to die.
Ryan: Yeah, we get about 400 over there. So I work closely with my counterpart over there, Mitch. They’re almost done with personnel issues. They’ve got more judges, but they spent an inordinate amount of time approving people. The assistant secretary of this, the ambassador of that. And when they get through that, they can spend more of their time on legislation. We anticipate, in the next few months, a lot of legislation moving through the system. The capstone to our regulatory reform agenda — and what I mean when I say regulatory reform agenda is we’ve always believed in a 2-step process. First, Congress passes its bills. Then, the administration takes it from there with their Cabinet and rewrites regulations so that they work. Obama hyper-regulated the economy. And there’s this thing called the Congressional View Act which cannot be filibustered — it’s one of two things that cannot be filibustered. Under it, you can rescind a recent regulation, in this case, those Obama regulations, and the bill repealing that regulation cannot be filibustered. It was done once in the past 20 years. We’ve done 15 already, in law. The 16th is making its way through the system. In one area, in just de-regulating the energy markets, we lifted the ban on the export of crude oil, we streamlined energy regulations, and now, we are the #1 producer of natural gas, and this year or next year, productions show us we’ll be the #1 producer of oil. We have, in the last 4 or 5 years because of technology, we discovered in Midland, Texas, an oil field as big as Saudi Arabia’s oil field. We have a Saudi Arabia in just this part of Texas. The point being, because of our policies, and innovation and technology and the free market, we’re gonna dominate. OPEC doesn’t have a number on us anymore. Our dollars are going to our fellow countrymen. Our foreign policy has dramatically improved. Our economy is stabilized. We’re gonna keep gas prices in an acceptable band for consumers, like Wisconsinites. That’s just one sector of our economy that will, for a long time, benefit from this regulatory agenda. So, I really believe we’ve made some profound differences. But the capstone of our regulatory reform agenda, to get to your question, is our replacement of Dodd Frank. We already have a bill out of the House. We have a bill out of the Senate, which is pretty amazing. So, we’re gonna get that done. So what’s to come, is finishing off the effort to replace Dodd Frank, which is just killing community banks. Ask any community banker in Wisconsin, this is where almost all of our business get their money from, as well as families. So this will bring tremendous relief to community bankers. I think it’s really good for our economy. The next thing we’re working on is people. We want to make two-year school cool again. We want to emphasize career and vocational technical assistance, technical education. We have technical schools here — a lot of states call them community colleges, you know it well. They’re really good. But this area has been so deeply micro-managed by the federal government, and we’re getting rid of all that. We’re sending that stuff back to the states, so that our local economies, local technical colleges, local employers, and local leaders can come up with career and technical education to get people from welfare into the workforce so we can deal with this labor issue we have, which is not enough people to do the jobs that are being made available. So we’re gonna get that done. So that’s a huge step in the right direction. So Dodd Frank being replaced, the career and technical education welfare-to-work reform getting done, and then, we do have some modernization of our infrastructure issues, which won’t cost a lot of taxpayer money, but fixing these things — it takes 4-10 years to get a federal-involved-project permit and we want to knock it down to 1 year — so we’re gonna get a lot of infrastructure done, welfare reform done, workforce development done, and more regulatory relief done before the year’s out. So that is an enormous amount of accomplishments in a 2 year period.
Hayes: So let’s say that everything you say is going to happen in fact happens, and all of the things that you’ve done are indeed the accomplishments that you’re touting, why are Republicans facing what Governor Walker calls a “blue wave” in 2018?
Ryan: I think it’s historical, I think it’s part of the Trump phenomenon — he has people who love him and he has people who hate him. You have an enthusiasm gap, that I think is what Scott is talking about, because there are so many people motivated by the fact that they don’t like the president. But I think it’s history. The history of midterm elections doesn’t speak well for the party in the majority. The history of midterm elections does not speak well for the president’s party. The average loss of seats in the house for a president’s party in the president’s first midterm election is about 32 seats. We have a 24 seat majority. 23 of our members come from Hillary Clinton-carried districts. So it’s that historical average, that statistic, that has everybody talking about this. If you look at the generic ballot, it actually looks pretty good. We believe that the if the election were today, we would keep the House of Representatives. So the way I look at it is: What do you do about it? Keep getting accomplishments, keep getting things done. I tell this to our members all the time: Don’t get distracted. Don’t get distracted on the latest Trump this, Trump that on MSNBC or CNN. Just focus on doing our jobs. We told our constituents what we wanted to do if given the opportunity, so let’s go do it. And that’s what we focus our time on. So we really do just focus on getting our work done, so then we have a good story to tell. And we believe we will have a good story to tell come the fall because of the economy, because of our accomplishments, because while the country was very much distracted in the media by this other stuff, we were busy at work focusing on people’s problems and trying to make a big difference in their lives. And we believe we’ll have a good story to tell on that. It’s one of the reasons why I raise all this research, so we can go around the media, and directly talk to the constituents.
Hayes: One of the reasons that there are these headwinds that you face a potential “blue wave” is the record number of retirements. We talked about that a little bit in our last panel, and our Haley Byrd, who covers Congress, said when she talks to people, there’s just a frustration that the Democrats are inevitably going to take the House of Representatives, and that they can’t do much policy-wise. You obviously have a different view. Why do they have the sense that they can’t accomplish much?
Ryan: I think the national narrative gets hyperventilated and pushed so hard to make people think that. But when you actually focus on what we’re doing in Congress — we just passed a huge FAA overhaul bill just a couple of days ago, which is bipartisan. Our technical education bill will be bipartisan. Our food stamp reforms, the Democrats aren’t getting involved in it, but we really believe in it and we’re gonna push this. There’s so many more things we’re gonna get done that I think what people are doing, is they’re looking at the national media and they’re just buying into the narrative. And they have fatigue of it all. Plus the trend, just the historical trend, has people a little unnerved. But what we’ve learned — we’re 6-1 in our special elections — is that in our special elections, we can win them by motivating supporters and getting them to the polls and communicating directly to them around the media. And that does actually work. We’re 6-1 in specials, so we think we actually know how to do this pretty well. And, by the way, it costs a lot less money than what the other side seems to spend on these specials. So, we actually feel like we have a formula to get this done.
Hayes: Except in Arizona — that was pretty expensive.
Ryan: It was expensive, but she won. A win is a win is a win. And, by the way, she’s from Wisconsin.
Hayes: Let me ask one more question before we take questions from the audience: There’s a lot of speculation about what comes next for you, speculation that you could be the next president of AEI. First, are you going to be living in Janesville? And second, what are you going to be doing?
Ryan: My plan is to figure out my plan in 2019.
Hayes: One thing he’s gotten very good at is evading the questions I ask, and he wasn’t that great at it earlier in his career.
Ryan: No, really, I don’t know. I think I shouldn’t be thinking about it. I got a lot of work to do still, to run through the tape. So I’m just not focusing on that chapter. I’m excited to just spend this weekend with my kids, and I usually only get Sundays because I’ve been running around the District on Saturdays. So just this idea that I’m gonna have more of that time makes me extremely happy. I’ll figure it out then. I have no plans on the table right now, none whatsoever. And I’m just gonna take some time off, come January, and just figure it out.
