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Why Paul Ryan will spend the next year talking about policy — but not making any
He's punting until at least 2017. Can you blame him?
House Speaker Paul Ryan, as you will learn in almost any article about him, is a wonk's wonk, so full of wonky wonkiness that never before has Congress seen a leader who cares so deeply about the substance of governing.
So now that he's the new speaker of the House, the real meat of policy work will begin, right? Well... not exactly.
The Wisconsin Republican's plan, as he's described it in the last few days, looks to be not so much about making policy as it is talking about policy. So don't hold your breath for anything meaningful to come out of Ryan's House in the next 14 months — and if a Democrat wins the 2016 presidential race, maybe not for years after.
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Ryan has made it clear that he is not interested in working with President Obama on much of anything; instead, he's going to spend his time coming up with an agenda Republicans can present to the public that will convince them to keep the GOP in control of Congress and give it the White House as well.
And indeed, there's a perfectly good reason Congress won't be passing any meaningful bills Obama would be even remotely interested in signing: They just don't agree with him on the substance of almost anything. There may be an exception here or there — for instance, there's some bipartisan support for certain kinds of criminal justice reform — but for the most part, there's an ideological gulf separating the two parties, and since Republicans have accepted that compromise is the same thing as betrayal, there's no common ground on which to meet.
In that context, it's reasonable for Ryan to say that for the next year until the election, Republican lawmakers will spend their time not making laws, but making a case for the laws they'd like to make. That would explain why Ryan is beefing up his communication team, hiring a dozen new staffers to sell Brand Ryan to the media. Here's what he told Fox News Sunday last weekend, explaining why Republicans have spent so much time fighting amongst themselves:
We fight over tactics because we don't have a vision. We have to have a vision and offer an alternative to this country so that they can see that if we get a chance to lead, if we get the presidency, and if we keep Congress, this is what it will look like. This is how we'll fix the problems that working families are facing. That is what we have not done, that's what we need to do, and that is in my opinion how we unify.
Ryan has this backwards. Republicans have spent years fighting over tactics precisely because they're unified on policy. They all agree that the Affordable Care Act ought to be repealed, but there were some people in the House who thought that the government ought to be shut down in an attempt to achieve that, and some people who thought that was a poor tactical decision. They all agree that government spending ought to be radically curtailed, but some of them thought that defaulting on the government's debt was a good way to get that done, while others thought that was nuts.
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As the party has moved to the right and moderates have been purged, the GOP's policy differences have grown smaller and smaller. What differentiates the "establishment" from the insurgents is nothing more than tactics. If Ryan came up with a brand new agenda tomorrow that was so compelling all Republicans were immediately committed to it, they'd still argue about how to get it accomplished. Fortunately for him, the budget President Obama signed into law Monday was a parting gift from John Boehner that took away the insurgents' ability to blackmail the country.
Ryan isn't wrong that Republicans could use some better-developed policy ideas. But the problem with Republican ideas in recent years hasn't been that there isn't a unified party behind them, or that they haven't been sold aggressively enough. It's that the ideas themselves aren't that appealing to most Americans. For instance, Ryan has repeatedly released his own budget, a document that inevitably gets loads of adoring media coverage for its seriousness and substance. The reason nothing ever comes from those budgets is that they're full of things Americans don't want, like brutal cuts to government services and the privatization of Medicare (not to mention the many "magic asterisks" that make the numbers add up).
I'm sure Ryan's squad of press flaks will be working hard over the next year to sell whatever policy ideas he comes up with. And that's fine — the public really should know exactly what both parties want to do. If a Republican wins the White House, Ryan can go hog-wild passing everything he'd like. But if a Democrat wins, he's going to have to come up with a new explanation for why his House won't be accomplishing anything.
Paul Waldman is a senior writer with The American Prospect magazine and a blogger for The Washington Post. His writing has appeared in dozens of newspapers, magazines, and web sites, and he is the author or co-author of four books on media and politics.
