Will speakership help Ryan enact conservative vision?

WASHINGTON — Newly elected Speaker of the House Paul Ryan rose to national prominence and gained the respect of many of his conservative colleagues by burnishing a reputation as a visionary policy wonk, releasing bold legislative proposals that fundamentally reimagined the size and scope of government.

But it may very well be that navigating the politics of the chamber that he has served in since he was 28 occupies most of his tenure as speaker, at least in its early stages, as he stares down the challenge of repairing divisions in the fractured Republican caucus while attending to the daily tasks of governing.  

Ryan, R-Wis., seemed to acknowledge as much in his first remarks as speaker on Thursday morning, shortly after receiving 236 votes from his colleagues to take the gavel from outgoing Speaker John Boehner.

“The House is broken,” Ryan said. “We are not settling scores. We are wiping the slate clean.”

Boehner made things somewhat easier for Ryan: A bipartisan budget compromise between congressional Republican and the White House that sets spending levels for the next two years and raises the debt ceiling eliminates the immediate prospect of a bruising confrontation with his flock.

But that’s a far cry from implementing some of the proposals that Ryan touted over the last few years as chairman of the House Budget Committee and his party’s 2012 vice presidential nominee. Then, Ryan called for an overhaul of the tax code, lowering rates for individuals, small businesses and corporations. Perhaps most notably, he was the author of budgets that reimagined the nation’s most costly safety net programs — privatizing parts of Medicare and Social Security and handing control of certain federal poverty programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, to the states.

Although those ideas may get even more attention now that Ryan is speaker and has promised a new, conservative vision for the country, they have little chance of getting past a Senate in which Republicans do not have a filibuster-proof majority and past — at least through January 2017 — a Democratic president.

“None of his big ideas have a real chance of breaking a Senate filibuster, and even if they could break that filibuster or be done through reconciliation, you can bet the president will veto them,” said John Hudak, a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. “He was elected speaker today. It doesn’t change the other institutional dynamics.”

Democrats, who have long used Ryan’s budgets as a cudgel against the Republican Party, on Thursday said they were determined to block his more controversial proposals.

“Make no mistake, my Democratic colleagues and I will continue to have deep policy differences with Speaker Ryan on the vast majority of issues. We will continue to fight against any effort to privatize Medicare or weaken Social Security,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said in a statement Thursday. “That won’t change with Speaker Ryan.”

Laura Blessing, a senior fellow at Georgetown’s Government Affairs Institute, noted that the dynamics in the House make it difficult to get large pieces of legislation passed in the chamber, particularly with members of the Republican conference demanding changes to the process to allow individual voices to be better heard.

Under Boehner’s term, that problem derailed many pieces of legislation, including bipartisan immigration reform.

“The change in the person in the speaker’s chair doesn’t change the political context that surrounds them,” Blessing said. “Even with a little bit of breathing space, he’s going to face the same exact challenges that John Boehner faced.”