Why Paul D Ryan, undercut by Donald Trump, may actually emerge stronger

Paul D Ryan rose to power two years ago and he is certainly not out of the woods

Paul D Ryan rode to power two years ago like a hero on a white horse, a reluctant candidate for House speaker elected to heal wounds left by his predecessor, who could not tame the incessant infighting between hard-line conservatives and establishment Republicans.

In one of his first real tests, Mr. Ryan discovered last week that those old wounds can reopen fast. But in President Trump, his mercurial partner in the White House, the speaker deftly found a foil to deflect some of the anger that had felled the man he succeeded, John A. Boehner.

President Trump’s fiscal deal with Democratic leaders in Congress — which passed the House with more than a third of Republicans voting against it — infuriated House conservatives, who struck first at Mr. Ryan, but ultimately turned their ire on the Trump White House. By week’s end, the men feeling the lash were Mr. Trump’s Treasury secretary and budget director. If anything, Mr. Ryan may have emerged stronger.

“It was thrown at him,” said Representative Mark Sanford, Republican of South Carolina and a member of the hard-line House Freedom Caucus, referring to the fiscal deal. “He didn’t create it; he’s reacting to it. I think he laid out a course that was acceptable to the conference as a whole, and to conservatives as well, and he had the rug pulled out from underneath him.”

Mr. Ryan is certainly not out of the woods. Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, is publicly sniping at him, openly declaring war on Republican leaders on Capitol Hill.

“The Republican establishment is trying to nullify the 2016 election,” Mr. Bannon said in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” that was to air on Sunday night. He singled out Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, and Mr. Ryan by name, saying, “They do not want Donald Trump’s populist, economic nationalist agenda to be implemented.”

The coming push to rewrite the tax code will present the speaker with his biggest challenge yet. The first major rewrite of the tax code in 30 years, an ambitious and difficult task at any time, has emerged as a must-pass measure for Mr. Ryan, its biggest champion. The failure of Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act, followed by the passage of a Democrat-approved fiscal and hurricane-relief package, has only amplified the pressure on Republicans to show their constituents they can govern.

“Some of us feel that we got jammed when you couple Harvey disaster aid and the debt limit,” said one outspoken conservative, Representative Dave Brat, Republican of Virginia. He added, “The leadership just needs to give us right now a tax plan.”

Representative Mark Meadows, the North Carolina Republican and Freedom Caucus chairman, agreed, warning in an interview that failure on the tax plan would be “extremely damaging for the speaker and for all members of the G.O.P. conference, as well as the president.”

Mr. Ryan declined to be interviewed. But his allies on Capitol Hill say that, despite the conservative pushback and raucous week, the speaker emerged with a stronger hand. By week’s end, tempers among even some of the angriest members of the Freedom Caucus had cooled, and Mr. Meadows insisted that the rumors of a coup in the offing were false.

“I wouldn’t want his job for anything,” he said. “I have a hard enough time keeping 40 members of the Freedom Caucus together.’’

Some moderates said that in cutting a deal with Democrats, Mr. Trump may have done the speaker a favor, demonstrating to hard-line conservatives that they cannot always have their way.

“In some ways it liberated Paul,” said Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York. “The president showed he’s willing to negotiate with everybody.”

Though a number of Republicans defected, the fiscal package passed with a majority of Republican votes, which Mr. King called “a good vote of confidence for Paul Ryan.”

Mr. Ryan, 47, a former chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee who was Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012, was the consensus choice of his colleagues to become speaker when Mr. Boehner was pushed out of the job in 2015. Worn down by his unruly caucus, Mr. Boehner turned the reins over to a younger man credentialed with both the Republican establishment and the Tea Party wing, which he helped bring to power in the Republican rout of 2010.

But unity proved easier for Mr. Ryan when Republicans had a common Democratic foe, President Barack Obama, in the White House. Under Mr. Trump, Mr. Ryan has a harder task: proving that he and his fellow Republicans can govern while not always having a reliable partner in the executive branch.

“It’s always been a tough job,” said John Feehery, a Republican strategist who was a top aide to J. Dennis Hastert when Mr. Hastert was speaker. “It’s herding cats, and in this day and age, I think it’s especially difficult with President Trump, because he is unpredictable. And I think Ryan is coming to grips with how difficult it is to develop a governing coalition.”

After spending the August recess traveling the country to promote his long-sought goal of rewriting the tax code, Mr. Ryan returned to the Capitol last week and promptly rejected a plan by Democratic congressional leaders to tie a three-month increase in the nation’s statutory borrowing limit to a package of hurricane relief. On Twitter, he called it “ridiculous and disgraceful.”

But on Wednesday, at a White House meeting with House and Senate leaders of both parties, Mr. Trump wrapped his arms around the Democrats’ idea, sidelining Mr. Ryan and Mr. McConnell.

Later that day, members of the Freedom Caucus met with Mr. Ryan to complain bitterly that he had walked into the White House without a coherent plan, and had ignored their proposal to pair raising the debt ceiling with other conservative priorities, such as spending cuts or easing regulations on business.

“I think lack of preparation typically means you don’t get the best results, and lack of preparation usually leaves few choices, and they’re not good choices,” said Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and a member of the Freedom Caucus.

On Friday morning, an hour before a scheduled vote on the debt limit and hurricane-relief package, the White House sent Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and the president’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney — a former member of the Freedom Caucus — to Capitol Hill to sell the plan in a closed-door meeting with Republicans.

Mr. Ryan said little, according to people who were in the room, stepping aside while the White House took the heat. At least one Trump supporter — Representative Lee Zeldin of New York — defended Mr. Ryan.

“The speaker was unanimously elected to represent us,” one lawmaker in the room recalled Mr. Zeldin saying. “When the president does an end run around the speaker, he does an end run around us.” A spokeswoman for Mr. Zeldin confirmed that was “the gist” of his remarks.

As the meeting broke up, some conservatives seemed to feel almost sorry for the speaker. And some of the more unruly voices of the Republican conference were reassessing their uncompromising tone.

“You don’t take a Pollyanna view that the way things have always been done are going to be changing, just because you get a new speaker,” Mr. Meadows, the Freedom Caucus leader, said. “But to Speaker Ryan’s credit, he stays engaged in spite of being bloodied, even by some of his own colleagues.” 

©2017 The New York Times News Service