Despite their combined almost four decades in the House, each took a very different path to their respective leadership positions.
Advertisement
The legislation included in the year-end budget package that passed Friday also would pay an additional $4.6 billion into a compensation fund for victims and extend if for five years.
But what is it about Paul Ryan that has seemed to unite Republicans – or, at least, temper the anger that conservatives felt toward John Boehner?
The two have spoken on the phone often since he took the speaker’s gavel – increasingly often as spending deadlines approached – and Pelosi and Ryan sat down in the latter’s office for a two-hour dinner last Friday to get to know each other over steak and fries.
“I come from the conservative movement, and the people who have been lifelong members of the conservative movement know me as one of their own”, Ryan said. Ryan, 45, has three young children and touts his Midwestern roots along with his love of hunting and the Green Bay Packers. He’ll head from there to Hawaii, where he’ll spend the holidays with his family. Ryan made weekends in his hometown of Janesville, Wis., a condition of becoming speaker.
“This is the wrong way of doing things and the nice thing about Paul Ryan is he said, ‘I’m not going to do this crap again.’ That’s a positive statement”.
Ryan told reporters he would continue to decentralize power, effectively weakening the job of the speaker.
While Friday’s vote may look like “Meet the new speaker, same as the old speaker”, Ryan’s supporters and even critics insist that while the final outcome may be the same, the route to it reflects a different style and tone from the Boehner era.
“It gave me such a wealth of knowledge and a ton of experience that I just don’t get rattled or phased anymore”, the Speaker said just before departing Washington for the year.
“My goal is to help unify the conservative movement so we can unify the Republican Party so… that the citizens of this nation get to choose in 2016 what kind of country they want to have in the 21st century”, the Wisconsin lawmaker said.
Another area they have in common: having to deal with unruly party members.
That message seems to be resonating inside the convention, whilst on Tuesday night time negotiators introduced they’d finalized a $1.1 trillion spending invoice that contained far fewer Republican “wins” than many had been anticipating.
Pelosi added that many of her members are particularly concerned that the bill would roll back the ban on USA oil exports. And some Democratic groups expressed serious concerns about the legislation and the negotiating process.
Republicans said they expected to get more GOP support for the spending bill Friday.
That would be this spending bill, by the way, which the majority of the Freedom Caucus is going to vote against because they hate it. For now, they’re saying this is still all Boehner’s fault, despite the fact that Ryan and his team pretty much abandoned them and have put them on notice for being disloyal to their conference. They overwhelmingly voted against the legislation, but said the process under Ryan was much improved. “John Boehner did a favor to all of us, including now-Speaker Ryan, by working with us to agree on a top-line budget framework”, Obama said at a White House press conference. This policy went through the committee process. “We did succeed in fighting off those efforts”.
But harsh assessments also came from some of the 95 Republicans who voted against the spending bill. Typically, tax extenders are slipped into some other must-pass bill at the end of the year.
“It’s testing limits and boundaries: What will fly? What are hers? I think there’s all of that”, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) told RealClearPolitics. How do you gauge that and how well do you read it?
President Barack Obama is expected to sign the bill.
Advertisement
Leadership negotiated the omnibus for weeks, marking the first time Ryan really worked with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi. “The most significant threat to our national security is our debt”, Admiral Mullen said.
