For two hours on December 19, Paul Ryan loved his job.
Shortly after the House of Representatives passed wide-ranging tax legislation—including reforms that he had pushed for three decades on Capitol Hill as a staffer, back-bencher, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and speaker of the House—Ryan leaned back in a brown-leather chair and exhaled.
Moments earlier, he had been standing before a throng of reporters, flanked by colleagues, answering questions about the bill and what it means. He had been doing this for months when the provisions were just proposals, and Ryan, a preternaturally optimistic man, had strained in those appearances to seem upbeat, affecting a forced buoyancy that those close to him have come to recognize in the past two years.
Today, however, Ryan was happy.
Best day of this Congress? I ask him.
“That’s a good question,” he says, pausing. “It probably is. . . . It probably is. I’ve been working on this since I was 22 years old. I’ve been working on this for a long time. This is the biggest thing we can do to create a growth engine for our economy.”
The sweeping reforms are the most ambitious overhaul of the U.S. tax system since Ronald Reagan’s in 1986. Unlike that bill, this package was in no way bipartisan, passing on a party-line vote in both houses of Congress. But the changes are equally significant. The law lowers individual rates at all levels; slashes the corporate rate to 21 percent from 35 percent; eliminates many deductions; nearly doubles the standard deduction; and increases the child tax credit. The reforms don’t do enough to simplify the tax code, but congressional Republicans are right to be pleased with the result.
Ryan says tax reform passed for two main reasons: Republicans successfully muted objections from K Street, and Donald Trump was more disciplined than he had been with the Obamacare repeal.
Republicans on Capitol Hill were frustrated with Trump’s role in that earlier debacle. His public comments undermined their efforts, as when he threatened to abandon the GOP and work with Democrats who wanted to “fix” Obamacare by increasing the role of the state in the U.S. health care system. He was unhelpful in his private comments, too, as when he called the House bill “mean” during a meeting with Senate Republicans. He was incapable of holding even surface-level discussion about the actual policies being debated, a fact that frustrated conservatives, who were looking to include more market-friendly reforms. And he conducted separate negotiations with various factions of the GOP, publicly pitting one group against another with no apparent strategy or goal.
Trump was a help this time, Ryan says. “I think he learned from health care—let me back up. We applied the lessons from health care to this. Number one: get the conservative movement unified. Number two: get buy-in and agreement from the White House, the Senate, and the House.” Trump focused on the timeline, urging Congress to meet its self-imposed deadlines, and otherwise allowed lawmakers to hammer out the details by themselves.
“He learned, too, that it doesn’t help to have multiple conversations with conflicting views in Congress among Republicans, because you’re just playing people off of each other and we’re not coalescing,” Ryan says. “He realized: stick with the plan, execute the plan, and don’t allow fractures to occur. So I think he learned, too, from health care what works and what doesn’t work.”
It was important, equally, that Republicans laid the groundwork to squelch opposition from K Street. They knew that there would be objections from special interests that stood to lose preferences and advantages in the tax code. “We worked really hard on that,” Ryan says. “We spent a year of prep work on that—getting the big groups to overwhelm the small, narrow interests.”
GOP leaders moved early to win support from groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Farm Bureau, and the National Federation of Independent Business. “We asked them to get their members to agree: ‘I’m not going to sweat the little details for my business or my industry in favor of comprehensive reform.’ ”
But even Ryan’s best day came with a hiccup. Shortly after our conversation, the Senate parliamentarian ruled that three provisions in the House-passed version of the reforms did not qualify under Senate rules for reconciliation—the mechanism for budget-related legislation that allowed Republicans in the upper chamber to pass the bill with a simple majority rather than the normal 60-vote threshold. The Senate passed the new version that evening and the House voted again the following day.
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Ryan isn’t one to bask in the glow of past accomplishments, and I ask him about his priorities for 2018. He names three: entitlement reform, welfare reform, and, surprisingly, health care reform. “I don’t think the health care issue is done,” he says, indicating a willingness to revisit Obamacare as early as January. “At the end of the day, we’ve got to go after the root cause—health care inflation and entitlements. Welfare reform is going to be our next lift,” he says, noting that the president has expressed interest in his ideas for welfare programs and Medicaid. Ryan concedes that Trump is opposed to tackling the two entitlements that drive the national debt—Medicare and Social Security—but he’s determined to press his case. “We’re never going to give up on entitlement reform and the things we need to do to get the debt under control,” Ryan says. “With one more reconciliation, I think we have a pretty good shot at getting some of these things done.”
It’s not just Trump who isn’t interested in reforming Social Security and Medicare. Neither is Mitch McConnell.
Less than 48 hours after Ryan told me that welfare reform and entitlement reform topped his 2018 agenda, the Senate majority leader effectively ruled out any work on either one during an interview with Mike Allen of Axios. The headline over the story: “McConnell: Welfare and entitlement reform not on 2018 agenda.”
“I think Democrats are not going to be interested in entitlement reform, so I would not expect to see that on the agenda,” McConnell said. Instead, he wants to work with Democrats to fashion a comprehensive infrastructure bill—a priority of Trump’s. Ryan is open to infrastructure spending, but he’s plainly wary of the Keynesian arguments for infrastructure that Trump favors.
I ask Ryan about Trump’s infrastructure-as-stimulus argument, noting the similarities between it and those made by Barack Obama. Ryan pauses before answering and then offers a knowing smile. “We like ideas that leverage private-sector dollars,” he says, laughing. In our brief discussion of infrastructure, Ryan mentions the private sector 10 times. The exchange shows just how adept Ryan has become at avoiding answering questions.
When I point out that Trump doesn’t talk about infrastructure the way he does, Ryan agrees. But when I point out that Trump seems to want the Treasury to cut a trillion-dollar check that can be distributed throughout the country, Ryan demurs. “That’s not, that’s not—” he laughs. “I’m not going to give you what you’re looking for.”
Even for someone as optimistic as Ryan, the outlook for 2018 has to be daunting. His counterpart in the Senate doesn’t share his top priorities, and the top priority for McConnell and the White House appears to be the kind of massive government spending bill that Ryan has spent years opposing.
There are the midterm elections, too. The president’s approval rating is stuck in the 30s. Congressional Republicans face a double-digit deficit on the generic ballot test. And tax reform, the biggest accomplishment of this congress, polls poorly.
It’s no wonder that there have been whispers in Washington that Ryan is considering retirement. He strongly disputes these stories. But sources familiar with Ryan’s thinking tell me that he has begun exploring his options.
With a June 1 filing deadline we may find out soon that Ryan’s interest in the private sector is not limited to infrastructure.
Stephen F. Hayes is the editor in chief of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
