Speakers of the House of Representatives don’t ordinarily retire before they’re turned into minority leaders. But on April 11, Paul Ryan announced he would leave his seat at the end of this term. His decision, which had been rumored for months, wasn’t entirely surprising. His children are still young, and the speaker’s job is all-consuming. Ryan had been reluctant to take the job in 2015; he is closer to an intellectual than the sort of transactional powerbroker a speaker needs to be. Even so, it’s hard to believe Ryan’s retirement isn’t part of the wider phenomenon of Republican political retirements. They’re being asked to defend an unpopular Republican president who isn’t really a Republican, and many of them are opting out. Altogether there are 38 House Republicans not seeking reelection this year.
For Republicans, Ryan’s retirement throws the 2018 midterm election effort into further chaos. Not only is it tougher to raise money for a caucus whose future leadership is uncertain, it’s tougher to make the case for Republican ideas when the leader most closely associated with many of those ideas has himself given up the fight.
Ryan’s departure saddens us for a larger reason, though. He is one of a tiny number of congressional Republicans who both understand the grave problems presented by the nation’s long-term spending commitments and have the courage to deal with those problems. Ryan first introduced major entitlement reform—incremental reductions in the federal government’s legal obligation to fund Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare—in 2008. His plan bore the slightly hokey title “Roadmap for America’s Future,” but it was bold and comprehensive and well argued. Almost no one in the House GOP was interested. The party’s presidential nominee in 2008, John McCain, ignored the issue, and Barack Obama’s election suggested the nation had opted for an expansion of the welfare state, not a curtailment of it.
Ryan persisted, and he gained credibility with his Hill colleagues when the Obama program—the 2009 stimulus, the automaker bailouts, the Affordable Care Act—began to produce dramatically larger budget deficits. Throughout the Obama years, Ryan could be counted on to rebut the administration’s specious claims that budget increases were all the fault of the Iraq war or that massive spending increases would somehow pay for themselves.
In 2010, Ryan reintroduced his roadmap, with largely the same result. The National Republican Congressional Caucus actually campaigned against it. The following year, though, he became chairman of the House Budget Committee and proposed a budget that included versions of the reforms to entitlement spending he’d advocated for a decade. It passed the House with the votes of all but four Republicans but failed in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Ryan pressed ahead on other occasions and each time met a fairly honorable defeat. Last year, he said Social Security and Medicare reform topped his agenda, but Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell declared the issue a no-go in the Republican-controlled upper chamber.
Ryan did achieve the long-sought goal of corporate tax reduction in 2017. It was his accomplishment more than anybody else’s, as those who’ve followed the debate on tax reform will testify. A few critics on the right faulted the bill for not achieving “revenue neutrality,” but Ryan, who loves ideas but isn’t an idealist, knew that there was no hope of even denting the deficit as long as the economy limped along at 1 percent growth. He was right, as the economic momentum we’re witnessing this year forcefully testifies.
Asked by our Stephen F. Hayes if the day the tax reform bill became law was his best day in Congress, Ryan replied: “It probably is.” It is a worthy achievement—though not, perhaps, the sort of reform he would have preferred to be his finest hour.
Last week brought not only Ryan’s announcement but also another item of dismaying news. A new report from the Congressional Budget Office projects the federal budget deficit will grow substantially over the next few years, topping $1 trillion by 2020. The national debt, if there are no changes in spending and revenue, could balloon to over $33 trillion by 2028, the report suggests.
In March, Congress passed a $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill. Included in its 2,232 pages is $80 billion more for defense and a $63 billion increase for domestic programs. As a result, the federal budget deficit—not the debt but the difference between revenue and spending—will actually top $1 trillion this year. The bill was the product of the familiar impasse: Republicans insisting on cuts to domestic programs but robust spending on the nation’s defense, Democrats insisting on heightened domestic spending and a sequestered military. In the end, both sides got what they wanted, as they usually do, at the expense of our long-term prosperity.
Nobody knows what sort of consequences such fiscal incontinence will bring—a devaluation of the currency, the implosion of state and local budgets when the feds have nothing left to give—but consequences there must eventually be. Congress is no longer capable of reducing even the rate of increase of the federal budget, never mind actually cutting anything. A trillion-dollar deficit, a debt in the tens of trillions: No budget deal negotiated by Washington politicians was ever going to address bewilderingly colossal numbers like those.
The best hope was to bring some sanity to the areas of federal spending that drive these mind-blowing deficits: the entitlements. And the best man in Congress for getting a majority to acknowledge that dismal reality will leave Washington next January.
