Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) was sworn in as the Speaker of the House on October 29 to replace outgoing Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), ending one of the stranger episodes of Washington politics after a drawn-out, month-long fiasco.
In his acceptance speech, Ryan admits: “The House is broken.”
This, of course, is not news to anyone.
But Paul Ryan’s inability to make things better shouldn’t be either. And to understand that, we have to first understand how and why John Boehner resigned to begin with.
Boehner’s resignation is extremely abnormal. For starters, this is the first time since 1910 that a House Speaker is being forced out by members of his own party. And speaking of his own party — Boehner is being forced out by the conservative wing of the GOP, which is strange because before Boehner assumed the Speakership (and the first cohort of Tea Partiers were sworn in) in 2010, he was the eighth most conservative member in the House among a total of around 200 Republican congressmen.
So. how could Boehner be pushed out by the conservative wing of the GOP when he was the conservative wing of the GOP?
Indeed, as pundits become engrossed in the daily round of headline-generating soundbites, the underlying trend that is often missed — and which belies Boehner’s downfall — is that over the years, ever since Reagan and especially in the past decade, the Republican Party has shifted dramatically and rapidly rightward, even by their own admissions. Boehner’s resignation is perhaps the clearest indication of this shift — that he, once one of the most conservative people in all of Congress has now been scorned for being too moderate. But Boehner didn’t suddenly become any more moderate than he was before — he’s still the same man. What changed was the party that surrounds him.
Boehner’s role as Speaker of the House is to regulate floor debate, restricting which proposals come up for a vote and which ones do not. In this capacity, he was able to curtail some of the most outlandish proposals of his Republican colleagues and ensure that the party does not throw its weight behind something that could be potentially damaging. For example, the thankfully-averted Planned Parenthood fight could have been a disaster for the Republicans if Boehner had encouraged it rather than dismissed it as he did. After all, Planned Parenthood is, according to an NBC/WSJ poll from August, more favorable among Americans than the Supreme Court, President Obama, and every 2016 presidential candidate.
But to our contemporary and, as previously noted, certifiably extremist incarnation of the GOP — and the Freedom Caucus in particular — this seemed to be a slight. The Republican congressmen want their agenda passed — and they are angry: Why isn’t Republican-favored legislation getting passed left and right? Isn’t the GOP supposed to be controlling Congress?
And the logical conclusion, best articulated by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), is that the current Republican leadership doesn’t really want to get those bills passed, because they don’t really favor them, because they aren’t conservative enough.
And so Boehner had to go.
In actuality, Boehner has been a highly effective Speaker in terms of advancing his own party’s interests and fighting the Democrats at every turn — as any left-winger who hates him can attest. It is true that he wasn’t able to implement the entirety of the GOP platform, but that’s because nobody can. During the last two years of George W. Bush’s term, both Houses were controlled by the Democrats. Did they get everything they wanted? Not even close. Heck, during the first two years of Obama’s term, the Democrats had both houses of Congress and the Presidency, and still didn’t get anywhere close to everything they wanted — the checks and balances built into our government virtually guarantee that neither party could ever do so, and sacrificing Boehner as a scapegoat won’t do anything to change that.
And as long as the GOP continues to push their increasingly right-wing and increasingly hard-line agenda that leaves no room for compromise, they will necessarily keep running into the same brick wall of Democratic opposition they’ve been battling since they first took the House back in 2010. And Paul Ryan — regardless of what cosmetic changes he may offer — isn’t going to be able to accomplish the impossible; sadly, however, that is something that the current GOP — and the Freedom Caucus in particular — has become too blinded by extremism to see.
Contact Terence Zhao at zhaoy ‘at’ stanford.edu.