After a race that saw nearly two dozen House representatives express interest in replacing John Boehner as 54th Speaker of the House after his surprise departure, Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan was elected, who came in with big hopes for his continually fracturing party and for the institution that he called “broken.”
Despite making it clear in weeks leading up to the election that he didn’t intend nor want to run for Speaker, and Boehner’s support of California Republican Kevin McCarthy, Ryan picked up an overwhelming amount of support in an October 28th caucus, confirming him as the newest leader of House Republicans.
Inside Texas Tech’s Abigail Arroyos talked to Texas Tech University Department of Political Science’s Tim Nokken, an associate professor of political science at Texas Tech and congressional expert about Ryan’s surprise bid for the speakership.
There seemed to be a lot of coverage of candidates and interested representatives besides Paul Ryan, including House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Ryan didn’t even seem to get a lot of coverage for much of the race, even going so far as to say he wasn’t interested. So how did Ryan actually become Speaker of the House?
First of all, the retirement of a sitting speaker is not a very common event, so when Boehner announced he was leaving, that left a void on who would be speaker. So what it also then highlighted is that normally there’s kind of a normal pecking order for replacing party leaders – so the speaker would usually be replaced by the majority leader, and the first kind of serious candidate that Boehner was pushing was the majority leader. But what we also saw was with stress with the Republican coalition, with the House Freedom Caucus. [What] people talked a lot about [was] the far-right wing of the Republican Party, [who] was not at all happy with that. So what happened is a lot of names kept getting floated as potential speaker, and Ryan initially didn’t want it, it’s kind of understandable, given it’s a hard job, and he had chairmanship of the most powerful committee in the House – Ways and Means – but over the course of a couple weeks, I think, felt the pressure from a number of people in his party, and also used that pressure to kind of extract some promises, or at least some assurances from the Freedom Caucus and similar folks that they help kind of ease his transition into the office a bit.
Is it possible that the same forces and circumstances that led to John Boehner’s sudden departure were the same that led to Ryan’s election as speaker?
What could’ve happened is that McCarthy could’ve achieved the speakership – he would’ve had enough votes, in all likelihood, to get a majority of votes on the floor, which is the formal requirement for electing a speaker. But what he foresaw, and what I think a lot of other Republicans were hesitant about going that route, was that he would receive a lot of opposition from members of his own party. So I think over the course of a couple weeks, Ryan worked hard to kind of quell some of the concerns of the far right, and he’s a fairly conservative member as well. I think arguably, notably more conservative than John Boehner. So in that regard, I think the newer, right-wing forces kind of saw him as someone who was a fellow traveler in a lot of regards, where they didn’t view Boehner in that same vein.
Ryan did have a lot of GOP support in the days leading up to his election. Do you see Ryan’s speakership unifying a Republican party that has seen a lot of splintering in the last couple of years?
I think the task of the speaker, and I think it’s always the task of the party leader to figure out who’s on board with certain proposals, and who’s not. None of parties are monolithic actors, there are factions, there are wings, there are coalitions, and they kind of ebb and flow depending on what the issues are. So I think the trick for [Ryan] is going to be figuring out how they can have a positive legislative agenda of actually doing stuff, exhibiting evidence that the party can govern and create policy, but doing so without alienating certain wings or energizing that Freedom Caucus-Tea Party wing. So balancing the need to do things, with his ability to figure out when to move and when not to move, is going to be, kind of, the trick to determine how cohesive[ly] the Republicans will be moving forward.
