Today in Bloomberg Opinion: What the Freedom Caucus Gets Right About the GOP

The extended process of electing a House speaker last week put Republicans' internal divisions on public display. Democrats and leadership-aligned Republicans had ample opportunity to attack or mock the band of holdouts, many affiliated with the House Freedom Caucus, who prevented Kevin McCarthy from becoming speaker until the 15th round of balloting. But for all their grandstanding, the holdouts have a point about how Republicans fail to deliver on their government-cutting promises—which portends more conflict ahead, as I explain in today's column for Bloomberg Opinion.

The Freedom Caucus Will Remain Powerful in 2019, Thanks to Trump

Because the House of Representatives operates by majority rule (unlike the Senate), the loss of the 2018 elections means that House Republicans will need to become accustomed to an immediate evaporation of their institutional power once the new session of Congress begins on January 3. As the New York Times points out today, most Republican members have never experienced life in the minority, and will need to adjust to an abrupt reduction in their procedural importance. "We have come to grips with the shock of the election," explains Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), "but the shock of [not] governing will still be a wake-up call for some people."

One might expect that the House Freedom Caucus would be especially hard-hit by the shift in party control. Though it represented no more than about 20 percent of Republican House members, the Freedom Caucus was able to exert disproportionate leverage in the past by threatening to vote against initiatives backed by the Republican leadership. When combined with the votes of minority Democrats, opposition from the Freedom Caucus would ordinarily be enough to sink legislation on the House floor, and could even be used to force out a sitting speaker. Starting in January, however, the Freedom Caucus will be a minority of a minority, without the ability to strategically harness Democratic votes to bolster its legislative influence over the Republican conference. Its former leader Jim Jordan lost his race for minority leader to Kevin McCarthy by a lopsided vote of 159 to 43, and then failed to win enough party support to become the ranking minority member on the House Judiciary Committee.

Yet the Freedom Caucus will hardly be irrelevant in 2019, because it retains a powerful ally in the White House. Trump may have campaigned as a heterodox populist, but he has mostly governed as a hard-line conservative, and his intermittently rocky relationship with the Republican congressional leadership has made him sympathetic to party insurgents who share the same set of complaints about the slow pace of conservative legislative accomplishments. Members of the Freedom Caucus have further strengthened these bonds by serving as frequent defenders of his administration on cable television and by targeting Robert Mueller and Rod Rosenstein—an easy way to earn the affection of the president.

The current government shutdown over Trump's border wall demands has Freedom Caucus fingerprints all over it. Jordan and Freedom Caucus chair Mark Meadows have encouraged Trump's instincts toward political confrontation on the issue, in contrast to Republican leadership figures who have signaled their impatience with the shutdown. Like Trump, the Freedom Caucus cares a lot about maintaining the enthusiastic support of activists and media personalities on the right, and little about expanding its appeal beyond the bounds of the Republican Party's conservative base.

One potential eventual solution to what now looks like an extended shutdown is for Congress to override a presidential veto of a resolution reopening the government. But while most congressional Republicans would prefer not to take the heat for Trump's risky shutdown strategy, it's likely that the Freedom Caucus would stay loyal to Trump and gladly pile public attacks onto fellow Republicans who considered defection. Under such circumstances, it's hard to imagine that enough Republicans would join Democrats to achieve the necessary two-thirds majority in the House. The formal institutional power of the Freedom Caucus may be waning with the end of the Republican majority, but its role as an enforcer of purity within the GOP as a whole will remain fully intact as long as the Caucus stands with Trump, and Trump with it.

Goodbye, Polarization—Hello, Polarization and Factionalism

Most people agree that one of the biggest problems—if not the biggest problem—in American politics today is partisan polarization, and most of those people agree that one of the biggest problems with partisan polarization is that it produces lots of gridlock. The increasing ideological divergence between Democrats and Republicans in government, coupled with the parties' more frequent exhibitions of procedural hardball and shouty rancor, can easily appear to explain why Congress is not more legislatively productive, or why presidents' favored policy initiatives often founder before making it into law.

The main problem with this argument is that there was plenty of gridlock, and plenty of unrealized presidential ambition, long before polarization came along. In fact, one of the main arguments of the party reform proponents of the 1950s and 1960s was that the United States was cursed with a system of weak parties that lacked sufficient internal discipline to develop and enact an extensive platform of legislation to effectively address the concerns of the citizenry. Reformers claimed that making the parties more internally unified and more externally differentiated would lead to a more "responsible" party system that would better respond to the growing demands of modern society, enhancing both governmental efficiency and democratic accountability.

Today, we often look back at such arguments and smirk that reformers should be careful what they wish for. But is it really true that polarization itself has prevented the gears of government from turning? During the presidency of Barack Obama, Congress enacted a landmark health care reform initiative, a sizable economic stimulus package, a major financial regulation bill, the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, aid to the American auto industry, the Budget Control Act, and a repeal of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Under Obama's predecessor George W. Bush, major legislative accomplishments included two significant federal tax cuts, the creation of a Medicare prescription drug benefit, a substantial increase in federal aid to public K-12 education, the USA PATRIOT Act, bankruptcy reform legislation, a ban on partial-birth abortion, campaign finance reform, the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate accounting regulation bill, the 2008 financial crisis response creating the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), and authorizations of military force in Afghanistan and Iraq.

For both presidents, polarization offered benefits as well as disadvantages. Increasing partisanship indeed made legislating more difficult when control of the government was divided between the parties. But enhanced levels of party unity also helped leaders move bills through Congress during times of unified Democratic or Republican rule; 2001 and 2003–2006 (for Bush) and 2009–2010 (for Obama) were largely productive periods for president and Congress alike.

Based on the events of the past few weeks, Donald Trump is unlikely to enjoy the same degree of success as his predecessors. But Trump's problems so far have derived less from the existence of continued warfare between the congressional parties—though such warfare indeed remains—so much as from a serious, and perhaps fatal, divide within the Republican majority itself. The purist House Freedom Caucus recently led internal opposition to the leadership- and Trump-backed American Health Care Act that quickly forced the bill to be pulled from the floor of the House, and this intra-partisan conflict appears likely to extend to tax reform, appropriations, and other items on the Republican legislative agenda this year.

This unique combination of polarization and factionalism is particularly treacherous for the Republican leadership. Attempts to satisfy the policy demands of the Freedom Caucus not only tend to cost the GOP votes from its own center-right flank but also rule out winning over any Democrats, which is ordinarily necessary to pass legislation through the Senate.

On the other hand, conceding opposition from the Freedom Caucus and instead replacing their votes with support from the Democratic side of the aisle presents its own set of difficulties. The pro-Republican shift of the South and rural Midwest has reduced the ranks of Democratic moderates over the past seven years, especially in the House. Without the ability to easily pick off two dozen or so Blue Dog centrists, as Republican leaders were often able to do during the George W. Bush presidency, the GOP is more commonly forced to negotiate with the Democratic leadership—which in turn forces them to make concessions that are unpopular with their own party's members.

This is the trap that ultimately snared John Boehner: the Freedom Caucus and other purist conservatives denied him support on the House floor, which forced him to cut deals with Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats, which then opened him up to criticism (from the Freedom Caucus, conveniently enough) that he had sold out his party and his ideological principles. But the consequences are more significant now that Republicans control both Congress and the presidency. Republican factionalism complicates leaders' attempts to enact even routine, must-pass legislation such as appropriations bills and federal debt ceiling increases, and might well prove thoroughly sufficient to obstruct more ambitious initiatives.

Why did this new internal divide arise in the congressional GOP? A complete answer is beyond the bounds of this post, but the most likely causes involve the rising influence of conservative media outlets over Republican politicians, the increasing ability of congressional members to raise money without help from party leadership, the declining importance of the congressional committee system (which reduces the ability of leaders to discipline their members), and the movement-wide eruption on the American right that followed the election of Barack Obama in 2008.

Obama is gone, of course, but a factionalized congressional Republican Party remains. And the Trump presidency will find it difficult to heal these divisions. Trump has started to recognize the problem that the Freedom Caucus and other conservative holdouts cause him, but he doesn't seem to know what to do to solve it (issuing threats via Twitter is probably not the most effective response). He also exhibits limited interest in policy, lacks the benefit of government experience or knowledge of congressional politics (as do several of his top advisors), and has dropped to a public approval rating of about 40 percent after less than three months on the job. The conditions are not auspicious for the leader of the Republican Party to promote unity within its ranks—or to successfully pressure members of the opposition party into endorsing elements of his agenda. The biggest threat to Trump's legislative ambitions at the moment is not that partisanship is too strong but that it's not strong enough.

Rand Paul Is Busy Blowing Up ACA Repeal. Is the White House Even Trying to Stop Him?

The election of Donald Trump may have been a game-changer in presidential politics, but on Capitol Hill things really don't look all that different. As the immediate euphoria inspired by the prospect of unified party government has started to wear off, congressional Republicans have gamely returned their attention to a problem that has vexed them for decades and especially for the past seven years: what do they do about health care? Existing confusion is mixed with new urgency, with the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act representing the party's first legislative priority and, according to its own strategic plan, a necessary step before Congress considers tax reform later in the year.

Republican plans to propose a detailed replacement for the ACA have always faced two major problems. The first is that it doesn't appear possible to develop an alternative policy framework that doesn't result in higher government costs, higher consumer costs, a reduction in the quality and quantity of care provided, or a combination thereof. As a party committed, at least in principle, to shrinking the size and scope of the federal government, Republicans understandably don't want to raise public expenditures above where they already are—but the alternative reform options would produce higher premiums and deductibles, less generous subsidies, and/or fewer Americans covered by insurance. None of these potential outcomes will strike the average politician as being particularly popular with the electorate.

The other problem is the existence of serious internal divisions within the congressional GOP. The 2016 election and its aftermath have temporarily eclipsed these conflicts from public view. But a sitting Republican speaker of the House was forced out of office less than 18 months ago by a rump faction of his own party, and there is no reason to believe that the dynamic that led to that extraordinary event has faded away completely.

Indeed, as Congress prepares to debate ACA repeal, we are seeing an all-too-familiar pattern emerging once again. The policy positions of the Republican congressional leadership are simultaneously under attack from two directions: from Democrats, who criticize them as unacceptably conservative, and from the Tea Party right, which characterizes them as not conservative enough. The House Freedom Caucus and like-minded Republicans in the Senate, supported by several key conservative interest groups, are now pushing for a reform bill that is far more "repeal" than "replace," and are threatening to join the Democrats in voting down any health care legislation that fails to meet their ideological demands.

These two problems merged on Thursday into a single bizarre scene in the Capitol building. Annoyed at leaks of previous legislative drafts that produced damaging headlines, Republican House leaders have decided to keep their latest health care reform proposal a secret from everyone except Republican members of the Energy and Commerce Committee. Rumors that the secret plan was being guarded in a basement room in the Capitol prompted congressional critics to engage in a mock-treasure hunt to determine its location and contents. While some Democrats tried to get in on the fun, the chief detective on the case was Republican senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who even played to the cameras by bringing along a photocopier in order to make a duplicate copy of any legislation he encountered. (The bill's whereabouts, if a draft indeed exists on paper, were not ascertained.)

Paul, a Tea Party ally, has already vowed to oppose any legislation that leaves large sections of the ACA in place, and such a rebellion would need to attract only two other Republicans—such as fellow right-wing purists Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah—to deny Republican leaders a majority vote for reform in the Senate.  As Paul has not only failed to endorse the leadership's repeal efforts but is now openly mocking them to Capitol Hill reporters, prospects for imminent passage of an ACA replacement seem rather remote at this point.

Paul knows full well that his behavior is making the passage of ACA repeal less likely; similar maneuvers by Tea Party types have doomed leadership-backed legislation repeatedly over the past 6 years. But now the White House is in Republican hands as well. For the first time in years, intra-party squabbling and acts of purer-than-thou symbolic position-taking can actually endanger the legislative program of a Republican president.

From what we can tell, there is apparently very little communication between Congress and the White House over policy, so that congressional Republicans have resorted to parsing the president's rhetoric in public speeches in order to divine his views on health care reform. But here is a Republican senator engaged in what looks like a public act of sabotage against one of Trump's biggest stated legislative goals—which immediately raises some curious questions. What, if anything, are the president and his advisors doing, or planning to do, about this ostentatious display of partisan independence? Will they devote any attention and energy to trying to whip Paul, or any other disaffected Republican, into line on ACA repeal? Or do they not actually care enough about the issue to bother?

Why Paul Ryan's In More Trouble Than Mitch McConnell

The events of the past two weeks have taken a lot of the suspense out of the outcome of the presidential race, unless you're the kind of person who is fascinated by the question of whether normally "red" states like Arizona and Georgia will actually flip into the Democratic column this year. (Full disclosure: I am that kind of person.) Comebacks are possible in politics, but the Trump campaign seems particularly ill-equipped to make one—especially with damaging revelations and counterproductive strategies emerging on what now seems like an hourly basis.

A decisive Republican loss in the presidential contest would probably be accompanied by a switch in party control of the Senate. All but one of the competitive Senate races this year are for seats now held by Republican incumbents, and a net change of four seats would be sufficient to produce a Democratic majority in the event of a Hillary Clinton victory (since the vice president would break a 50-50 tie). Most Republican Senate candidates are likely to outrun Donald Trump in their home states, but GOP nominees in electoral battlegrounds like Pennsylvania and New Hampshire will find it difficult to attract enough crossover support from Clinton voters to prevail over a national Democratic wave, should it appear. If Trump demoralizes enough of his own party's supporters that Republican turnout falls across the nation, Democrats could wind up winning a near-sweep of the key Senate races.

Compared to the Senate, Republican prospects in the House look considerably brighter. It's difficult to know exactly how vulnerable the Republican House majority is in the wake of Trump's latest problems; we suffer from a lack of good survey data on congressional races (media polling budgets are getting tighter, and the presidential race has consumed virtually all of the attention this year). But Republicans have the twin advantages of a structural edge in the configuration of House districts and a superior crop of candidates compared to Democrats, who failed to recruit a large number of high-quality challengers. A pro-Democratic electoral tide would need to be quite massive indeed to flip the 30 seats necessary to shift party control of the House.

And yet Paul Ryan is in a much tougher position, politically speaking, than Mitch McConnell.

Even if the House GOP ultimately retains its majority, the party's likely margin of control narrows by the day with each new Trump mishap. Ryan is already operating with little room for error, as he is situated between the hard-line House Freedom Caucus on one side and the opposition Democrats on the other. A Democratic victory in the presidential race would mean that Ryan would, like his predecessor John Boehner, need to cut bipartisan deals in order to fund the government—which would inevitably leave him open, as Boehner was, to criticism from party purists that he did not sufficiently defend conservative principles. The fact that the new Democratic president would be a figure uniquely loathed on the popular right—especially after a presidential campaign in which the Republican opposition characterized her as a literal criminal—further threatens Ryan's ability to hold off such attacks.

Boehner's departure from the speakership last year was prompted by the unique constitutional requirement that the Speaker be elected by a majority vote of the full House, which gives any dissident faction of the majority party tremendous procedural leverage. Even if Ryan were able to win an initial vote for Speaker this coming January, he would serve under a constant threat of defenestration from an purist right motivated by fierce antipathy to Hillary Clinton and to any Republican who faces her with less than total opposition.

By comparison, McConnell has it easy. To be sure, he is more likely than Ryan to lose his governing majority in this election. But if the worst happens, he will slip smoothly back into his role as minority leader, leading filibusters against Democratic legislation and waiting for the 2018 midterms, which will provide Senate Republicans with a very favorable set of vulnerable Democratic seats.

Ryan was famously reluctant to seek the speakership upon Boehner's resignation. When he was finally prevailed upon to do so, he probably assumed that there was a fairly good chance of a Republican presidential victory in 2016—which would both hand him an opportunity to implement his national policy agenda and relieve him of responsibility for leading the opposition to a Democratic administration.

Today, those hopes have faded away entirely. Ryan as much as conceded the presidential race in a conference call with House Republicans earlier this week, telling them to do whatever they needed to do in order to save their own seats. Even that admission earned him some blowback from conservative purists within his own caucus—a preview of what may turn out to be an even uglier conflict within the Republican Party if Trump goes down to defeat. If Ryan is handed a narrow majority on November 8 along with four guaranteed years of a Democratic president, he will need to draw upon all his political acumen in order to prevent suffering the same fate as John Boehner.

Why Ryan Should Run

In the daydreams of most Washington Republicans and nearly the entire political press corps, Donald Trump is stopped short of a majority on the first roll call vote at the Republican convention in Cleveland this summer. After a few deadlocked ballots on which neither Trump nor Ted Cruz can manage to win enough delegates to capture the nomination, the lights dim, thick smoke and loud music fill the air, and the arena doors open to reveal...Paul Ryan, riding in on a white steed to save the Republicans once again!

While this seems like wishful thinking more than a serious prediction, there is some logic at work. Trump will find it difficult to win over Republican delegates who are not already supporters of his campaign. Cruz also lacks broad appeal within the party and seems unlikely to be a strong general election candidate. And Ryan has already played the role of "The Only Man Who Can Unite the Party" once before: last fall in the House speakership race, when he was prevailed upon to succeed John Boehner after Kevin McCarthy's ascension from majority leader was blocked by the House Freedom Caucus.

Tonight, Politico tries to spoil everyone's fun by publishing "Why Ryan Won't Run," an article full of on-background denials from Ryan aides that their man has any interest in being the savior of his party at the national convention. The piece is full of arguments that are convincing enough—taking the nomination under such circumstances would divide more than unify a party in which the vast majority of voters supported either Trump or Cruz; assembling a national presidential campaign from a standing start in July would put him at a disadvantage against the Democratic opposition; running and losing this year would probably foreclose any future ambitions.

And yet: in the unlikely scenario that Ryan is presented with an opportunity to maneuver his way to the nomination, it seems to me that he should grab it without delay.

The main reason I draw this conclusion is that it sure looks like the speakership will eventually swallow him up just like it did John Boehner. Ryan has been speaker for less than six months, and he's already facing a serious rebellion over the budget from Boehner's old nemeses in the Freedom Caucus (a development that would be a much bigger story if the political world weren't fully distracted by the presidential race; in truth, the dumping of Boehner was itself a remarkable event that never really got the attention it deserved either). Republican regulars, perhaps including Ryan himself, may have assumed that their party's internal divisions would be abated after the installation of a new, more conservative speaker without Boehner's history of slighting the Freedom Caucusers. Instead, it looks as if the problem is structural, not personal—and now the problem is Ryan's.

The best-case scenario for a successful Ryan speakership requires a Republican victory in the 2016 presidential race. The new president would take responsibility for shaping the party's legislative agenda, and hard-right dissatisfaction and troublemaking would likely decline—or at least find a new target.

But if the Republicans are defeated in the presidential election—a nearly-certain scenario if Trump or Cruz wins the nomination—Ryan's job as speaker will only get harder. Republicans are likely to lose seats in the House this fall, reducing the party's margin of control, but these losses will not be suffered by the Freedom Caucus, whose members occupy safe deep-red districts. A newly-elected President (Hillary) Clinton will stimulate a gushing stream of conservative outrage that will inevitably splash onto the Republican leadership in Washington, as it did in the Obama years. Like Boehner before him, Ryan will be caught between making the compromises needed to govern and satisfying the incessant demands of his own partisan-ideological base. And if the election is a true landslide, the House Republican majority itself will be in jeopardy (though this remains a remote possibility at present).

Several of Politico's sources in the Ryan orbit appear convinced of the idea that four years of this madness would somehow leave Ryan in a good position to seek the presidency. That seems unlikely, if not outright delusional. In truth, Ryan will be lucky to still remain speaker at the end of the next president's term, and any further ambitions will probably be closed off completely. If Ryan really envisions himself in the White House, he shouldn't have accepted the speakership in the first place—but if he still wants the job, the time to run is now.

The "Vote No, Hope Yes" Caucus Gets a Scolding from House Leadership

In a development that should shock no one, new House speaker Paul Ryan has inherited exactly the same dilemma that bedeviled now-former speaker John Boehner: how to keep the government running without Republican hard-liners poking him with pitchforks. Congress must appropriate money in order for the government to function, but Republican members of Congress don't like to vote for appropriations bills because they're full of things that a potential primary challenger can attack them for supporting—especially since any legislation must be acceptable to Barack Obama in order to be signed into law. This dynamic repeatedly forced Boehner to bring up spending bills at the last minute, often under threats of imminent shutdown or default, and pass them with most Democrats voting yes and most Republicans voting no—a violation of the "Hastert Rule" norm restricting floor access to measures with a support of a majority of the ruling party.

The result is a textbook case of a collective action problem. Most Republicans agree that a government shutdown is a bad idea that will hurt their party. Individually, however, they believe that opposing the bill is good politics for themselves. Thus the rise of the "vote no, hope yes" caucus—or, in the words of Homer Simpson, the "Can't Someone Else Do It?" coalition—of Republicans who want these bills to pass even as they personally refuse their support. Of course, this is free-riding to a degree; if no Republicans voted in favor, the bills would fail, so the vote-no-hope-yes group is receiving the benefit of averting a shutdown while letting any political cost fall on their yea-voting colleagues. This behavior prompted a scolding from House Republican whip Steve Scalise, who recently circulated a memo to House Republicans complaining that “Too many in our conference are falling into the pattern of voting no on tough bills while actually hoping the bill passes because they know that the outcome will be even worse if the bill fails.”

Ryan ascended to the speakership while pledging a return to regular order and by assuring the House Freedom Caucus that he would not cut them out of policy-making. He's arguing now that these promises shouldn't apply to the current spending bill, which executes the overall budget plan negotiated by Boehner on his way out the door. On the other hand, the arch-conservatives aren't making things easier for him either, as they are proposing and supporting a number of policy riders that would cause Democratic support to disappear if they were actually included in the law—even though many of them will vote against the overall bill whether or not the riders are included. Ryan clearly enjoys much more good will among the hard-liners that Boehner had by the end of his speakership, and it's likely that he will resolve these matters before the government is scheduled to shut down. Clearly, however, the basic dynamics that caused Boehner such grief have not been fundamentally affected by his departure.

Another Speaker Promises "Regular Order"? This Time For Sure!

Quote #1: "We need to let every member contribute, not once they earn their stripes, but now. The committees should take the lead in drafting all major legislation: If you know the issue, you should write the bill. Let's open up the process. In other words, we need to return to regular order."

Quote #2: "We need to stop writing bills in the speaker’s office and let members of Congress be legislators again. Too often in the House right now we don’t have legislators; we just have voters. . . . That’s not right. We were each elected to uphold the Constitution and represent 600,000-odd people in our districts. We need to open this place up, let some air in. We have nothing to fear from letting the House work its will–nothing to fear from the battle of ideas. That starts with the committees. The result will be more scrutiny and better legislation."


Quote #1 is from Paul Ryan, October 29, 2015, upon being elected to the speakership. Quote #2 is from John Boehner, October 25, 2010, just before winning a Republican majority in the House that would make him Ryan's predecessor as speaker.

During his ascent to the speakership of the House, Ryan has been making assurances that he will be a different kind of speaker than Boehner. Since most House Republicans seemed to like Boehner's governing style just fine, this is perhaps a surprising pledge to make. But it is largely aimed at satisfying the demands of the House Freedom Caucus, the hard-line conservative faction that chased Boehner from office and that was initially cool to a Ryan speakership until he won them over in a personal meeting.

One of the chief complaints made by Boehner's critics was that he often circumvented "regular order"—the textbook system of lawmaking in which bills written and debated in committee are reported to the floor by majority vote for consideration by the entire House. Ryan reiterated at his first press conference as speaker that he would return to this traditional process, rather than the increasingly frequent alternative scenario in which legislation written by the leadership is sent to the floor directly, often under a short deadline in an atmosphere of crisis. “Every mem­ber will have a chance to re­view each bill and give their in­put on their pri­or­it­ies. We have nev­er done this be­fore, but that is how we should work and from now on, that is how we will work,” Ryan told the press. In fact, he said that he would be willing to risk the failure of his own favored legislation on the floor rather than use his procedural power to strong-arm his fellow members.

It is worth remembering that Boehner, too, promised to observe "regular order" when he became speaker in 2011. He was unable to deliver on this promise because Republican-controlled committees often failed to agree on legislation, especially appropriations legislation—usually because a faction of purist conservatives refused to support spending bills developed by mainstream Republican committee and subcommittee chairs. With the Democratic minority also voting no, these bills would thus lack the majority support in committee necessary to move them to the floor. Since any final agreement on government funding ultimately required support from Senate Democrats and the Obama White House, Boehner usually chose to hammer out a bipartisan compromise first, then bring it back to the House for approval—where it usually passed on the floor with mostly Democratic votes.

Ryan surely understands that Boehner adopted this approach not because he yearned to rule the House with an iron fist, but because it was the only practical way to fund the government and avoid shutdowns or other crises given the current state of the House Republican Party. So why is he making a promise that seems so unlikely to be fulfilled? Maybe Ryan believes that he possesses unique powers of persuasion that will engender agreement and compromise among Republicans, allowing for a much smoother operation of the committee system. Or, alternatively, he adopted this pledge in order to gain the speakership, and will hold to it until its failure is so immediately apparent to all concerned that most of his fellow Republicans will openly plead with him to do things Boehner's way—in which case he will "reluctantly" agree that, though he's very sorry it came to this, he has no choice but to dispose of regular order once again, leaving the next speaker with the opportunity to make the very same promise that he and Boehner did.

So What Did Paul Ryan Give the House Freedom Caucus?

When Paul Ryan enumerated his conditions for pursuing the speakership in front of the assembled House Republican Conference on Tuesday night, one in particular seemed certain to provoke objections from the hard-line conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus: a requirement that the House amend its rules allowing the speakership to be vacated via a simple majority floor vote, in order to make it more difficult for a coalition of minority party members and dissatisfied members of the majority to remove a speaker mid-session. Since several conservative purists had been threatening to employ this provision to depose John Boehner in the weeks before Boehner announced his resignation, Ryan's demand seemed unlikely to win acceptance among the membership of the House Freedom Caucus, even as Ryan simultaneously claimed that he would only stand for speaker if he received the endorsement of the HFC as well as the rest of the major Republican party caucuses. Indeed, the immediate response to Ryan's conditions among members of the HFC was skeptical at best, and for good reason—they were effectively being asked to give up procedural power with no guarantee of receiving anything in return.

Yet after Ryan met personally with the HFC last evening on Capitol Hill, the purists' attitude had changed considerably. Ryan emerged from the meeting with the support of more than two-thirds of the HFC members—not enough to receive the group's official endorsement, but more than enough to ensure that he would face an easy path to the speakership without any active opposition within the party. What did Ryan tell the HFCers that won them over?

This Politico article and this Newsweek piece shed light on the matter. Among the promises made to the HFC were the following:

1. Ryan would not advance immigration reform legislation for the remainder of the 2015–2016 session of Congress.

2. He would respect the "Hastert Rule" norm, under which legislation is brought to the floor only if it receives support from a majority of the majority party.

3. He would work to return to "regular order," in which legislation follows the textbook process of emerging from the committee system (rather than being introduced directly to the floor by the leadership), with open rules allowing further amendments on the floor.

4. He would pursue various changes to the internal rules of the Republican conference that would weaken the power of the speaker to control the process of assigning members to committees.

The first promise is fairly trivial—this already did not look like a Congress that was about to take action on immigration—but easy to fulfill. But what about the others?

As Ryan surely knows, the violations of the Hastert Rule and regular order that have occurred under the Boehner speakership have been necessary in order for the House to pass essential legislation such as funding the government and raising the debt ceiling. Boehner, too, pledged to return to regular order, but was ultimately stymied by the problem that appropriations bills written by mainstream Republicans would often become stuck in committee, opposed by a both-ends-against-the-middle coalition of Democrats who preferred a more liberal policy and purist Republicans who favored even deeper spending cuts. Since final legislation could only be enacted with the acquiescence of Senate Democrats and President Obama, Boehner opted to negotiate agreements with the Senate and White House first, bringing them back to the House for consideration thereafter (and often passing them on the floor with more Democratic than Republican support).

The Freedom Caucus members not only want to further empower a committee system in which they can often exercise an effective veto over legislation (despite their minority status within the Republican Party at large), but are also pushing for even more representation on powerful committees—as well as protection from internal GOP reprisal for voting however they wish. Ryan clearly convinced many of them of his sincerity in sharing these goals. But it is difficult to see how he could be an effective speaker by giving in to their requests, and his assurances Tuesday night fell short of formal commitments to enact any specific reform or rules change. Can he achieve his stated demand to amend the motion-to-vacate rule without being forced to trade away formal powers elsewhere?

Above all, what Ryan seems to have given the House Freedom Caucus is something else that its members have seemed desperate to acquire: personal respect. It is clear from both of the above articles that Ryan spoke sympathetically to the HFC, signaled that he took their ideas seriously, even flattered them a bit. After several years under Boehner in which the hard-liners felt as if they suffered constant contempt and isolation, this approach seems to have gone a long way toward inspiring enthusiasm for a Ryan speakership among initially skeptical purists. But it's unclear how long such friendly gestures can allow Ryan to maintain HFC support while simultaneously managing the institution of the House—a task that proved impossible under his otherwise able predecessor in the speaker's chair.

UPDATE: Ryan is now backing down from his demand that a change in the motion-to-vacate procedure be enacted immediately by the House, suggesting that he wants to institute it down the road in exchange for internal Republican Party reforms sought by the HFC. Unless he can keep laying on the charm, the probability that he will eventually wind up facing the same procedural threats as Boehner just jumped up a few notches.

Paul Ryan Still Doesn't Really Want to Be Speaker

Paul Ryan is no dummy. After watching John Boehner bail out of the speakership in the middle of a congressional session and second-in-command Kevin McCarthy abruptly fail in his bid to succeed him—in both cases, due primarily to opposition from the bloc of conservative purists known as the House Freedom Caucus—Ryan's immediate instinctive response to suggestions that he run for speaker himself was a rousing "no thanks." Ryan appeared to understand all too well that Boehner's successor, no matter how initially well-liked and unimpeachably conservative in reputation, would soon become the target of unrelenting criticism from within the Republican Party for carrying out the routine tasks (negotiating budget agreements with Obama, preventing default on the national debt) required to keep the government functioning without crisis. His refusal to abandon his post atop the House Ways and Means Committee—along with, in all likelihood, any future ambition to seek the presidency—in order to subject himself to such treatment was not only understandable, but revealed a respectable degree of political sense. 

Over the past two weeks, Ryan has been deluged with pleas from fellow Republicans, both within and outside the House (and including Boehner himself), to reconsider his position. Yesterday, he softened a bit, telling the House Republican Conference that he would accept the speakership if four conditions were met:

1. He would play the role of a "visionary" on behalf of a party that advanced its own positive policy agenda. (Presumably, this means that he would be a big-picture speaker who left the care-and-feeding-of-members responsibilities to the rest of the Republican leadership team.)

2. The House would change its rules, in part to make it more difficult for a majority of members to unseat a speaker in the middle of a term.

3. He would be guaranteed a clear path to the speakership without organized opposition from within the Republican conference.

4. He would concentrate on strategy and media visibility while shouldering less of the fundraising duties traditionally borne by the speaker, in order to spend more time with his young children.

By normal political standards, these are fairly stringent demands to make in order to accept a powerful and prestigious office. Of course, these are not ordinary times. Nearly the entire Washington community, including most Republicans, now views Ryan as the indispensable man—the only person able to steer the House GOP, and with it the entire Congress, away from an imminent governing disaster. According to this now-prevalent perspective, Ryan's demands are barely demands at all; they are sensible, even necessary, and—in the case of his stated desire to tend the home fires with his family instead of jetting around the country every weekend to attend fat-cat fundraisers—heartwarmingly admirable.

But let's be clear: Ryan is proposing an old-fashioned political deal from a position of perceived strength—and, as in many negotiations, his strength is a function of his willingness to walk away from the table. In exchange for the above numbered concessions, which both increase the power and ease the burdens of the speakership, he is offering his party the following: himself. Most Republicans, increasingly desperate, will gladly agree to such a trade. Yet it is less immediately apparent why Republicans who don't necessarily view Ryan as the lone savior of the GOP—presumably including most of the Freedom Caucus—would commit to this arrangement (which would deprive the purist faction of its primary procedural leverage) rather than explore alternative speaker candidates. After all, the usual pattern is for the purists to force the party to creep up to the edge of chaos (and even fall over the edge, as in the 2013 shutdown) in order to convince Tea Party activists and other supporters of their commitment to conservative principles.

Ryan is probably assuming that his conditions will not be met. Many Republicans have been telling him that he had a responsibility to save his party; if his terms are not accepted, he will be able to say that he tried but was blocked by the unreasonable Freedom Caucus (whose members seem quite aware that they are being set up to take the blame if Ryan backs out). Ryan is not averse to portraying himself in heroic terms. He told reporters last night that "My biggest worry is the consequence of not stepping up, of having my own kids ask me, 'When the stakes were so high, why didn't you do all that you could do? Why didn't you stand and fight for my future when you had a chance to do so?'" However, the fact that Ryan is only willing to take on such a supposedly crucial fight after winning substantial personal accommodations strongly suggests that he'd still much rather let somebody else lead the charge.