Paul Ryan is right to run for speaker, and he is doing it the right way. He understands the rules, protocols, and culture of the House, and he has the leadership and communication skills to do the job, if anyone does. Moreover, he is interested—passionate, in fact—about policy, and the effect of policy on real people.
This latter point is tremendously important. To be a successful congressional leader, you have to be either (1) invisible to the American people, or (2) associated in their minds with a meaningful agenda rather than with the Congress itself.
The American people dislike and distrust Congress as an institution, and always will. If the broad electorate knows that you are the speaker of the House, and that’s all they know about you—if your identity is associated only with an institution they despise—they are not going to like you. Even that part of the electorate that identifies with your party is not going to like you. That’s what happened to John Boehner, and Nancy Pelosi before him, and Denny Hastert before that. (Hastert was fine early in his leadership tenure, until a sufficiently large number of voters identified him as the speaker; of course, I’m not referring to his recent legal troubles.)
Since it’s impossible for Ryan to be invisible—he’s too prominent a national figure already—he should continue, should he become speaker, to be visible in pushing for at least those parts of his personal agenda that do not divide his conference.
The model for that is Dick Armey. Dick was a great majority leader in the 1990s, and one of the reasons is that he cared, and kept caring after becoming leader, about policy. He fought, cheerfully and consistently, for his personal agenda—primarily but not exclusively the Flat Tax—all during his years in leadership.
Ryan is right, too, about cutting down significantly on the amount that the speaker travels. Our political leaders generally travel too much. They should spend the large majority of their time in Washington or at home: In Washington, because that is the best place to do their work; at home, because home is real.
Service in Congress tends to alienate the members from their roots, and eventually from themselves. So they need to spend a lot of time with the people who’ve known them the longest and the best—people who will tell them the truth, whether they want to hear it or not, people who can center them and bring them back to who they were before they entered office. That is first and foremost their families, of course, but it includes long-tenured district staff, and friends, from politics and other walks of life, who don’t think of them primarily in terms of their congressional service.
Ryan has a special reason for needing to be home: his children. It’s a good reason. I also had young children when I served in the House. My wife and I always emphasized to our kids that public service was a sacrifice the whole family was making for a broader purpose; we included them in what I was doing. Children can understand that and benefit from it, but it’s important that when they look back at the experience, they know that their Dad (or Mom) was gone because he had to be gone, not because he wanted to be gone—and that means being at home whenever possible.
Finally, the Republican Conference, and all its various factions, needs to begin acting like a team. The infighting has to stop. There is no reason to assign blame for the past. But going forward both leaders and rank-and-file members—and I was both during my years in office—should understand the responsibilities that attach to their status.
The leaders must, after consultation, set an agenda that addresses the needs of the country in a way that reflects the deeply held views of the conference. They must develop sound plans to execute that agenda, and they should structure their operations so that there is two-way communication; the members must understand what is happening and why, and the leadership must be willing to absorb and accept good ideas about how to do it better.
As for the rank and file, they are accountable to their voters, not the leadership, and their votes on policy are entirely their own. There should be plenty of debate, and people should be open to persuasion on the merits, but, at the end of the day, the ultimate decision rests with each individual member. There is no point to congressional service if you are going to substitute the judgment of others for the personal judgment you were elected to exercise.
I served on the whip team during the entirety of my years in Congress. I never once asked, much less pressured, a colleague to vote against his conscience. And I was never pressured by the leadership to vote against my conscience; they knew how I would have reacted if they did.
At the same time, on issues of tactics or process the rank and file should give the benefit of every reasonable doubt to the leadership plan, even if they personally disagree, and even if it means defending the process against anger or second guessing from partisans back home. There will be failures, of course, and if there are too many failures the leaders must, at the proper time, be made to go, but there can be no successes at all if the team cannot act because no one is effectively in charge.
That is why Ryan is also right to ask that the motion to vacate the speakership be removed from the rules. At minimum, his colleagues should commit not to use the motion unless the personal ethics or integrity of the speaker is in question.
The members of the majority party in the House have the discretion to choose anyone they wish as their speaker, but it is not right to assign responsibility to someone without also giving him, or her, the authority and breathing room that is necessary to do the job. Ryan is entitled to the rest of this Congress to vindicate his leadership in the eyes of his colleagues, and he is entitled now to demand their confidence as well as their votes if they decide to elevate him.
The issue of how much, and how long, to support a leader is a difficult one. I leave the last word to Winston Churchill, who wrote this about the days in May of 1940 when he was made prime minister:
“The loyalties which centre upon number one are enormous. If he trips, he must be sustained. If he makes mistakes, they must be covered. If he sleeps, he must not be wantonly disturbed. If he is no good, he must be pole-axed. But this last extreme process cannot be carried out every day, and certainly not in the days just after he has been chosen.”
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