Paul Ryan Taps GOP Power Broker David Hoppe for Top Job

LATimes.com:

Less than a year ago, after Republicans rolled up big majorities in the 2014 congressional elections, their leaders set out to show the nation that conservatives were up to the challenge of governing.

"The logjam in Washington has been broken," House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declared. "We will make it our job to prove the skeptics wrong."

So far, alas, the skeptics have been right. The GOP's big majority in the House became a curse, not a blessing; little of the legislation that Boehner and McConnell sought has passed. Instead, the GOP's zealously conservative Freedom Caucus pushed Boehner out of office and blocked the rise of his chosen successor, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield).

"We are not solving the country's problems; we are only adding to them," Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) acknowledged last week as he announced his decision to seek the speaker's chair.

By all accounts, Ryan is likely to win the job easily. Last week, he won support from all three wings of the House's factionalized Republicans. That will give him a chance to start over.

"We can show the country what a common-sense conservative agenda looks like," he told his colleagues.

Still, Ryan faces the same challenge that brought down Boehner and McCarthy: the Freedom Caucus, which not only spurns bipartisan compromises but has made its first goal to purge the GOP of its moderates.

And, amazingly, some Freedom Caucus members consider Ryan, a thoroughgoing conservative by any traditional definition, to be dangerously moderate too. Never mind that Mitt Romney chose Ryan as his running mate in 2012 because the congressman had championed bills to slash domestic spending and turn Medicare into a voucher plan. Ultras in the Freedom Caucus distrust Ryan because, as chairman of the House's tax-writing committee, he made a bipartisan budget deal to keep the government running in 2013. (Any deal had to be bipartisan because the Democrats had a majority in the Senate that year.)

Others worry because he long supported bipartisan efforts for comprehensive immigration reform, even though he's abandoned that goal in the face of grass-roots opposition.

One even derided Ryan for wanting to preserve time to spend with his young family. "It's like interviewing a maid for a job and she says, 'I don't clean windows,'" Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.), told the Hill.

Remarkably, Ryan met these truculent revolutionaries halfway, even though he was already the choice of most House Republicans. The Freedom Caucus demanded changes in House rules to reduce the speaker's power; Ryan agreed that the GOP conference should consider their ideas. The caucus asked him to promise that he would never allow a floor vote on any measure unless a majority of Republicans supported it (the "Hastert Rule"); Ryan agreed.

If the GOP can't get behind Ryan it'll be just another win for the anti-God Left.

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