Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan joked on Sunday that his first job as the new Speaker of the House of Representatives was to rid the smell of smoke from the office held by his predecessor John Boehner.
Smoking might divide the two allies but Catholicism is a binding tie. Mr Boehner reportedly enlisted the help of Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, a former Archbishop of Milwaukee, to talk a reluctant Ryan into taking the thankless job of Speaker.
"I laid every ounce of Catholic guilt I could on him," Mr Boehner told CNN's Sunday talk show State of the Union.
The decision to become the 54th Speaker of the House, a position second in line to the presidency, was a difficult one for the midwesterner, a member of the House since 1999.
Mr Ryan was the vice-presidential nominee in 2012 on Mitt Romney's ticket and harboured ambitions to run for the White House. That dream appears over given that only one Speaker went on to become President; James Polk in the 1840s.
At 45, Mr Ryan is the youngest Speaker in 140 years. He faces the unenviable task of trying to unite a bitterly divided party and keep 40 hard-right conservatives, now grouped as the “House Freedom Caucus”, in line. That small tail of insurgents has wagged the House Republican dog wildly in recent years, generating plenty of growling and gnashing among its 247 House members.
Chosen successor
The conservatives took the House gavel off Mr Boehner and guaranteed that it was never going to his chosen successor, majority leader and second-ranking House Republican Kevin McCarthy.
This made Mr Ryan, chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, the only viable compromise candidate. In the end, he won all but nine House Republican votes. Mr Ryan's rise to prominence stems from his 2012 budget proposal, The Path to Prosperity: A Blueprint for American Renewal, drafted when he was chairman of the House Budget Committee.
A policy wonk with a love of heavy metal music and Ayn Rand’s objectivism, he proposed radical cuts in spending and taxes, partly privatising social security and scrapping corporate income tax and the estate tax. It was a fiscal conservative’s dream budget and predictably received short shrift from Democrats, but it propelled his political star northwards, presenting him as one of the party’s leading thinkers.
As Speaker, he has been bequeathed a major benefit by Mr Boehner. In one of his final acts, the Ohio Republican pushed through a budget that lifts the debt ceiling until after the next president election, in March 2017. This means Mr Ryan starts his speakership without the risk of another potentially damaging fiscal standoff.
That only 79 Republicans, including Mr Ryan, voted for it shows the scale of the challenge he faces. "Boehner has done a tremendous service to Ryan in clearing a lot of the decks," said John Feehery, former spokesman to Republican Dennis Hastert, who served as Speaker from 1999 to 2007.
‘Buy into an agenda
’ “Ryan’s biggest challenge is trying to find a way to get everybody to buy into an agenda and then vote for that agenda. The other challenge is coming to grips with this right-wing attack machine that spends all of its time attacking Republicans. He has to develop a pretty thick skin.”
Ryan has promised a “bottom-up approach” to managing the disparate Republican conference, saying: “I was not elected dictator of the House.” This will appease the conservative flank who felt Mr Boehner imposed his will on the party.
Although Mr Ryan has embraced his Irish heritage, meeting regularly with Irish Government visitors and Irish-American immigration reform activists, they shouldn't expect any sweeping changes in the short term.
During his round of Sunday talk show appearances, he vowed not to work with President Barack Obama on the issue because he tried to bypass Congress last year with executive actions to grant temporary legal status to millions of illegal immigrants.
“It would be a ridiculous notion to try and work on an issue like this with a president we simply cannot trust on the issue,” he said.
