For House Republicans, a crucial week

Speaker John Boehner hopes to exit Congress by week’s end, but several key outstanding issues for Republicans are standing in his way. (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

As John Boehner’s tumultuous years as House speaker come to a close this week — or so he devoutly hopes — his final fights may determine the fate of his presumed successor, Paul Ryan, who already is bracing for ideological attacks from the hardline members whose support for him is tentative at best.

The full House Republican conference was scheduled to meet Monday night to discuss a looming debt limit deadline and a potential two-year resolution to the fiscal questions that dogged most of Boehner’s tenure. They could meet again Tuesday morning to discuss those same issues.

A full House vote on who will succeed Boehner is scheduled for Thursday, the day after Republicans decide behind closed doors whom they will line up behind. And if all goes according to plan — and that’s still a significant “if” — Boehner will leave Congress on Friday and be replaced as speaker by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who has never held an official role on the House GOP leadership team.

When Boehner leaves the Capitol for the final time, it will mark an end to a complicated, fraught chapter for House Republicans — a chapter that began in 2010 when they regained the majority and was marked by stalemates, deadline crises and a 16-day government shutdown in 2013, and is ending with the largest GOP majority since Harry Truman was in the White House. The climax came this month with Boehner’s surprise resignation and an even more stunning move from his second in command, Kevin McCarthy, who bowed out of the running to be speaker even before his party’s conference got to vote on him. The next chapter is still full of blank spaces and question marks about whether the badly fractured House Republican conference will learn from its recent history.

Boehner had discussed wanting to “clean the barn” for his successor, even before Ryan reluctantly bowed to pressure to run for the post, but the Treasury Department made that job much more complicated when it pushed up the deadline for Congress to act on re-upping the government’s borrowing authority. As Ryan was trying to decide whether he would seek the leadership post — or perhaps, more accurately, grappling with the fact that the uncertainty created by his colleagues changed the course of his career no matter what — Boehner and his aides were privately working toward a solution to the debt-limit problem.

Republican leadership aides know and readily acknowledge that if they push forward with any sort of legislation to extend the debt ceiling, whether it’s a clean extension or part of a larger fiscal package that Congressional leaders are currently negotiating with the White House, they will need to do so on the backs of Democrats whose votes they will need.

Of course, it was exactly that kind of vote, to fund the government or raise the debt limit, for which Boehner relied on Democrats to avert major fiscal catastrophe and for which the hard-right conservatives in his party castigated him. His agreeing to work with Democrats and Senate Republicans to keep the basic functions of the government operational was the main reason tea party Republicans tried to use floor procedures to oust him. And for his part, Ryan has tried to assure hard-line conservatives in his party that he will not push legislation without the majority support of his conference, an edict referred to colloquially in Washington as the “Hastert Rule” after the speaker who first implemented the approach.

The budget and debt-ceiling votes make a fitting backdrop to the leadership vote, because the significant ideological differences within the House GOP conference are not going to disappear just because Boehner is leaving Congress.

The most conservative members of the House are wary of Ryan’s previous willingness to consent to pragmatic budget compromises, notably a deal he made with Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington in 2013 to set budget spending levels for two years and take the threat of government shutdowns off the table. The White House, Boehner and respective congressional leaders are now seeking a similar two-year framework, which would help Ryan avoid these fights at the outset of his tenure and take the issues off the table for the 2016 presidential campaign.