US House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan in a series of televised interviews on Sunday said that he would not work with the administration of US President Barack Obama on changing immigration policy, effectively pushing the issue to at least 2017.
“Look, I think it would be a ridiculous notion to try and work on an issue like this with a president we simply cannot trust on this issue,” Ryan said in an interview with CBS’ Face the Nation. “He tried to go it alone, circumventing the legislative process with his executive orders, so that is not in the cards.”
The message from Ryan, who was elected on Thursday last week, signaled antagonism toward the White House that both echoed his predecessor, John Boehner, and is likely to appeal to the party conservatives who forced Boehner’s resignation.
Photo: Reuters
Ryan taped five Sunday morning news shows, where he laid out his agenda for unifying his party and his approach to relationships with congressional colleagues, Obama and US Republican presidential candidates.
When asked to comment on the statements about immigration, a White House spokesman referred to a news briefing on Friday last week by White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, who described the speaker’s stance as “a source of deep disappointment.”
Ryan said if Republicans were to be a successful opposition party between now and the presidential election, they would need to become an aggressive “proposition party,” laying out a clear policy vision with alternatives to Democrats, like plans for reforming the tax code and replacing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly known as “Obamacare.”
“We have been too timid for too long around here,” Ryan said on ABC’s This Week. “We have been bold on tactics, but not on policy, not on an agenda. We have to show people what our alternatives are and that is the kind of leadership I think people are hungry for here.”
Such proactive agenda-setting, Ryan added, would help avert the kind of brinkmanship over spending that was common under Boehner’s leadership. It also requires that congressional leaders be “honest with people up front about what it is you can and cannot achieve,” Ryan said, in response to a question on CNN’s State of the Union about defunding Planned Parenthood.
Ryan repeatedly made it clear that he would take an approach different from that of Boehner, whose almost five-year tenure as speaker was rife with Republican infighting.
In a nod to the conservatives who have demanded that power in the House be decentralized, Ryan said the speaker’s job was to facilitate consensus, not to be “dictator of the House.”
“I don’t think leadership should be trying to, you know, covet power and write legislation,” he said on Fox News Sunday.
“I think I want to have a more participatory process, which is really what the founders envisioned the House to look like. And that is something that so many of us, myself included, have been concerned about the way this place has been run,” he added.
Ryan, who was the Republican Party’s 2012 vice-presidential nominee, said he would remain neutral in the Republican nomination race until the party chooses its candidate.
The Republican presidential aspirants have offered a model for the kind of policy alternatives he hopes to see in the House, he added.
“I looked at that stage and said every one of these people would be a far better president than [Democratic candidate] Hillary [Rodham] Clinton,” he said on ABC.
Ryan briefly addressed his own personal qualms with taking the speaker’s job, which he said he never wanted.
His thinking underwent “a metamorphosis over a few weeks,” as he realized the role he could play in “wiping the slate clean” in the House and the ways it does business, he said.
As he made clear during his courtship, Ryan said that as speaker he would continue commuting every week between Washington and his home in Janesville, Wisconsin, where his wife and three young children live.
In Washington, he will continue to sleep in his old House office, rather than the speaker’s suite, which his staff is trying to rid of the odor of Boehner’s cigarettes.
Asked by Fox News Sunday how long he expected his honeymoon period as speaker to last, Ryan offered a quick joke.
“About 35 minutes,” he said.
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