The Speaker knew that his legacy was on the line, and it wasn’t just about tax reform. For the past year, he had justified his silence in the face of Trump’s behavior as means to an end. Determining that public confrontations would only result in deeper intraparty fractures that would stall policymaking efforts, Ryan restrained himself. The executive branch had already gone off the rails, he told colleagues; they would gain nothing by turning the legislative branch into a comparable circus.
Yet this was a profoundly naïve perspective. In the House under Ryan’s stewardship, the only thing missing were the bearded ladies. The already-fraught relationships between the parties—leaders, key committee personnel, rank-and-file members—became irreperable. Norms of process and procedure, already neglected, deteriorated to an unrecognizable degree. The House Intelligence Committee, once a paragon of congressional maturity, had devolved into a schoolyard taunting contest. The chairman, Devin Nunes of California, had turned one of Capitol Hill’s most esteemed panels into a partisan food fight. (Not that no one saw this coming; Nunes had once referred to a colleague of Arab descent, Michigan’s antiwar congressman Justin Amash, as “al-Qaeda’s best friend in Congress.”) By the time Ryan stepped in to address the dysfunction of Nunes’s committee, the institutional damage had been done.
The Speaker simply could not afford to let tax reform fail. As strange as the conditions were, they were ripe for success. And as cynical as he knew it was, Ryan had come to view Trump’s manic activity as advantageous to a rushed legislative process that would have received far more scrutiny had the president of the United States not been tweeting his vendettas before sunrise. If they couldn’t muscle a bill through under these circumstances, Ryan figured, it was never going to happen.
Ryan seized control of the process in the House, angering members of the Ways and Means Committee, who complained that they didn’t see legislative text until just days before voting on it. The complaints echoed those from the original Obamacare push: The Speaker was running the House like an autocrat, ignoring the input of members and breaking the very vows he had made when ascending to the position. “He’s more controlling than Boehner . . . and I voted against John Boehner and worked with Mark Meadows to vacate the chair,” Walter Jones, a frumpy older congressman from North Carolina, said during the tax reform campaign. “I’m very dissatisfied. I’ve been here twenty-two years, and this is the most closed shop I’ve ever seen.”
Ryan heard the criticism. He also heard the rumors that the Freedom Caucus, feeling increasingly disenfranchised, was discussing another overthrow of another Speaker. But he paid these distractions no mind. Because for Ryan, in the fall of 2017, there were only two things worth thinking about: tax reform and retirement.
He was sick of Congress, tired of spending five days a week away from his family, and most of all, fed up with babysitting Trump. His solid working relationship with the president had done nothing to convince him of the man’s suitability for the office he held; rather, Ryan had become a professional counter to ten, convincing himself each morning anew of the counterproductive nature of a pissing match with the commander in chief. Sitting in the Speaker’s office, knowing the institutional chaos that would flow from a game of chicken between the two most powerful officeholders in the federal government, Ryan had convinced himself that it was better in the long term, even if emasculating and hypocritical in the short term, to keep his composure with Trump.
The two men had developed a surprisingly strong working relationship, thanks largely to this acquiescence from Ryan in the pursuit of policy victories. But the Speaker shuddered at the thought of sticking around for 2019 and 2020, when Trump would be actively running for a second term. The idea of enduring another Trump election cycle was nauseating to Ryan. Retirement was the only escape hatch. What better way to go, he thought to himself, than with a signature tax reform law?
ACROSS THE CAPITOL, FOUR REPUBLICANS WERE RESPONSIBLE FOR drafting and redrafting the Senate version of the tax bill. But it was Tim Scott, the South Carolinian, who emerged as the key player.
Having worked on the issue since his arrival in Congress in 2011, and bringing a wealth of real-world experience from his career as a successful insurance salesman, Scott labored for months to align the conflicting visions of his colleagues. He sat at the intersection of the ideological tribes, someone trusted by both conservatives and centrists alike. Time and again, throughout the fall of 2017, Scott was tasked by McConnell with putting out the latest fire that threatened to engulf the entire effort. He became the indispensable actor among Senate Republicans.
As he brokered settlements between his colleagues, Scott had but one priority himself: “Opportunity Zones.”
A few years earlier, Scott had gotten to know Sean Parker, cofounder of the Napster music streaming service and the original president of Facebook. Parker described to the senator a pair of problems that he saw as interrelated: a staggering amount of capital sitting on the sidelines of the economy, and an uneven recovery in which investments rarely found their way to the communities most in need. The government, Parker argued, should offer incentives for venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to invest in Opportunity Zones, blighted areas (determined by poverty level and median household income) desperate for economic renewal.
Scott was sold. Working with his friend, Democratic senator Cory Booker, and with a bipartisan group of lawmakers in both chambers, Scott led the charge to incorporate the policy into the GOP’s tax bill.
But he needed an ally. Influential as he was in the tax reform negotiations, Scott did not have the juice to strongarm the Senate into adopting a policy that few of his colleagues were familiar with. Securing the Opportunity Zones would require a lot of weight to be thrown around. He had just the person in mind.
“Well,” the senator had replied to the president during their post-Charlottesville conversation. “You can support the Investing in Opportunity Act.”
Trump wasn’t familiar with the policy, but he gave Scott his word that he would support it—and he did. The president endorsed the legislation the very next day and remained loyal until it became law as part of the GOP’s tax reform package.
Scott was exuberant. So was Ryan. The final, compromise legislation passed through both chambers of Congress in mid-December. No Democrat in either the House or the Senate voted for it, a sign of the polarized climate but also of the GOP’s lack of outreach across the aisle. (Tax cuts aren’t exactly a tough sell in purple states, but there was virtually no pressure placed on vulnerable Democrats to support the Republican bill.) The partisan nature of the end product didn’t much bother Scott or Ryan. Both had notched crowning, legacy-making victories.
When Republicans gathered on the South Lawn of the White House on December 20 to celebrate their triumph, Ryan stepped to the lectern and uttered one of the defining observances of his speakership. “Something this big, something this generational, something this profound,” he declared, “could not have been done without exquisite presidential leadership.”
Throughout the ceremony, Scott stood right next to Ryan, flanking the president. The extent of his influence was on full display. But that’s not what everyone saw. Just minutes before Trump invited Scott to speak at the lectern, Andy Ostroy, a HuffPost blogger, tweeted, “What a shocker . . . there’s ONE black person there and sure enough they have him standing right next to the mic like a manipulated prop. Way to go @SenatorTimScott.”