Official Washington was dumbfounded, then, when Ryan and Murray announced a budget deal on December 10. The toplines were straightforward: Their plan would fund the government for two full years at new, slightly higher spending levels, but would reduce the deficit and save $28 billion over a decade—all without raising taxes.
Ryan was thrilled with the deal. Yes, he had broken the terms of the Williamsburg arrangement, but there was no question that the budget compromise moved the country in a fiscally conservative direction. “I deal with the way things are, not necessarily the way I want things to be,” Ryan said after the agreement was unveiled. “I have passed three budgets in a row that reflect my priorities and my principles and everything I want to accomplish. We’re in divided government. I realize I’m not going to get all of that.”
The budget deal revealed a new schism on the right—between some, like Ryan, who had come around to the concept of incrementalism, and others who rejected the notion of half a loaf. Tom Price, Ryan’s friend and vice chairman of the Budget Committee, attempted to rally conservatives around the plan. “It is increasingly obvious that success, particularly in divided government, has to be measured in positive steps, not leaps and bounds,” Price said.
But that sentiment was drowned out by loud opposition. The Club for Growth blasted the deal as “budgetary smoke and mirrors.”9 Talk radio host Mark Levin told Ryan the agreement was “Mickey Mouse.”10 And Heritage Action, which also key-voted in opposition, called Ryan’s work “a step backward” for conservatism.11
Boehner had always ignored such external criticisms, but he could no longer bite his tongue. Ryan had volunteered on behalf of Boehner’s congressional campaign as a college kid, and the Speaker felt a fatherly bond with the Wisconsin congressman. He could not stomach watching these professional purists eviscerate his young budget chairman.
“I think they’re misleading their followers. I think they’re pushing our members in places where they don’t want to be,” Boehner said of the critics. “And frankly, I just think that they’ve lost all credibility.”
Boehner’s battering of the outside groups was an assault on the conservative movement itself. And it wasn’t happening in isolation. On December 11, in another Mafioso-style move, RSC chairman Steve Scalise fired the group’s longtime executive director, Paul Teller, an integral player in Washington’s conservative scene, for leaking member-level conversations to the outside groups in the hope that they could turn on-the-fence members against bad legislation.
“We are saddened and outraged that an organization that purports to represent conservatives in Congress would dismiss a staff member for advancing conservatism and working with conservatives outside Congress,” the leaders of Heritage Action, FreedomWorks, and other activist outfits said in a statement responding to Teller’s firing. “Given this action . . . it is clear that the conservative movement has come under attack on Capitol Hill.”12
In the middle of all this stood Ryan, once the golden child of conservatism, who seemed more bemused than beleaguered by the right’s turning against him. “It’s a strange new normal, isn’t it?” he said.
Ryan always knew the compromise would draw opposition from Tea Party lawmakers. But the toughest disagreement was with his fellow Jedi Council member, Jim Jordan. “Eleven months ago, our conference made a decision . . . that we will not get rid of the sequester unless and until we get the kind of big savings in mandatory programs that put our nation on a path to balance in ten years,” Jordan explained. He called Ryan’s deal with Murray a “marked departure” from their Williamsburg agreement and mobilized his allies to defeat it.
Other conservatives piled on—Mulvaney said it wasn’t “hard-core” enough, and Labrador called it “really a terrible plan”—but Jordan’s dissent was the most consequential. He and Ryan had shared breakfasts together for years, bonding over talk of sports, families, a common philosophy. Jordan had defended Ryan earlier in the year against accusations that his friend had gone soft. But he could no longer ignore the evidence of his own eyes. Ryan’s breach of the Williamsburg arrangement wasn’t just a disagreement; it was an act of duplicity. And Jordan would never let it go.
Thirteen days before Christmas, the House passed Ryan and Murray’s bill, the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013, in lopsided fashion: The tally was 332–94, with 169 Republicans supporting the legislation and only 62 opposed. It then passed the Senate and was signed into law by Obama.
The deal’s success marked Ryan’s promotion to an essential player in Washington—no longer an ideologue, but a seasoned and accomplished policymaker who had secured real progress in a divided government and had faced down his own base to sell it.
Ryan’s triumph was just as meaningful for Boehner. The Speaker had rung in the New Year amid swirling rumors that a mob of conservative malcontents was orchestrating a coup d’état aimed at overthrowing him in humiliating fashion. He had not only survived but thrived, uniting the conference around a plan, sidestepping the land mine of immigration, and earning newfound respect by giving his trigger-happy hard-liners the shutdown shootout they craved. Topping it all off, Boehner had outmaneuvered his enemies by putting Ryan in charge of budget negotiations, baiting the right into criticisms of a bill that passed with enormous support. After three years of the Tea Party dictating terms to the GOP, its influence was on the decline.
As Boehner walked off the House floor, shaking hands and patting backs and looking forward to the bottle of cabernet waiting inside the Speaker’s suite, he knew this Christmas would be merrier than the last.
Chapter Eight
April 2014
“We called them ‘the Caveman Caucus,’ and we needed to crush them.”
JOHN BOEHNER SIPPED HIS BLACK COFFEE WHILE STARING INTO THE soul of Roger Ailes.
It was a sunny Monday morning in New York, and the renewing sights of springtime felt fitting to the Speaker of the House. Ever since the government shutdown of the previous fall, the worm had turned inside the Republican Party. The civil war raged on. But it was the rebels who were now on the run—and the establishment was striking back. Having exposed the strategic clumsiness of the Tea Party delegation, and triumphed over the right with Ryan’s budget compromise, congressional leaders and their establishment allies looked ahead to the 2014 elections as a chance to seize back control of the GOP.
This depended in large part on neutralizing the conservative news media—or at least, defusing its explosive predispositions.
The proliferation of right-wing reporting and punditry in the late 1990s had once been a blessing for the GOP. The impeachment of Bill Clinton, the election of George W. Bush, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—wherever there was controversy, conservatives had been able to depend on friendly voices covering it.
But the disruption of recent years—the implosion of Bush, the election of Obama, the arrival of the Tea Party—had upended that business model. Politics was no longer symmetrical. To channel the populist fury of its audience, conservative media began targeting the GOP elites with the same mendacity that it displayed in attacking Democrats. The irony was inescapable: Republicans had spurned legacy journalism outlets for their perceived bias and dishonesty only to receive heaping portions of both from the likes of Fox News, talk radio, and the ever-expanding constellation of conservative blogs, websites, and social media feeds.