Paul Ryan Faces the “Young Guns” Jinx
From the outside, Boehner often looked like a weak Speaker who was letting his most conservative members — roughly forty to sixty congressmen — push him around and recklessly use government shutdowns and potential debt defaults as bargaining tools in negotiations with the White House. But inside the House Republican conference, conservatives had the opposite view: that Boehner was a tyrant who ran the House with little input from members.
.. So far, Ryan’s plan for avoiding the Young Guns jinx has been to mollify the Freedom Caucus—to make the underclass feel like they are part of the governing establishment of the House. Some Republicans are skeptical it will ever work—or else they worry that it will work all too well. “Is Ryan’s Speakership going to break up their power or embolden them?” one frustrated House Republican aide said. “ They want changes in the process.… But if you bring four hundred and thirty-five people to that table of negotiations you are never going to get something that comprehensive. The thing to understand about the Freedom Caucus is that they don’t want any government.”