Kevin McCarthy of California, the majority leader — who, along with Speaker Paul D. Ryan, had opposed the proposal — lobbed a pointed question at his fellow Republicans, according to two people present: Had they campaigned on repealing the Affordable Care Act, or tinkering with an ethics office?
.. House Republicans, led by Representative Robert W. Goodlatte of Virginia, had sought on Monday to prevent the office from pursuing investigations that might result in criminal charges. Instead, they wanted to allow lawmakers on the more powerful House Ethics Committee to shut down inquiries. They even sought to block the small staff at the Office of Congressional Ethics, which would have been renamed and put under the oversight of House lawmakers, from speaking to the news media.
“It has damaged or destroyed a lot of political careers in this place, and it’s cost members of Congress millions of dollars to defend themselves against anonymous allegations,” Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, said Tuesday, still defending the move.
.. Mr. McCarthy told his fellow Republicans that they needed to reverse themselves quickly, or potentially face an even more embarrassing revolt on the House floor. By his estimation, he told them, the provision was going to be removed one way or another.
.. Perhaps most prominently, in 2011, Representative Melvin Watt, a North Carolina Democrat who later left Congress to join the Obama administration, tried to cut the agency’s budget by 40 percent, a proposal that failed on a 302-102 vote.
.. But Mr. Goodlatte’s critics said he had simply been caught trying to sneak through a favor to help protect his fellow lawmakers.
The Conservative Plan to Tackle Poverty
House Speaker Paul Ryan says that improving the lives of low-income Americans is a top priority. To do that, the GOP plans to help businesses first.
.. In Ryan’s oft-touted policy agenda, “A Better Way,” he argues that social services may help Americans cope with poverty, but they do little to eliminate it. That’s why it’s no surprise that in the GOP’s anti-poverty plan, the welfare system—also called the “entitlement” system, depending on who you ask—is to be a main target for cutbacks.
.. But Ryan made it clear during his speech that altering policies specifically aimed at reducing poverty won’t be an immediate priority. Instead, the GOP will focus on tweaking policies they think will help businesses grow and provide more opportunities for low-income Americans: removing business regulations and cutting taxes, classic conservative solutions for jumpstarting economic growth.
.. Cutting taxes comes next and will most likely ease the tax burden on corporations and the wealthiest Americans. Under his proposals, top individual income tax rates would drop from 39 percent to 33 percent, and corporate tax rates would fall from 35 to 20 percent.
.. The problem for Ryan’s approach is that even if the economy does grow from removing business regulations and cutting taxes, it’s not clear that that growth will come in the form of wages for the poorest Americans. More than half of the country’s income growth in the last decade went to the wealthiest 1 percent of American families.
.. That means the traditional Republican plan of spurring growth in order to boost the economic standing of the poorest Americans won’t do much to end poverty unless they can also ensure the money is going to those who need it most.
Paul Ryan’s Dangerous Silence on Donald Trump
Other Republicans are looking to the speaker of the House for guidance on when to confront the president-elect and when to let his craziness go unchecked.
.. when he was asked about Trump’s reckless — and wholly unsubstantiated — tweet that millions of Americans had voted illegally for Hillary Clinton.
.. “I’m not really focused on these things,” Ryan said, all too blithely. Then: “I have no knowledge of such things. It doesn’t matter to me.”
.. Doesn’t matter? No, I guess a president-elect’s effort to undermine Americans’ confidence in our political system — and, beyond that, his attachment to conspiracy theories — aren’t pressing concerns.
.. Ryan’s answer was marginally better than the one given on the ABC News show “This Week” by Mike Pence, who described Trump’s tweets as “refreshing.”
.. They’re alarmed by Trump, and frequently aghast at him, but they want enough peace to steer him in the directions they desire and to minimize the damage over all.
The Political Bargaini Behind Trump’s Cabinet of Lamentables
Some of Trump’s supporters may have believed they were electing a pragmatic businessman who wouldn’t be restricted by obligations to either party or other powerful interest groups. But he is putting together a cabinet that looks almost exactly like the modern Republican Party: older, white, anti-government, and extremely conservative on virtually every issue. It could have been constructed by the Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, or one of the other corporate-funded institutes that have helped drag the G.O.P. so far to the right on issues ranging from taxation to environmental regulation to charter schools.
.. Many have wondered recently why conservative leaders such as Ryan haven’t been more critical of Trump’s conduct since the election, and, in particular, his barrage of controversial tweets, including one in which he suggested that millions of people voted illegally on November 8th. But the answer is clear enough. So far, Ryan and his colleagues have had every reason to believe that Trump will allow them to pass large parts of a conservative agenda that they have been putting forward for years but that they have never been able to persuade a majority of Americans to support. As long as Trump goes along with this agenda, orthodox Republicans have every reason to downplay his outbursts on social media, as Ryan did earlier this week,
.. My own theory is that Trump is being pragmatic, but not in a policy sense. He’s pragmatically promoting his own interests, which, at this stage, are best served by throwing some large bones to the Republican Party.
.. The deal doesn’t need to be explicit to be clear. The G.O.P. gets its legislative “revolution.” Trump gets to keep his businesses and further enrich himself.