Congressional expert: Paul Ryan should give the right more input, not less — and here’s why

Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., inside the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Friday. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

The most commonly heard criticism of outgoing Republican House Speaker John Boehner is that he has allowed himself to be held hostage by the far right of his party.

Now, as Paul Ryan seeks to replace him as speaker and unite the fractious 247-member House Republican majority, the Wisconsin congressman is coming under pressure from the far-right House Freedom Caucus and its 40 or so members. Their demand of Ryan is the same as their demand of Boehner: more procedural power and greater input into the process of legislating. Some of the Senate’s most conservative members have also weighed in to support their cause.

This sounds like a recipe for disaster to many. After all, GOP hard-liners already hamstrung the House’s ability to pass laws.

Yet one of Washington’s most obsessive thinkers about congressional dysfunction argues that a big part of the problem was actually too much top-down control by Boehner, not the opposite.

Jason Grumet, founder of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and author of “City of Rivals: Restoring the Glorious Mess of American Democracy,” says Boehner failed to give the far right enough input, provoking its revolt. At the same time, Grumet says that while Ryan should open up the process in the House, he should also make it clear to the House Freedom Caucus that if he gives them ownership of the process, he also is going to work with Democrats to pass some measures.

That would be in violation of the so-called Hastert Rule — instituted in 2004 by former Speaker Dennis J. Hastert — which states that a Republican speaker will pass a bill only if the majority of Republicans favor it, no matter how many Democrats support it. The solution to squaring this circle, Grumet says: Get rid of the Hastert Rule.

If Ryan does keep an ironclad commitment to the rule, Grumet thinks it will be hard for him to have much success. Ryan has reportedly agreed not to violate the Hastert Rule on contentious or controversial legislation, specifically immigration reform. But it’s not clear that he has committed himself to total adherence either.

I sat down with Grumet in his D.C. office to talk about what advice he’d give the new speaker.

The following transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Yahoo News: I put you in the same camp as somebody like Jonathan Rauch, who has written about politics—

Jason Grumet: Political realism.

Exactly, yeah, and machine politics and the power in the parties. Even in the first line in your book, we have “more transparency and less efficiency,” so that points toward, well, we need more backroom deals.

The language can be provocative, but I think an easier way to say that — if you’re not trying to write the first sentence of a book — is that we need to restore both the practice and the possibility of collaboration, as opposed to the rigidity which flourishes when your most aggressive constituents are always looking over your left shoulder.

There’ve been people who have just gotten so despondent, that maybe we should have a parliament. … My argument is that it would be more productive to try and understand what’s weakened the structure. And one thing is that they’re just not deliberating, engaging. There just aren’t expectations and forums in which people can talk to each other.

How will Paul Ryan do as speaker?

The way he has framed the debate would lead to a more constructive legislative process than we’ve had before. … These insurgent movements, a new gang tends to operate by a different set of rules and it takes a while for everyone else to kind of figure that out and kind of come to terms with the fact that no, they’re just not going to engage the way you expect your colleagues to engage. And at a certain moment, one of two things happens. The movement either dies down or the majority changes the rules, and I think in this case if Ryan or someone is not better able to unite the Republican caucus, you’ll see the Republican caucus on an occasional basis pass laws with some Democrats.

The so-called Hastert Rule … used to work. It was a barrier, but they used to actually be able to generate the majority of their majority on a regular enough basis that that was a reasonable idea. Some argue it was never a great idea for democracy but it was at least a workable idea. It’s not a workable idea now.

Because it used to cause consensus and now it’s—

Now it’s disabling their ability to do anything.

When I read stuff like what I read from Mike Lee … my immediate thought is he wants to further democratize a body which has already been completely chaotic.

You need to do both things at once. … You ideally want a system where the process is to have aggressive airing of disparate views that then inclines toward resolution. At the moment, we have neither. We have a closed process.

What specific things has Boehner done to make it a closed process?

They operate under closed rules which basically — they call them structured rules or closed rules — so very rarely will the House have an open debate and allows individual members to—

Didn’t he promise this when he came in?

Every new speaker expresses the desire to move in this direction, and I think what has confronted Speaker Boehner is intransigence on his left and his right. … By continuing the notion that you don’t want to pass bills with Democrats you also take that 45 percent out of the way or you move them from your potential coalition, at which point a block of 40 or 50 really becomes the electorate you have to sway. … The answer, if there was one, would be a combination of opening the process up and then opening the voting up. Instead of saying, “I’m only going to deal with Republicans. … I’m a leader; vote with me or don’t,” you basically say, “We’re going to have a process, we’re going to have amendments, we’re going…”

You open the process and you get rid of the Hastert Rule.

Basically, yeah. … There is always going to be some fealty to party, but have it be understood that if after some period of time your coalition cannot coalesce after an open process, you’re going to try and find votes you need to move the process forward.

You think the opening up of the process would be the pressure valve by which that process could be made more possible? Because right now it’s just bloody murder on the right anytime you wink in the way of a Democrat.

It’s a little bit of a chicken and egg, but you can certainly see a new speaker basically say, Mr. Lee and others’ argument is people should be able to vote their conscience and we should be able to move forward as a majority and I believe this is the right basis for the full Congress. … I’m speaker of the whole place. I want to get things done and so we are going to have an opportunity for everybody to make their views known. We are going to try to come together as a Republican caucus first, but where we can, we are going to open things up. That then allows the people on the extreme to be as vociferous as they want but recognize that they don’t always get to shut things down. Right, there’s actually a cost to being rigid.

Another problem is, in addition to that, the word “govern” is a dirty word now because I guess it’s code for making government bigger.

You’ll hear from many conservatives, I think, the rational argument that when moderates talk about Congress working better, what they really mean was the 80 years when the Democrats were in total control and Republicans were just subordinates. That’s not what they want to return to. I think there’s a far cry from that to playing chicken with the American economy six times a year. We have to confront the question of whether we have to differentiate functional government from big government. There’s a lot of things that the Republican caucus wants to pass that could streamline the government.

The perception of Boehner is that he has been pushed around and cowed by the far right. But part of your critique is that he has actually not allowed them — he shut them down too much and he has not allowed them enough room to express themselves through the process.

You have to think about both circumstances at the same time. I think he has disempowered the far right and disempowered the center. He’s disempowered the far right by not giving them a voice and he’s disempowered the center by excluding 100 members of the Democratic Party who would agree with him in a lot of things. If he had that bigger palette to paint on, then you could give full expression to the views of every member but not have it be understood that those views get to shut down the process if they’re a minority and so richly held that they won’t collaborate.