The congressman from the 1st District is Paul Ryan, a Republican elected in 1998 at age 28. Ryan took over as chairman of the Budget Committee in 2011, and is regarded as an intellectual leader in the GOP for his unrivaled influence on fiscal matters. Many Republicans embraced his controversial blueprint for controlling future spending, while dissatisfied Democrats made clear that its drastic proposal for overhauling Medicare would be among their leading campaign issues for 2012. In August 2012, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney chose Ryan as his running mate.
Ryan grew up in Janesville, where in 1884 his great-grandfather started a family construction firm, now run by his cousins. His father, a Republican lawyer, and former Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold’s father had law offices in the same building, and the two sons were friends in Congress before Feingold’s 2010 defeat. Ryan got started in politics early, as a staffer for Republican Sen. Bob Kasten while attending college at Miami University in Ohio. During summers, he was a salesman for Oscar Mayer and can boast that he once drove the company’s incomparable Wienermobile. He planned to apply to the University of Chicago and eventually become an economist, but says he “just kept getting really interesting jobs” in politics.
Ryan was hired as a speechwriter for Republican Rep. Jack Kemp of New York and then worked for the think tank Empower America founded by Kemp and conservative pundit William Bennett. He later was legislative director for then-Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan. In his days as a poorly paid congressional staffer, Ryan moonlighted as a waiter and a fitness trainer. (His father and grandfather both died of heart attacks in their 50s, making Ryan, the father of three young children, particularly mindful of a healthy diet and an exercise regimen. Washingtonian magazine’s survey of anonymous congressional staffers in 2010 named him the House’s biggest “gym rat.”)
In 1998, Ryan returned to the 1st District to run for the House when GOP Rep. Mark Neumann ran for the Senate (Neumann lost to Feingold). Ryan won the Republican primary with 81% of the vote. Democrats nominated Kenosha County official Lydia Spottswood, who had lost to Neumann in 1996. Ryan campaigned against tax increases and in favor of gun ownership rights. This was a strenuously contested election, one of the Democrats’ top 10 priorities in the nation that year. Spottswood spent $1.33 million, and Ryan spent $1.24 million. However, the results were not close. Ryan won 57%-43%.
In the House, Ryan has been a loyal conservative, especially since Barack Obama became president. Previously he had a reputation as someone who occasionally bucked his party and took centrist positions on foreign policy and some social issues. In 2007, he voted for a bill to prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and later said he supported the bill because he had friends “who didn’t choose to be gay … they were just created that way.” He said he “took a lot of crap” for the vote from social conservatives. He also voted for the 2008 government bailout of the domestic auto industry, citing mounting hardships in his district because of factory layoffs.
Like his political mentor, the late supply-sider Kemp, Ryan advocates tax cuts to spur economic growth but says his views also have evolved to put equal weight on keeping deficits low and government growth in check. His beliefs drew widespread attention in 2009, when he began warning of future fiscal problems in dire terms. The debt, he told The Washington Post, was “completely unsustainable” and would “crash our economy.” That year, Ryan helped write the Republicans’ alternative to Obama’s first budget, along with Republican Study Committee Chairman Mike Pence of Indiana and Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia, a close ally of Ryan’s. Ryan and Cantor pushed House Minority Leader John Boehner to include details about how the party would control spending and trim the deficit, but Boehner steered it away from specifics that could be picked apart by Democratic critics. The plan ultimately was panned in the press for lacking detail, and the effort was scrapped.
Undeterred, Ryan in 2010 produced a detailed “roadmap” to economic recovery as an alternative to the majority Democrats’ budget, which he said was chock full of “reckless borrowing.” His document called for a dramatically simpler tax code of two rates, 10% on annual income up to $100,000 for joint filers and 25% on income above that. Ryan’s plan also would: break the link between employment and health insurance by switching from tax incentives for employer-provided insurance plans to tax credits for individual purchases of insurance; transform Medicare for Americans younger than 55 into a voucher system providing an average $11,000 for the purchase of government-approved policies; and allow younger people to invest a third or more of their Social Security savings in personal retirement accounts. While Obama and other leading Democrats said they disagreed with much of Ryan’s proposal, the president lauded him for having “serious” ideas. Most of the Republicans who ran for and won House seats in 2010 campaigned on Ryan’s message of immediate and bold action on the deficit.
Taking the helm of Budget, Ryan pronounced himself highly disappointed with Obama’s fiscal 2012 budget proposal, contending it did little to rein in spending over 10 years. Answering Democratic taunts that Republicans had no detailed response of their own, Ryan promised again to offer an alternative, which was rolled out in April 2011 to much conservative fanfare. Titled “The Path to Prosperity,” it called for freezing most domestic spending for five years and repealing the stimulus law in the course of cutting spending more than $6 trillion over 10 years, shrinking federal spending as a percentage of the economy to its lowest level since 1949. It proposed overhauling the tax code, lowering the top tax rates for individuals and corporations from the current 35% to 25%, and reducing the number of individual tax brackets. To raise revenues, it would reduce or eliminate an unspecified number of tax credits, deductions and other tax breaks. It also would repeal several tax increases in the 2010 health care law, such as the 3.8% surtax on higher earners’ investment income. Medicaid would be cut by over $700 billion and would be replaced by block grants to the states. Defense spending would not be touched, and the budget itself would not be balanced until 2040.
The most immediately controversial feature of Ryan’s budget was its plan for Medicare. Like his earlier “roadmap,” individuals who turned 65 before 2022 would continue under the current program, while others would get a government subsidy to buy private insurance. Many Democrats and some economic commentators sharply questioned the disparity, as well as the impact its cuts would have on the poor and middle class. In an April speech, Obama said Ryan’s approach would lead to a country that is “fundamentally different than what we’ve known throughout our history.” The House passed the budget in April, with 235 of the chamber’s 239 Republicans backing it and every single Democrat opposing it.
The political repercussions became apparent on Ryan’s “listening tour” in Wisconsin during a congressional recess. Some audiences jeered him, while polls showed strong majorities of Americans opposed to the Medicare aspects of his budget. Democrats quickly began incorporating such sentiments into their effort to retake control of the House in 2012. Even some Republicans grew uneasy. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, fresh from announcing his intention to run for president, called the budget “radical” in May and added, ” I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering.” Ryan responded to a conservative talk-radio host: “Hardly is that (budget) social engineering and radical. What’s radical is kicking the can down the road.”
But Ryan continued to push radical budget reforms. In December 2011, he tried to team up with an unlikely ally, mostly liberal Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., in an ill-fated plan to partially privative Medicare. In March 2012, Ryan offered another budget plan that cut discretionary spending below the levels agreed upon by Congress in 2011. It would have overhauled Medicare and Medicaid and repealed the 2010 health care law signed by President Obama. His budget squeaked out of committee and passed the full House, 228-191; it later failed in the Senate, 41-58, with five Republicans opposing the measure.
During the summer of 2012, Ryan’s name emerged as a potential dark-horse vice presidential pick. Former Gov. Mitt Romney, R-Mass. was reportedly also considering Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio and former Gov. Tim Pawlenty, R-Minn. as possible running mates. He eventually selected Ryan, viewed by some political observers as a riskier choice given Ryan’s controversial budget blueprint and his willingness to enact sweeping entitlement reforms. But Ryan and Romney reportedly had a strong working rapport.
Ryan has been the top Republican on Budget since 2007, when he vaulted over 12 more-senior Republicans on the committee. “We lost our brand as the party of fiscal responsibility, and we’ve got to get it back,” Ryan said after his selection. “It’s important that we give voters a very clear choice on fiscal policy.” In late 2008, Ryan helped to almost derail negotiations on a $700 billion bailout of the financial services industry when he and other fiscal conservatives introduced an alternative plan to the one backed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Democratic leaders. Eventually, the Democrats included some of his provisions, and he supported the compromise bill. Ryan was once offered the job as President George W. Bush’s budget director, in 2005, but turned it down to remain in Congress.
Unlike many of his conservative peers, Ryan refrains from culture war arguments over abortion rights, immigration and other hot-button issues. He backed versions of the DREAM Act giving some children of illegal immigrants a potential path to citizenship. But he refused to support the version that the Democratically-controlled House passed in December 2010, saying it went too far. After the 2008 election, a Wall Street Journal editorial called for Ryan to challenge Minority Leader Boehner, arguing that Ryan’s “economic knowledge and youthful energy make him the best choice to pull his party in a more promising direction.” Some Republican House members encouraged the move as well, but Ryan decided against a challenge.
Ryan is considerably more conservative than the balance of his district. Still, he seems secure in the seat, having cruised to re-election in 2010 with 68% of the vote. As his political stock rose, he was even mentioned as a possible 2012 presidential candidate, but Ryan told a Milwaukee television station in February 2010 he wasn’t interested: “My head’s not that big, and my kids are too small.” An avid sportsman, Ryan enjoys fishing (walleye and muskie) and hunting, particularly bow hunting, and has been known to send emails from his BlackBerry while waiting in the brush for deer to appear.
