Parting gift

John Boehner's parting gift to Paul Ryan

Passage of a budget and debt ceiling package this week would give Ryan more room to operate than Boehner ever had.

By Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan

Call it the Paul Ryan protection plan.

The Wisconsin Republican wasn’t involved in crafting the bipartisan budget deal hashed out in secret between Speaker John Boehner, Senate leaders and the White House. In fact, the way the plan came about is pretty much the opposite of how Ryan has told people he intends to operate if he's speaker.

"Under new management we are not going to do the people's business this way," Ryan said Tuesday. "We are up against a deadline — that's unfortunate. ... As a conference we should've been meeting months ago to discuss these things to have a unified strategy going forward."

Despite those critical remarks, Boehner is handing his likely successor an invaluable gift that could help smooth his transition to power. No legislative cliffs. No fiscal emergencies that rattle Wall Street. No government shutdown threats or default countdown clocks.

If Boehner can shepherd the deal through the House in his final hours in Congress, and the Senate sends it to the White House, Ryan would start out as speaker with more running room than Boehner ever enjoyed.

The next time Congress would have to deal with the debt ceiling increase would be March 2017. Government funding levels would be set through the end of the next fiscal year, taking a shutdown threat off of the table for the first year of Ryan’s speakership. Spending targets would be in place through the end of 2017.

And when the conservative uproar that's already bubbling in private spills into the public, Ryan can point to Boehner, who will be on his way out the door or already gone, as the author of the deal.

It’s unclear whether Ryan will vote for the agreement, and some of his backers are privately urging him to oppose it, arguing it will help him prove that he is ready to legislate differently.

But it seems unlikely, at least at this point, that conservative furor over the budget proposal would derail Ryan’s bid for speaker. To be sure, the angst is already apparent: During a closed Republican meeting Monday evening, Rep. Curt Clawson (R-Fla.) criticized the possibility of Boehner cutting a deal on major policy changes that will ripple long after he's gone. Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) argued that candidates for speaker must say where they stand on the accord, and how they feel about the agreement being negotiated behind closed doors.

Yet it's the kind of agreement that is born of old-fashioned, actual compromise between President Barack Obama and congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle, sources involved in the talks say. If the package makes it to the House floor — which it could by Wednesday — both sides say it has something for everyone to like. Senate action would come afterward.

Defense hawks will be happy because the agreement could yield more than $30 billion in new military spending over the next two years. Democrats should be pleased because the plan would boost discretionary spending by tens of billions of dollars as well. And conservatives, in theory, should be heartened by changes to entitlement programs. The plan also reduces the deficit, supporters say.

Putting the debt ceiling issue off until after the 2016 election — and with a new president in office — would be especially helpful to Ryan as Republicans were privately worried about their ability to pass a “clean” bill to increase the nation’s borrowing authority. If a fight over a debt increase were to drag out until the current Nov. 3 deadline, the potential of a default could land in Ryan’s lap even as financial markets melted down. The pending plan would avoid that unwelcome scenario for the Ways and Means chairman.

“I don't see how a clean debt ceiling passes this floor,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Monday afternoon. “If you can get some entitlement reform moving this process forward, that would be a very big positive.”

House and Senate leaders were briefing the rank and file about the particulars of the agreement Monday night. Republicans familiar with the agreement are calling it a big win for the party. They say the tweaks to Social Security disability insurance would yield $168 billion in long-term savings, which supporters of the proposal say would represent the most significant revision to the program in decades.

The accord would lock in budget levels for the next two fiscal years. Spending would be increased by $50 billion next year, and $30 billion the year after — split equally between defense and nondefense spending. Another $30 billion-plus would go to the Pentagon in “contingency funding.” Congress would make several alterations to Medicare and Social Security to help pay for the package.

“There is a framework but I would say that it's certainly not locked in, in the sense that there are things that are subject to change depending on what the feedback is,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 3 Senate Republican.