For House conservatives, blocking Ryan’s rise poses risks

On Wednesday night more than two-thirds of the Freedom Caucus voted back to Ryan – just short of an official endorsement, but Ryan said afterward he planned to move forward with his bid and continue talking to other House Republicans.

Conservative party members were refusing to fall in line behind Mr. Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin who was the 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate, after he said he would run under certain conditions to replace Boehner.

Caucus members said that while that endorsement still technically stands, their support for Ryan supersedes it. The Freedom Caucus announcement came as Ryan was making the rounds to the three major House caucuses whose endorsements he was seeking as a condition for running for speaker. With their support the chief remaining question over whether he’d seek the job, the group’s vote essentially meant the speaker’s post is his for the taking when the House formally chooses a new leader next week. She says Representative Webster “is a fine man” and “would be an extraordinary speaker”.

If the endorsement of Rep. Luis (the illegal immigrant’s best friend) Gutierrez was not enough to demonstrate that Rep. Paul Ryan is a bad choice for Speaker of the House, then surely Sen.

The 40-some members of the Freedom Caucus deemed changes to the motion to vacate the chair a “non-starter”, says Rep. Raul Labrador. But in a written statement afterward, Ryan erased any doubt that he considered their vote a green light to run. Paul is a policy entrepreneur who has developed conservative reforms dealing with a wide variety of subjects, and he has promised to be an ideas-focused Speaker who will advance limited government principles and devolve power to the membership. And a few members said they were anxious that Ryan did not really want the job. His path to the Speakership is clear: Paul Ryan did not seek this position.

174-c-23-(Jerry Bodlander, AP correspondent)-“forced Boehner’s resignation”-AP correspondent Jerry Bodlander reports the outgoing Speaker thinks his fractured caucus will support the consensus candidate for Speaker”. He won support from about 70 percent of caucus members.

Conservatives outside the House are not united in their support for Ryan, either. “He was very candid in saying, ‘Look I’m very happy as chairman of Ways and Means”.

While the Freedom Caucus vote doesn’t qualify as a full embrace of Ryan, “the support represents the first thaw in the increasingly frosty relationship between tea party conservatives and establishment Republicans”, the Washington Post notes.

“I’m not sure that Paul Ryan could walk on water today”, Rep. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., who had supported Chaffetz, said after hearing Ryan’s pitch Tuesday.

Ribble and others acknowledge that opposing Ryan could help Freedom Caucus members back home because many of their House districts are solidly Republican and deeply conservative.

“No matter who is speaker, they can not be successful with this weapon pointed at them all the time”, Ryan’s spokesman, Brendan Buck, said Tuesday.

A few names have been tossed into the ring, but when majority leader and heir apparent, Kevin McCarthy dropped out of the race on October 8, it added even more uncertainty to the future of the House leadership.