Rep. Paul Ryan lashed out at the big budget pact steamrolling through Congress, criticizing House GOP leaders for cutting the deal behind closed doors without input from his members.
The comments suggest Ryan is trying to align himself with the right a day before he is expected to be nominated by his party to be the next speaker.
“I am reserving judgment on this agreement because, quite frankly, I haven’t seen it yet,” Ryan told CNN on the way into a GOP conference meeting. “I want to see what it looks like on paper.
“About the process I can say this: I think the process stinks. This is not the way to do the people’s business, and under new management, we are not going to do the people’s business this way,” he added. “We are up against a deadline. That’s unfortunate. But going forward, as a conference, we should have been meeting months ago to discuss these things, to have a unified strategy going forward.”
Ryan did meet with House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy Monday hours before the deal was released but he was taken pains to distance himself from it. The deal would increase defense and domestic spending by $80 billion over two years, make changes to the Social Security disability fund and raise the national debt ceiling until March 2017 — taking off the table for Ryan the same fiscal fights that damaged Boehner’s speakership.
Boehner addressed the GOP Conference in one of his last times as speaker Tuesday. GOP lawmakers gave the avid golfer a golf cart as a parting gift with the license plate: “Mr SPKR.”
