Paul Ryan: Health care bill will take time, as GOP learns to govern

WASHINGTON -- A new push to pass a GOP health care bill will take weeks, not days, House Speaker Paul Ryan indicated Wednesday, as the latest talks among Republicans produced no apparent breakthrough.

“We’ve got a couple months at least,” Ryan said in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Wednesday.

“We’ve gotten pretty far in coming together,” he said, “but I also think we’re not there yet — because the stakes are so high, and people are just having to get used to” being the governing party.

Ryan broadly defended his stewardship on the issue and what he portrayed as a leadership style of “nudging” his colleagues, not bullying them.

“Leadership can’t be autocratic. I’ve watched that. It doesn’t work,” said Ryan. “I’m not an arm breaker.”

While discussions between Vice President Mike Pence and House Republicans on health care briefly stirred talk of legislative movement this week, Ryan played down the notion of quick action, saying members were “shopping concepts to each other.” The House begins a two-week recess next week.

At a forum Wednesday hosted by the web site WisPolitics.com, Ryan said of a health care bill, “We can keep working this for weeks now.”

GOP leaders had expressed far more urgency when they scrambled unsuccessfully for votes last month before Ryan pulled the bill.

But in an interview Wednesday with the Journal Sentinel and the Associated Press, Ryan said he had “built cushions into our schedule” to accommodate delays or setbacks.

“The president wanted us to get it going ... we wanted to meet that aggressive time table. But we’ve always had more time, and we’re now using that,” he said.

The health care defeat was a major political blow to Ryan, and polls suggest it has left his public standing in shaky condition.

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In a national survey by Quinnipiac University released Monday, the speaker was viewed favorably by just 28% of voters, and unfavorably by 52%. Only 21% approved of the job Republicans are doing in Congress, while 70% disapproved.

In an earlier poll by Quinnipiac, the GOP health care bill only drew 17% support.

“I’ve long believed we have to do very difficult and challenging things to get this country back on track, and the process of doing this may not be popular at the moment,” Ryan said in the interview. “It’s very disruptive. It’s high stakes, and of course it’s controversial … I am unconcerned about popularity and polling when I’m focused on advancing our principles and policies that we believe are necessary to get the country back on track.”

With difficult issues such as tax reform looming, Ryan said one takeaway from the failure to find consensus among different GOP factions on health care is that,  “We have to talk things out much, much, much more thoroughly.”

He said it was his job to get GOP conservatives and moderates to understand each other’s districts and points of view and “make some concessions to one another in order to govern.”

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But he rejected the idea that there is no fundamental consensus within the GOP on how to replace Obamacare. And he sought to put a positive spin on the defeat, saying that bringing the debate to the cusp of a floor vote clarified where things stood within the Republican caucus.

“My style has always been to let things go. Let you fail a couple of times so you can learn from those experiences … We had to bring it to a head to find out just where we stood … to get people to take positions, to then understand what their positions were, so we could work through those problems and that’s where we are right now.”

Ryan suggested that many of his colleagues have never had to find common ground.

“Two-thirds of our members have never experienced governing before. ... they only knew Obama and ‘fight’ … They come from very Republican districts. Compromising and negotiating and getting to yes and passing legislation is a big lift. It’s going to take time.”

The speaker suggested the arm-twisting approach used by some past leaders was not an effective style or one that he is comfortable with.

“It’s not the Tom DeLay system around here,” he said referring to the former House majority leader from Texas. “I believe in persuading instead of intimidating.”

Ryan said the GOP has to find consensus, using "sort of a bottom-up organic process."

"That’s going to be a little sloppier, it’s going to take a little more time, we’re going to stub our toe from time to time, but I think at the end of the day it makes us a stronger conference,” he said.

At the WisPolitics.com forum, Ryan declined to put odds or an “artificial timeline” on getting a health care bill passed.

Asked by moderator Jeff Mayers if he was “optimistic,” Ryan said he was “hopeful.”

Mayers also asked him if he ever wondered, “what the heck did you get yourself into” when he became speaker.

Ryan said, “No, I knew about it. That’s why I said no four times.”