The following article by James Hohmann with Breanne Deppisch was posted on the Washington Post website May 11, 2017:
THE BIG IDEA:
NEW ALBANY, Ohio—Paul Ryan desperately does not want the dark cloud hanging over the White House to distract congressional Republicans from advancing their ambitious policy agenda. Yesterday showed that he may no longer have a choice.
Donald Trump called the Speaker of the House to give him a heads up that he was going to fire FBI director James Comey, yet Ryan still waited more than 24 hours after the news broke to make any public statement.
Repeating the pattern of last year’s campaign, the president sucked up all the oxygen and put Ryan on the defensive. The 2012 GOP nominee for vice president rolled up in a long motorcade to a plant here in Central Ohio as part of an effort to jumpstart his push for comprehensive tax reform.
But Ryan could not escape the Comey news, and some Republicans back in Washington freely acknowledged that the growing scandal will make passing big-ticket legislation, including tax reform, much harder.
The congressman from Wisconsin sniffed a canister of walleye bait that gets packaged at the facility. “I spray my lures,” he explained to his tour guide. As cameramen pleaded with him to say anything on the Comey news, he replied: “I’m not doing questions right now.”
At a roundtable with small-business owners later, he said: “I want to tell my friends in the press I’ll be making some statements later about the questions that they all have. At another time. But, right now, we want to talk with the people here about the issues that they are facing.”
The president firing an FBI director who was overseeing an investigation into his campaign’s possible collusion with the Russians is apparently not one of those issues.
Finally, after dodging the reporters who flew here to see him, he went on Fox News last night and offered support for Trump’s decision. “It is entirely within the president’s role and authority to relieve him and that’s what he did,” Ryan said. “The president made a presidential decision.”
The Ohio events offered a revealing window into the 47-year-old’s thinking. He explained that there is currently “a once-in-a-generation opportunity” to simplify the tax code and cut rates for corporations. The last time the system got overhauled, he noted, was the year he got his first driver’s license. This has been his dream since coming to Congress two decades ago, and unified Republican control of the government has created a window to get it done. Left unsaid was that the Russia/Comey story, if allowed to get legs, threatens to prematurely close that window and stop him from getting what he cares about most.
Mitch McConnell, Ryan’s counterpart in the Senate, also chose to defend Trump, even as some of his members expressed concerns. The Speaker and the Senate Majority Leader each reiterated opposition to an independent investigation or special prosecutor. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Ryan, saying that the congressional intelligence committees should take the lead.
Both GOP leaders have been around town long enough to understand the risks of empowering an outside prosecutor who cannot be reined in by the president’s appointees. They saw what Ken Starr did to Bill Clinton and Patrick Fitzgerald did to Scooter Libby – and how those investigations brought Washington to a standstill.
— “Only one GOP senator — John McCain — has definitively said he’d support an independent inquiry, a position he has held for months,” per Amber Phillips, who is now keeping a whip count. “At least one more GOP senator, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), is open to the idea. But supporters of an independent investigation have a long way to go before they have a majority in either chamber.”
— Stipulating that they can withstand pressure for a special prosecutor, there are already strong indications that the fallout from firing Comey will make it harder to put points on the board:
- “This scandal is going to go on,” McCain told a group of security experts after the Comey news broke. “This is a centipede. I guarantee you there will be more shoes to drop. I can just guarantee it. There’s just too much information that we don’t have that will be coming out.” (Josh Rogin got permission from the Arizona senator to let him public comments that were initially made off-the-record.)
- “The only thing that is guaranteed right now is that the sense of chaos will continue, not only in law enforcement but also in Congress,” GOP strategist Kevin Madden, a veteran of Capitol Hill and the Justice Department, tells Karen Tumulty. “Every single lawmaker in the House and Senate is going to be pressured to take a stance.”
- “Comprehensive tax reform just got an awful lot harder, as did nearly every other challenge facing the nation, both foreign and domestic: infrastructure, health care, immigration, trade and others,” Michael Bloomberg argues in an op-ed for his eponymous news organization.
- Several Republican lawmakers made the same point to Politico: “I think it already has,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). “Anytime you have a controversy like this, at least in the short-term, it will be a hindrance going forward with legislation — that’s just the reality,” added Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.). “Health care is tough enough,” noted Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.).
— Comey’s termination has prompted some Republican rank-and-file to show additional independence:
- House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), who is leaving Congress, asked the DOJ Inspector in a letter last night to investigate why Comey was fired.
- The Senate Intelligence Committee issued a subpoena yesterday to force former national security adviser Michael Flynn to turn over documents related to the panel’s probe. “It is the first subpoena the committee has announced in the course of its Russia investigation — a step Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) was long reluctant to take,” Karoun Demirjian reports. “But the chairman began signaling this week that if Trump surrogates did not turn over requested materials to the committee by Tuesday — a deadline that some missed — he and Vice Chairman Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) might begin issuing subpoenas. ‘Everything has been voluntary up to this point, and we’ve interviewed a lot of people, and I want to continue to do it in a voluntary fashion,’ Burr said. ‘But if in fact the production of things that we need are not provided, then we have a host of tools.’”
- Last night, McCain and Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) came out against Trump’s nominee for U.S. trade representative. “Unfortunately, your confirmation process has failed to reassure us that you understand NAFTA’s positive economic benefits to our respective states and the nation as a whole,” they said, imperiling his hopes of making it through.
— Democrats are already slowing down the Senate to retaliate. Convincing eight of them to vote for legislation Trump wants becomes harder with each passing day. Even the senators from red states Trump carried overwhelmingly, like North Dakota, West Virginia and Montana, feel less pressure than they did a few weeks ago.
- This was a major factor in the Senate unexpectedly voting down a resolution yesterday to repeal an Obama-era environmental regulation restricting methane emissions from drilling operations on public lands. Democratic votes that GOP whips were counting on didn’t materialize at the last minute. It is the first time since Trump’s election that Republicans failed in their attempt to use the Congressional Review Act to overturn something Obama did. (Juliet Eilperin and Chelsea Harvey have more.)
- To press for a special prosecutor, Senate Democrats plan to begin slowing down the process of confirming lower-level nominees. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) put a hold yesterday on Sigal Mandelker, a Trump nominee for the Treasury Department. Wyden said he would maintain the hold until the agency provides lawmakers with more documents related to Russia and its dealings with Trump. Republicans can override Wyden, but it will eat up valuable floor time. (Don’t forget: Democrats will use the tax reform debate to score more points against Trump for refusing to release his tax returns.)
- As another form of protest, Democrats forced the postponement of some committee hearings yesterday.
View the post here.