Paul Ryan's record: huge role in debt debate but few legislative wins

There’s also Ryan’s work with Sen. Ron Wyden (D) of Oregon on what has come to be known as the Ryan-Wyden route to reforming Medicare: allowing seniors to opt into a system of “premium support,” where they would receive government checks to help them buy private health insurance, or stay in traditional Medicare. 

His personal connection with lawmakers doesn’t stop at the chamber doors. A bipartisan group of lawmakers including Rep. Jim Cooper (D) of Tennessee and Rep. Heath Shuler (D) of North Carolina are regulars at grueling morning workout sessions hosted by Ryan, an exercise buff and former personal trainer.

But that personal connection with lawmakers stands in contrast to what even a colleague who has worked most with him, Representative Van Hollen, sees as an unwillingness to cut a deal on big issues.

"I like Paul Ryan personally and have enjoyed the very sharp, but always civil, debates we have had in the House Budget Committee on the future direction of our country,” said Van Hollen, in a statement after news of Ryan’s addition to the Republican presidential ticket.

"It’s important not to mistake civility with a willingness to compromise,” he added, in an interview Monday morning on MSNBC’s "Daily Rundown."

That unwillingness to compromise means that Ryan has had little impact on the nation’s actual fiscal trajectory, despite his budget’s high profile on Capitol Hill. 

The number of Democratic senators who agree with him on a potential Medicare fix (one, Senator Wyden) is eclipsed by the five Senate Republicans who helped a united Democratic front defeat his budget earlier this year. In the House, 14 Republicans voted against his budget, with zero Democrats in favor.

Less noticed than his budget plans but also infuriating to Democratic lawmakers was Ryan’s proposal to head off the budget-slashing sequester, or automatic spending cuts for each of the next 10 years agreed to in a 2011 deal to lift the nation’s debt ceiling. His proposal, which Democrats castigated during Budget Committee hearings, cut deep into social services spending and the retirement plans of government employees, while exempting the Pentagon from any reductions.

That legislation, approved with no Democratic support, was dead on arrival in the Senate.

Ryan served on a presidential commission jn 2011 to study the nation’s debt and deficits, and he voted with two of his House GOP colleagues and several Democrats against the final plan. (By contrast, two GOP Senate conservatives on the commission, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Mike Crapo of Idaho, backed the plan.) That plan, which came to be known as Bowles-Simpson after the commission’s leaders, is regarded as a blueprint for bipartisan compromise on the issue of debt and deficits in a way that Ryan’s own budget has never been.

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