The United States House has a new speaker: Republican Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. His election comes in the wake of a budget deal to fund the government for two years. Congressman Donald Payne, Jr. joins NJTV News Correspondent Michael Hill from Washington D.C. to talk about the new speaker and the passing of the budget.
Payne said that he hopes the passing of today’s budget signify a new ability to get things done in Congress. “I think Speaker Boehner did a very good job of getting this bipartisan agreement together, along with the house Democrats and the White House, to give us certainty for at least the next two year,” he said. “It really was cleaning, as he put it, cleaning the barn for speaker Ryan. He didn’t want him to have to walk into this predicament in his first few days of speaker.”
The effects of ending the sequester are such that the agreement removes 90 percent of the sequester that the president was asking for. “It has a great impact on this nation moving forward,” Payne said, “so I think that is a great move in the right direction, and gives us some economic certainty for the next two years.”
Hard line conservatives are still unhappy with the budget deal. He said that he hopes cooler heads will prevail when it comes to getting the budget through the Senate? “A lot of times, you know, with the bipartisan agreement, we didn’t get everything we wanted, they didn’t get everything they wanted, so that’s a bipartisan agreement. And we’re hoping that the same thing evolves in the Senate to move this country forward,” he said.
The budget prevented increases to medicare recipients and shored up social security for people with disabilities. Payne said that we need to deal with the long term. These solutions are all short fixes that will get us through the next two years. “We’ll have to work on the process, but the bipartisan agreement, as I stated, is giving us certainty, at least into 2017,” he said. “That bodes well for our seniors knowing what they can do in terms of their medicare and their benefits remaining the same and not going up. I think in that respect it’s a good start, but we need to deal with the long term fix.”
All Democrats in the House voted for this budget deal, however a lot of republicans did not. What does this mean for the newly elected Speaker Ryan? Payne said we’ll have to “wait and see” if the new speaker can produce the same bipartisan cooperation that was seen today with the passing of the budget. “It’s really a wait and see. His speech was promising, but he talked about going back to regular order and also giving the committees more power on the legislation that they craft,” Payne said. “So, it’s really a wait and see. It’s the old adage when you’re running for an office; you have all these promises that you’re going to keep, and then you get inside and you see what you’re up against and then reality hits. So, we’re going to see if reality hits speaker Ryan.”