"Mr. Ryan said the speaker’s job was to facilitate consensus, not to be 'dictator of the House.'" How about tossing in some compromise, Ryan?

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Paul Ryan Says He Won’t Work With Obama on Immigration Reform
By Nicholas Fando, November 1, 2015

Speaker Paul D. Ryan said in a series of televised interviews on Sunday that he would not work with the Obama administration on changing immigration policy, effectively pushing off the issue to at least 2017.

“Look, I think it would be a ridiculous notion to try and work on an issue like this with a president we simply cannot trust on this issue,” Mr. Ryan said in an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “He tried to go it alone, circumventing the legislative process with his executive orders, so that is not in the cards.”

The message from Mr. Ryan, who was elected on Thursday, signaled an antagonism toward the White House that both echoed his predecessor, John A. Boehner, and is likely to appeal to the party conservatives who forced Mr. Boehner’s resignation.

Mr. Ryan taped five Sunday morning news shows, where he laid out his agenda for unifying his party and his approach to relationships with congressional colleagues, Mr. Obama and Republican presidential candidates.

When asked to comment on the statements about immigration, a White House spokesman referred to a news briefing Friday by Josh Earnest, the press secretary, who described the speaker’s stance as “a source of deep disappointment.”

Mr. Ryan said that if the Republicans were to be a successful opposition party between now and the presidential election, they would need to become an aggressive “proposition party,” laying out a clear policy vision with alternatives to Democrats, like plans for reforming the tax code and replacing the Affordable Care Act.

“We have been too timid for too long around here,” Mr. Ryan said on ABC’s “This Week.” “We have been bold on tactics but not on policy, not on an agenda. We have to show people what our alternatives are, and that is the kind of leadership I think people are hungry for here.”

Such proactive agenda-setting, Mr. Ryan added, will help avert the kind of brinkmanship over spending that was common under Mr. Boehner’s leadership. It also requires that congressional leaders be “honest with people up front about what it is you can and cannot achieve,” Mr. Ryan said in response to a question on CNN’s “State of the Union” about defunding Planned Parenthood.

Mr. Ryan repeatedly made it clear that he would take an approach different from that of Mr. Boehner, whose almost five-year tenure as speaker was rife with Republican Party infighting. In a nod to the conservatives who have demanded that power in the House be decentralized, Mr. Ryan said the speaker’s job was to facilitate consensus, not to be “dictator of the House.”

“I don’t think leadership should be trying to, you know, covet power and write legislation,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “I think I want to have a more participatory process, which is really what the founders envisioned the House to look like. And that is something that so many of us, myself included, have been concerned about the way this place has been run.”

Mr. Ryan, the Republican Party’s 2012 vice-presidential nominee, said he would remain neutral in the Republican presidential nomination race. The Republican presidential aspirants, he added, have offered a model for the kind of policy alternatives he hopes to see in the House.

“I looked at that stage and said every one of these people would be a far better president than Hillary Clinton,” he said on ABC.

Asked by “Fox News Sunday” how long he expected his honeymoon period as speaker to last, Mr. Ryan offered a quick joke.

“About 35 minutes,” he said.
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