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Groton Daily Independent
Thursday, Dec. 21, 2017 ~ Vol. 25 - No. 165 ~ 31 of 44
up debris before reopening the freeway that typically sees about 60,000 cars a day. The train, with 85 passengers and crew members, was making the inaugural run along a fast, new 15-mile bypass route.
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Associated Press writer Michael Balsamo in Los Angeles, Sally Ho in Seattle, Michael Sisak in Philadel- phia, Gillian Flaccus in Portland, Rachel La Corte in Olympia, Washington, and Manuel Valdes in DuPont, Washington contributed to this report.
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For complete coverage of the deadly derailment, click here: https://www.apnews.com/tag/TrainDerailment
Ryan savors tax bill win, but coming ghts could roil GOP By ALAN FRAM, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — It was a victory lap so irresistible that Speaker Paul Ryan did it twice.
When the House approved the $1.5 trillion Republican tax bill Tuesday and again Wednesday with minor changes, it was a beaming Ryan who emphatically pounded the gavel, announced the vote and applauded his bellowing GOP colleagues.
The moment put lawmakers on the cusp of shipping the measure to President Donald Trump and achieving one of Ryan’s — and his party’s — long-cherished goals. Since entering the House in 1999 as a 28-year-old whose resume ranged from tness trainer to congressional aide, Ryan has evolved into a dominant GOP voice on tax and budget issues.
Few dispute that the Wisconsin Republican can claim the tax bill’s passage as a personal triumph. But in a business that often cares more about the next battle than the last one, the coming few days and the 2018 election year loom as a complicated and risky time for Ryan.
To ward off a Christmas-season or January government shutdown and win defense spending boosts, GOP leaders will eventually need a compromise with Democrats demanding domestic program increases and an immigration deal. That could anger his party’s most conservative members, who helped push pre- vious Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, into early retirement in 2015 when they decided he was too prone to cut bipartisan agreements.
“I can’t imagine that a historic tax reform package would be enough credit to stop backlash from a bad spending and immigration bill that gets put on the House oor,” Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., leader of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, said in an interview Tuesday. “It’s just not the way that politics happen. They’re viewed as two separate things.”
Up next will be the 2018 agenda, which Ryan envisions focusing on squeezing savings from bene t pro- grams that moderates from competitive districts are leery of touching. Then comes November’s midterm elections in which Trump’s unpopularity means the GOP faces a real chance of losing House and Senate control.
“He’s got to hold the House,” said former Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., who once led the House GOP’s campaign efforts. “At the end of the day, part of the report card of leaders is they’ve got to re-elect their members.” For now, Ryan is relishing congressional approval of the tax bill, which Trump is certain to sign. His desire to revamp the code was evident in 1998, when as congressman-elect he complained during a C- SPAN interview that existing laws were inhibiting practices “that make America great,” two decades before
Trump made similar words famous.
“I am very pleased with how far we pushed the art of the possible,” Ryan said Tuesday in an interview
with The Associated Press.
With a tricky 2018 approaching, speculation has arisen that ush from victory, Ryan would leave Con-
gress after the tax legislation becomes law or after next year’s elections. He’s tried squelching that talk, though in a less-than-airtight way.
“I’m not going anywhere anytime soon, and just let’s leave that thing at that,” he told reporters. Davis, the former Virginia GOP congressman, says it would be a “huge mistake” for Ryan to depart before