Hands on.
Via McClatchy:
Vice President Mike Pence is moving into House Speaker Paul Ryan’s neighborhood, creating a new power center where GOP lawmakers can lobby the White House and plot strategy without Ryan.
Republicans in the House of Representatives like Ryan, but they love Pence, a conservative favorite who was an Indiana congressman from 2001 to 2013 and widely regarded as a rising star. He was well-liked, rising to Republican conference chair, a top leadership role, before leaving to run for governor of Indiana.
Now Pence is vice president, an office that also means he’s president of the Senate, able to break ties. It traditionally does not mean he gets a House office.
But he will. He’ll have a place on the first floor of the Capitol, one floor down from Ryan’s and down the hall from Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s, an area where lawmakers can easily reach the vice president.
“He feels his history comes from the House,” said Rep. Ted Budd, a first-term North Carolina Republican. “He’s going to be a great help.”
“He understands the intricacies of the House,” added Rep. Mike Bost, a second-term Illinois Republican.
And perhaps most important, he’s seen as a staunch, unyielding conservative. When he left Congress, his lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union was 99. Ryan’s at the time was 91.
The Wisconsin Republican, a reluctant recruit as speaker, was acceptable to the renegade conservatives who helped push Republican Speaker John Boehner of Ohio out of office in 2015.
Neither Ryan’s office, nor Pence’s, would comment on the vice president’s role on Capitol Hill. But when introducing Pence at the Republican congressional retreat in Philadelphia last month, Ryan described him as “the glue that keeps us all together.”
“The vice president sharpens all of us,” Ryan said. “He makes all of us better.”
While Ryan has solid conservative credentials, Pence’s are even stronger.
As governor of Indiana, Pence pushed for changes to Medicaid, the federal-state health care program for lower-income people and those with disabilities, that have become a model for other Republican governors. Among those changes: Beneficiaries have to pay a small premium to receive coverage.
HT: sowsear1