WASHINGTON — House Republicans, struggling to regroup and reunify their conference in the face of a leadership crisis, achieved no new clarity Friday about who might step forward to claim the speaker's gavel as attention remained focused on Rep. Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, who has said repeatedly he does not want the job.
Ryan, the Republican nominee for vice president in 2012 and now chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, is viewed by many House Republicans as perhaps the only person who could bring the conference back together, after the resignation of Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio and a stunning decision Thursday by the majority leader, Kevin McCarthy of California, to drop his bid for speaker.
Both Boehner and McCarthy have been trying to cajole Ryan into running and several lawmakers leaving a conference meeting in the basement of the Capitol said they believed Ryan was softening his position and would return to Wisconsin to discuss the situation with his family and closest advisers.
"He's the consensus candidate at this point," said Rep. Darrell Issa of California, who was standing in a hallway outside the meeting and whose comment reflected the extent to which many Republicans have refused to accept Ryan's own insistence that he is not, in fact, a candidate.
"He's both vetted and he has experience of chairing not one but now two committees," Issa said, referring to Ryan's prior role as chairman of the Budget Committee. "And so what you are hearing in there is the preparatory work for a more successful conference once we find a new speaker, but you are also hearing people universally or nearly universally asking Paul Ryan to go home over the weekend and reconsider."
Ryan, upon entering and exiting the meeting, made no comment, which in itself some of his colleagues viewed as notable given his previously forceful denials of interest.
The leadership void in the House is playing out as Congress braces for a series of major battles over crucial fiscal issues, including a need to raise the federal debt ceiling by early next month, and the need for an agreement on a broad spending plan to avoid a government shutdown by Dec. 11.
Several lawmakers described the mood in the meeting as positive, almost convivial, even as House Republicans grappled with their most serious leadership crisis since 1998 when Rep. Bob Livingston, who had been chosen to replace Speaker Newt Gingrich, suddenly withdrew amid revelations about an extramarital affair.
In the meeting Friday morning, Boehner, who had been hounded for nearly his entire time as speaker by the far-right flank of his conference, reassured rank-and-file lawmakers that he would remain until a new speaker was chosen. That suggested he could stay as speaker and in Congress, beyond his previously announced retirement date at the end of October, though Boehner said he believed a new speaker could be chosen before then.
Professing himself "as shocked as you were" about McCarthy's decision, Boehner told House Republicans that he had postponed the vote "to allow the shock to wear off a bit," according to a Republican official in the room.
Boehner urged lawmakers not to let the leadership tumult interfere with their work. "We've got to continue to address the people's priorities; this institution cannot grind to a halt," he said.
And while he said he believed a speaker could be elected by the end of October, he added: "But at the end of the day, that's really up to the people in this room."
During the meeting, the Republicans also agreed to form a task force to address a debate over internal rules.
The hard-right lawmakers who had pushed for Boehner's ouster have made a long list of demands for changes in how the House operates, including major adjustments to the composition of a committee that decides other committee chairmanships, and also changes in the way legislation and amendments can be brought to the floor.
Those demands, as well as others regarding various leadership posts, apparently contributed to McCarthy's decision to withdraw, even though he had been the heavy favorite to succeed Boehner. The Freedom Caucus, a group of about 40 hard-right lawmakers, had announced its support in the speaker's race for Rep. Daniel Webster, a little-known lawmaker from Florida.
Their bloc of votes essentially made it certain that McCarthy would be short of the 218 votes needed on the floor of the House for his election later in the month, and that he would have had to spend several weeks trying to meet the group's demands to win their backing.
Members of the Freedom Caucus said they would continue to support Webster for the time being, though several said they would be happy to meet with Ryan and consider his candidacy.
Issa said Ryan could not avoid conferring with colleagues over the speakership.
"Paul Ryan has been meeting with people nonstop because too many of us have his phone number and know where he works out in the morning," Issa said, "And he is obviously dealing with the fact that this isn't the job he asked for or even wants but may be a job that the conference needs him to take."
Even as supporters of McCarthy, including many veteran lawmakers, expressed dismay at the disarray, critics of the party establishment were headed into Friday's meeting hopeful for an opportunity to turn a new page.
The gulf between mainstream Republicans and the hard-liners who demanded Boehner's resignation is now so great that one veteran Republican even raised the possibility of teaming up with Democrats to elect a new speaker — an idea that would normally be unthinkable in modern U.S. politics, in which such elections normally break on party lines.
"The question is: Who's going to be the next person to step up?" said Rep. Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, who is serving his sixth term.
"In order to pass any bill around this place, everybody knows we need to assemble a bipartisan coalition," he said, pointing to a stopgap spending measure that was adopted last week with more Democratic votes than Republican ones.
"Same thing will happen on the debt ceiling, budget agreement, omnibus, there will be a bipartisan coalition," Dent continued. "I suspect at some point if we can't get 218 Republicans to vote for a speaker candidate, we will have to assemble a bipartisan coalition to elect a speaker."
While potentially appealing to voters disgusted with partisan rancor and paralysis in Congress, such a prospect still remains highly unlikely. But Dent's remark highlighted the frustration among many Republicans that their caucus is so fractured that serving as speaker — a post second in the line of succession to the presidency — has little appeal.
While Ryan may ultimately yield to the entreaties of his colleagues, he has ample reasons not to want the gavel. It is hardly clear that the job will be any easier for him than it was for Boehner, especially because conservatives are demanding changes in how the House operates that will only diminish the speaker's power. And Ryan's prospective presidential ambitions would not be enhanced by serving as speaker.
In addition, Ryan, who has a deep interest in policy, now has his dream job on the Ways and Means Committee.
"Ryan said to me all the time, 'All I want to be is chairman of Ways and Means,' and he has it," said Bill Thomas, a retired representative from California whom McCarthy replaced.
Thomas, in a telephone interview, said the hard-liners in the Republican Party were making it impossible for their colleagues to govern.
"Any time when you try to do something in the House, it's through a coalition of the willing," he said. "Being not for something, being on the Committee to Help Stamp Out Committees simply is a nonsensical position."
However, many of the requests that the Freedom Caucus, a group of about 40 conservatives, has made in exchange for its votes for a new speaker would decentralize leadership in the House and make it even more difficult for speakers to pull together such coalitions.
In Boehner's case, he has had to turn to Democrats to pass spending legislation to prevent a government shutdown. A similar situation looms within just a few weeks when the government will reach its limit on borrowing and Congress will have to vote on raising the debt ceiling.
Some conservative Republicans have said they will vote to raise the debt ceiling only if it is attached to significant reductions in mandatory spending programs, such as Social Security and Medicare. While Boehner could potentially lift the ceiling once again with the help of Democrats, such a move would only worsen the fissures among Republicans.
Rep. Peter Roskam of Illinois had urged Republicans to come to a consensus on a number of issues, including policy priorities and potential changes in how the House operates, before moving to a vote on the new speaker, saying the party needs "a plan, not a person."
Roskam in a statement Thursday voiced his own surprise at McCarthy's decision to withdraw and issued a renewed call for consensus. "It's clear we can't move forward until we unite around a shared definition of success," he said.
His view was echoed by Gingrich, the former speaker, who said Republicans needed to slow down and regroup. In a telephone interview, Gingrich said, "They should take a deep breath and have a series of daylong meetings to really listen to each other for a while."