The last six years in Washington are on track to look like a golden age of cooperation compared to what’s coming if Hillary Clinton wins the White House and Paul Ryan keeps his GOP majority in the House.

The 2016 races are far from over, but the trends, if polls are right, might be irreversible. And for the Clinton and Paul insiders now drafting their bosses’ 2017 agenda, a realization is dawning that the dynamic between these two could determine whether any actual lawmaking happens.


For Clinton, who seems poised to win the presidency with her position on major Democratic policy priorities squishy at best and unknown at worst, progressives are pre-programmed for disappointment. And on Ryan’s side, while handicappers still show him retaining a Republican majority, the 2016 season will have delivered a different kind of conference after Democrats pick off many of the moderates who gave him the leeway to keep the Freedom Caucus in check, even as he says privately and publicly that he believes rebuilding his party is about passing bills again.

They’re interested in making moves and have all the political reasons to do so. But while sources close to both camps say Clinton and Ryan would probably get along and might even agree on a handful of priority issues, they would be coming into their shared mission with a relationship that so far has been nothing more than handshakes and pleasantries and a few conversations about State Department funding while she was secretary and he was running the Budget Committee.

Add in Ryan’s expected run for president in 2020 and the thought that either the first-term president or her likely future challenger would share credit with the person who might soon be starring in the other’s campaign commercials leads to rapid onset depression for some of the aides closest to these two principals.

“The next four years are going to totally suck,” said a person close to Ryan.

“It certainly won't be easy, but the Framers intended divided government to be hard,” said a more optimistic Miguel Rodriguez, an aide to Clinton in the Senate and the State Department who was later President Barack Obama’s legislative affairs director.

Washington veterans often talk a new president’s honeymoon period, expecting the losing side to act defeated for a while. This year is no different, as Democrats and Republicans are already talking about criminal justice reform, infrastructure spending tied to tax reform, with maybe a dash of entitlement reform to sweeten the deal. They talk about immigration reform, too, especially after the last 15 months of Donald Trump.

“She is not just campaigning as the alternative to Donald Trump, she is campaigning on a very clear progressive agenda, and the two items that she has advertised that she wants to focus on in the first 100 days—infrastructure and immigration—are two consensus issues that independents and Republicans, all things being equal, should be able to rally around,” said Clinton campaign press secretary Brian Fallon, who said her focus remains getting to 270 electoral votes while her transition team turns to any planning for what’s possibly beyond that.

That’s the theory, anyway.

“Paul’s the kind of guy who wants to get things done. But when you talk about ‘things,’ what does ‘things’ mean?” said the person close to Ryan. “That’s when it gets a little stickier. He has no interest in implementing her Bernie Sanders-esque agenda.”

Take tax reform, which sounds like the kind of thing that everyone could get behind—until everyone involved starts haggling over the particulars, of which there are many, none of them simple. Immigration reform would seem like an obvious lay-up, except to anyone who’s been paying attention to the politics that kept it frozen long after Obama and then-House Speaker John Boehner both started talking about what an obvious lay-up it is.

More likely, many involved worry: a constant lurch between ultimatum deadlines and government shutdown threats.

Democrats planning the years ahead are watching how Ryan handles the Trans Pacific Partnership in the expected lame duck session as a signal of what next year could be like. Trade is a key area where the tea partiers have split from traditional Republicanism, and it’s also been a priority of Ryan personally. But in order to get a deal, Ryan would have to hand a desperately desired win to Obama on his way out the door, and do it just two or three weeks before turning around and asking his more Freedom Caucus-empowered conference to re-elect him as speaker, preferably without the kind of protest votes Boehner faced two years ago.

This is the kind of thing that has Democrats and Republicans joking that Ryan should be praying Trump helps him lose the majority, setting him up instead as an accountability-free opposition leader who can attack without having to provide any true alternatives.

Then there’s the Supreme Court. Obama’s hoping that hard news for Republicans coming out of Senate races means they’ll confirm Merrick Garland, but if not, Clinton would have an agenda-devouring nomination hanging over her from day one, on top of whatever goes less than cordially as she tries to get her whole new Cabinet in place.

The preliminary Clinton transition effort has been starting to think about how to get to a policy agenda. High on their minds, though, according to people familiar with the ongoing conversations, is facing the bigger question of how to build the trust with Ryan to do anything.

Ryan, meanwhile, according to the person close to him, hasn’t been talking about Clinton much at all, preserving his party credibility as staying focused on backing the nominee he endorsed for president and planning a campaign travel schedule for his House candidates through the fall.

Clintonites eagerly point out that she’d come into office with more relationships on the Hill and more interest in nurturing them than Obama ever had. She also has a different mindset from Obama—he appealed to Boehner’s reason and sense of history, while she’s more of an avid horsetrader willing to factor in the political situation Ryan might find himself in and accept his beating up on her in public to satisfy the tea partiers if that means getting through a vote.

Ryan allies are already counting on that difference.

“If Secretary Clinton wins the White House and Paul chooses to stay on as speaker, Paul’s going to reach out to her and see what they can do together,” said Rep. Reid Ribble (R-Wisc.), a Ryan friend and ally. “And if she governs at all like her husband did when he was in office, there may be an opportunity to do some of these things.”

Giddy Democrats dancing on Trump’s ravaging of the GOP say the burden’s all on Ryan.

“Does he want to get some bills passed, take some credit for things and then leave, or does he want to just be Dr. No and assume he’s running for president in 2020 and try and make her a failure?” said Steve Elmendorf, a veteran of the Hill and now lobbyist who talks frequently with the top brass in Brooklyn, and believes his own party’s left should “understand what she’s dealing with” and cut her some slack to negotiate. “If she’s a failure, he’s a failure, nothing happens, his speakership was nothing. And how is that a platform to run for president?”

But if the 2020 race is any kind of a factor—and Ryan’s circle expects it to be, at least in political conversation—there’s really no hope at all, said Mike Ferguson, a former congressman from New Jersey who’s worked with both, and was willing to look ahead despite being a member of Trump’s transition team.

“If that’s the case, you can just shut it all down. There’s just nothing,” Ferguson said. “If there’s a real prospect for a campaign between the two of them for two or three years down the road, forget it. Why would either of them do anything?”

Or there’s always the chance that Clinton would find a way to calm her left, Ryan would find a way to calm his right, and they’d find a couple of big bills that could bring along enough Democrats to make up for Republican defections.

“Seems like he’s got the Boehner choice: work with Democrats and lose his job, or you don’t work with Democrats and you don’t get anything done. I don’t think that’s Paul Ryan either,” said Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.). “So good luck to him.”

Rachael Bade contributed reporting.