An Interview with Speaker Paul Ryan

Hey, man, oh, you do it. I'm doing well. Move on, folks. Mr.

Seagulls. How you doing? Say right here. Mr.

Speaker. Hey, man. Oh, yeah. Welcome home.

Good. It's good to be home. Yeah, it's good to be home. Thanks.

Thanks, everybody. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, everybody. Appreciate it.

Good to be home. Good to be home. I'm working. Can you hear me?

Okay. All right. I heard you were pushing beer carts on Saturday night, too, and wearing a beer shirt. How is that infinity war with my kids and my gods?

Oh, you were. You were. My hair was black. I was in better shape.

I don't know how you find time to stay in shape, do whatever you do, but I won't use that as an excuse. That's great to have you here. Thank you very much. Obviously, you've been a friend of the weekly standard for you.

Since it started. Since it started early, early days. Let me jump in. I really don't mean to put you on the spot right away, but there's obviously a very controversial personnel decision in the news, and I'd like to just dispense with it right away.

What do you make of Jordy Nelson's departure from the package? We all adore him. We love him. We give us great memories, but there was a salary cap issue, and they wanted to free up the salary cap and get some younger talent.

It was kind of a bell check like move, and I understand the intellectual side behind it, but the emotional attachment is hard for us. He's not the Raiders. At least he didn't go to Minneapolis or Chicago, so that's basically what I care about it. Like some other former traitors.

I mean, that's not going to name any names, Brett Favre. No, that's good. So it really comes down to a deficit issue for you, essentially saying, leave to you to make a physical responsibility case. Do you think about salary caps?

Do you think about talents? That's good. Did you have a chance to look at the Packers' draft? I did.

People were asking me, what are you hoping for the draft? And I kept saying, cornerbacks and defensive ends. I don't know if we're going to do three, four knockers, dumbkeepers is gone, but I was hoping for defensive ends and cornerbacks. What do we get?

The first two picks are cornerbacks. Yeah, good ones. Yeah, good ones. So I'm excited.

The first guy, Jair, he runs a 4-3-8. He's going to be the fastest guy on the team. The day he steps on the field. And so what if he's 5'10?

The guy runs a 4-3-8? I'll take it. He'll probably be a good return. Well, he's getting comparisons to Sam Shields.

Yeah, exactly. I didn't watch him. He went to Louisville, right? I don't think I watched him once this last year, but he is the same shields like player.

Getting a 4-3 guy in the backfield, that's fantastic. We'll take it. The other guy. So I'm pleased with the draft, actually.

It's exactly what I thought we needed. Yeah. And they potentially could step in this year. That's right.

That's right. Well, that's a wrap. You came to hear us talk about the Packers, though. So everybody, thank you very much for coming.

Appreciate it. Yeah. So let's get to the other personnel question the news. You recently fired House Chaplain Patrick Conroy.

News reports suggest that you told the Republican Conference on Friday that this was about pastoral concerns. I just told the news media, the New York Times and others, that it was not about pastoral concerns and was related to politics. Yeah. First, let me just say a couple things.

As Speaker of the House, one of your responsibilities is to be a guardian of the institution. It's a responsibility I take very seriously, and you guys sometimes have to make decisions on behalf of the institution that may not be politically popular. Father Conroy is a good man, and I'm grateful for his many years of service to the House. This has nothing to do.

This is not about politics or prayers. It was about pastoral services. And a number of our members felt like the pastoral services were not being adequately served or offered. And the decision on behalf of the House, on behalf of making sure that we can have adequate pastoral services.

And we're going to have a bipartisan process to select the next chaplain. Is this the decision that you've been thinking about for a while or something? It is. It's based upon feedback I've been getting for quite a while from members.

And again, as a person who stands up for the institution, I just wanted to make sure that we have pastoral services that are being adequately offered on a go forward basis for all of our members. Yeah. Let me touch on something else that's been in the news over the past 24 or 48 hours, and that was this comedian at the White House, of course, Monand Stinner, took some pretty tough shots. Yeah.

Some pretty tough shots at Sarah Huckabee Sanders, while Sarah Huckabee Sanders was sitting just a few feet away. And it's generated quite a bit of criticism, quite a bit of controversy. Did you have a? Yeah, I didn't watch it.

Never have. Again, that was at Infinity War and Jainsville with Our Sons and My God's Son. And then we went to Culver's to talk about the movie, which by the way, if you're a Marvel fan, it's a pretty profound. Yeah, I thought it was a very good movie.

And I don't want to give away the ending because, you know, so candidly, I didn't see it. I've certainly heard a lot about it. I heard from people who were there about it. That it was extremely inappropriate.

But I can't really comment on the specifics other than I heard from people I know I can trust that it was very inappropriate. Yeah. Let me ask you a big picture question about this moment in American politics. Mitch McConnell, your counterpart in the Senate, did an interview with Fred Barnes not long ago.

My colleague and longtime mentor at The Weekly Standard, in which he said that for conservatives in Washington, this has been the best year since he's been in Washington, D.C. And I'd like you to tell me if you agree with his sentiment there and not just in terms of actual practical policy, but in terms of the conservative movement that you've been a part of for three decades now. One of the reasons why I felt comfortable retiring. First of all, you know, my family situation and I don't want to be an empty nest or only, you know, being a weekend dad.

But the other big primary reason why I felt comfortable retiring is we got a lot done that I came to do. And it is what Mitch was talking about. And I think I agree with that assessment. He's been in Washington longer than I have.

But ever since I was, you know, a think-think guy, you and I knew each other back way back in the day when I was working think-tanks trying to get tax reform moving on all this regulatory relief. Worried about the military and our foreign policy. We've passed more bills in Donald Trump's first year in office in the House than you saw pass in either Obama, Bush, Clinton, or Bush 41. So we have passed over 500 piece of legislation in the House, a rock and roll, and we've been moving quickly, getting a lot done big and small.

And the Senate has a tighter majority with the filibuster. But even with all of that, we've still got a lot done. The regulatory reforms are truly impressive. It spans all sectors of our economy.

We are a few weeks away from getting our bill into law that rewrites the Dodd-Frank law. We rewrote the tax code for the first time in 31 years in a far more comprehensive and profound way than the last tax reform, which was in 86. That's been something I've been working on in my entire adult life that we finally realized. And that's been ushering a strong foundation of growth.

When I are what I guess we would call defense talks, I was really worried, especially since being a speaker, because you get a lot of the briefings and spend a lot of time with our intelligence community and our military. I was very, very, very worried about the absolute hollowing out of our national security apparatus, namely our military and our intelligence community. And we have now rebuilt that. Now, that's underway, but I think that that's extremely important for America, our national security and our prosperity.

And there are a whole multitude of other things what Mitch talks about is in the Senate, they're doing judges. And boy, are they putting some really good ones on the bench. Neil Gorsuch is probably the one you're thinking of, but behind Neil Gorsuch are so many other lower court federal judges that are great judges that are now on the bench for a long time to come. So whether it's rewriting the regulatory state, relimiting the government in that area, rewriting the tax code, rebuilding the military, getting constructionist on the bench, it's a really good year.

The one thing that got away from us, which is my other signature issue, is entitlement reform. I'm encouraged by the fact that the House every year has passed, every term has passed a budget that balances the budget, pays off the debt, cuts trillions in spending. We've not been able to get that kind of a budget through the Senate, let alone supported by a president. This current president supports that kind of a budget, but we couldn't get that kind of a budget to the Senate.

So we brought our healthcare entitlement reform bill through, which would have saved trillions in the long run of debt reduction, and moved us more toward a patient-centered health care system, which sort of lowered premiums and costs for everybody. That bill passed the House, and I'm really encouraged by the fact that we did our job in the House, and it is discouraging that it failed by basically a vote in the Senate. Had that gotten done, we would have done it all, more or less. But even with that not getting through, we then went to an incremental stage on that.

We got rid of the individual mandate in tax reform. We got rid of the independent payment advisory board, which is the price controlling body, which is sort of the intellectual architecture of Obamacare in the caps agreement. So we're making pretty good incremental progress on healthcare all the same. Although, if I can push back, if I can push back, you will, you know me well enough to know that I will.

When you and I talked in 2012, long, probably spent more time with me than you cared to remember, we spent most of that time talking about entitlement reform. And at the time you're arguing was, this is a crisis. It's an urgent crisis. If we don't address Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, we're in trouble, and we're in trouble really soon.

And since then, it's been in House budgets, but nothing has happened. Medicaid was expanded. The President has created an additional new entitlement in Obamacare that even if you're dismantling pieces of it, it's not gone. We seem to be moving in precisely the opposite direction.

And if you look at that and you think about the tax reform package that you told me was your best day in Congress, the day that passed, aren't we exacerbating this problem? And the President doesn't agree with you on entitlement reform at all. I wouldn't say that. He said that you were the reason that Mitt Romney flossed.

I think he said exactly like that. You know, I talk a lot about this. I've shown him charts and graphs and all of this stuff. First, there's two things you need to do to get our debt under control.

You've got to have a growing economy where people have good jobs, pay good wages, where we have tax revenues coming in at a good clip. That's really important. That's why regulatory reform and tax reform are so essential. I fundamentally believe if we had not done tax reform, that would have exacerbated our debt problems going in the future.

Look, Johnson Controls was the biggest publicly traded company in this town in this state. They're now an Irish company. You were going to see more and more of those kinds of transactions. Another big insurer in this town was in the midst of becoming a foreign company while tax reform was being debated.

Once tax reform was done, they withdrew from that transaction. They're staying in Milwaukee company. And so what we saw was a bleeding of the tax base and a shrinking of the economy if we didn't do tax reform. You have to have growth.

But you're exactly right. So your brother Dan used to do these videos with me, you remember that, on this stuff? So the Hayes Boys, it's pretty talent and family, but you guys are from Toaster, right? I've been talking about this a long time.

And again, I agree. And I'm pleased that the House did this. The House took two of our three, the big drivers of our Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare. So security is one of those drivers, but it's not nearly as profound in its impact in the out years as the health care entitlements.

This bill we passed took two of those three health care entitlements and fixed them. To fix them in such a way that they were grown at defined rates, at gradual rates that would have been absorbable, and more importantly, would have had more market choice and competition, which would have brought down costs for consumers and had more competition in the marketplace. It was basically giving the state, I see some of the state legislators here, I just walked in with Alberta. I said, here's Medicaid, you guys do Medicaid, it's going to grow at a certain rate.

We're blocking it back to per capita. We were going to, for Obamacare, unlock Obamacare, let everybody buy what they want to buy if they want to buy it. Give people health savings accounts and tax credits to go buy the insurance that they want. Regulated at the state level.

We're proud of that bill. It passed the House. And yet it did not pass the Senate. So you're right.

There was unfinished business, no two ways about it. So for me, my own decision on it. Isn't it still a crisis? Oh, absolutely.

Look, what does it, let me ask you, what does the president, you say you show him charts and graphs. I mean, you showed him charts and graphs and they have 2016. He wasn't terribly interested. Yeah.

It has made health care reform one of his big issues and that is one way at getting at this problem. If you reform health care by having more choice and competition, you can get a root cause of health inflation, which is a big driver of this. Let me put it this way. We've got about a 90% increase in the retirees of this country with the boomers retiring.

But we only have a 19% increase in the people following them into the workforce. Birth rates. And so you got this big slug of boomers coming into retirement, 40 million to 77 million. And the benefits they use that they earned grow far faster than inflation.

And therein lies your problem from a debt standpoint. We can borrow money to absorb the retirement of the baby boom generation as a country. The question is, can we get it to a manageable level where we have reforms that reform this expenditure, all this health care spending, so that they can have the benefits that they're entitled to. We can meet the mission of health and retirement security without bankrupting the country in the next generation.

These reforms that we passed are designed to do that. And I believe they do do that. Right. But they need to go into law and that's where we're not.

So you're not going to be around to shepherd this issue anymore. I mean, you pushed it. You made an issue. You got the Republican Party on board.

I think you got a lot of credit for doing that. It wasn't an easy thing to do. It took a fair amount of political courage, which is in short supply in Washington these days. The president is not going to pick this up.

I mean, let me ask you this way. The president's reelected in 2020. Do you expect that he's going to tackle one title reform in the way that you would in his second term? I have no reason to believe that he would not do that.

I don't want to speak for the president. I'm not going to get in front of him. But he knows the math. I've had so many conversations with him about this.

Let's go back to one thing you said. You and I talked about this back in 2012. Our party wasn't even touching this stuff. Our party wasn't even willing to touch this stuff.

So I wrote budgets when I was budget chair doing this specifically and with great detail, forcing members to vote on this stuff. I wanted to do that. First members take tough votes. So they go explain it so that they go would go out there and what I call normalize the idea.

Now we've been doing that in the house ever since 2007. So House Republicans, everybody here, Mike Gallagher, Jim Sensenbrenner, Sean Duffy, they've been going out in Wisconsin talking about how to fix entitlements specifically and they've voted for this stuff. So I do believe we have built a foundation for entitlement reform among grassroots Republicans and House Republicans. That foundation I had hoped would have realized the success by now.

Again, two of the three were going to be done with our Obamacare replacement bill and one vote in the Senate cost us that. I very much regret that. But I do believe that we've moved ourselves so much farther than where we were before. And the question I don't know the answer to is when are we going to finally realize this?

We will have to for the sake of just the debt, for the sake of health care entitlements not being able to fulfill their promises. And I think the president is getting around to that idea. Will he do this in 2021? I don't know the answer to that question.

But I do know that he's familiar with the problem and did support us, helped us pass this bill in the House. He did a lot to help us pass this bill to solve two of the three entitlement problems. Let me ask a big picture question on Congress. You've been in Congress for a long time, despite the fact that you're relatively young.

We don't need the commentary on my hair. Thank you very much. He didn't have a mic should I repeat? What, I mean, there's a good case to be made that Congress is a lot uglier today than it was when you started.

Whether you're talking about political polarization, whether you're talking about cross-party attacks, whether you're talking about intra-party frustrations. What's the biggest thing that you've seen change in today's Congress with you as the leader and the days when you were a backbencher from you? It's funny. I kind of got thrown into this job.

I wasn't looking for this job. And I ended up being the only one who had the votes to take it. So I did it out of sort of duty and obligation knowing that this job more than doubles your time away from home. It's one of the reasons why I'm going to do it for three years and not five years.

But it was a symptom of what you just described, my coming into this job. I think, and I've given a great deal of thought about this. It's one of the reasons why I'm spending my time trying to focus on the institution of the Congress, making sure that it's better off than when I found it in a good place. I think it's the rise of technology, generally speaking, on top of the fact that moral relativism is becoming so pervasive in society, combined with the fact that identity politics is being practiced on all sides these days that has got us to where we are.

So take, well, right, so take at least one person agree with me. So when I came in, I got to like the 98. And it was just so different. Constituents would fax or call with concerns.

And it usually was somebody affected by a specific piece of legislation. If you're, you know, a car dealer, you would call our facts right concerned about car dealer legislation. If there was a big issue before Congress, a general constituent interest would call or fax. Now it's instantaneous.

It is, so the volume is more, but what I've learned is there is, there is, there is a business model out there on all sides of issues to sell controversy, to sell and appeal to darker emotions. Anger, fear, envy, you name it. And that anxiety sells, it's good for ratings, it's good for clicks, it's good for hits, it's a business model. Sounds like you're blaming the media.

No, it's just technology and culture. And I see the media, I think it's just in a transition where they have to, you know, newspapers aren't doing well, even cable is under duress by the internet. So I think there's a ratings chase that is for survival. I just see the whole combination of the moral, moral relativism, pervading society, which I think is, if you ask me the biggest problem, it's not, the debt is high up there.

I think relativism is probably the biggest. Really? Oh, sure. Absolutely.

It's hard to tackle all these other things if relativism is so pervasive. And then you add on top of that identity politics, and then you add on top of that 21st century technology, and there you have a very combustible mixture, not just within parties, but just in the country. So you have more polarization, you have more anxiety, and that bubbles up into Congress. That bubbles up into public service as a vocation.

Something I like to spend a lot of time thinking about, I'm busy doing the FAA bill and the word of bill and personnel decisions and all the things you do running Congress, but this is something that I care a great deal about, put a lot of thought into it, I want to spend more time thinking about it. Let me ask you about that follow up. You've got kids. I've got kids.

You've made no bones about the fact that in May of 2016, you had some real problems with the way that Donald Trump had behaved. You're concerned about it. Throughout your time as speaker, you've occasionally spoken out when you've seen something you disagreed with after Charlottesville and other things. Would you say that the president is typical of the challenges of moral relativism that you describe?

Is he a cause or a result of that? You think I'm going to take that? No. But how can you know?

Seriously, how can you talk about what you're describing with the media and playing on fears and without saying that? We have different political temperaments. We have different political styles for sure, no two ways about it. What I've learned in my particular job is where is my effort best produced the best results?

Is it in being some scold on TV? Is it trying to score points in the media? By the way, parenthetically, I do a better job talking to the president than if I were going out and media and talk about the president. I think I'm going to get more done that way than just going out and scoring a bunch of.

But secondly, I'm not a writer for the weekly standard. I'm not on WISN or TV. I'm trying to take ideas that we as conservatives believe in and get them into law to make a big difference in this country. That's my job.

My job is to make sure that this article one branch of government works and that we get as much done while we can. We've had unified government as Republicans this our third time in a century. The other two times were basically war times. Now we're technically at war, but we're not consumed with it.

And so I have this window of opportunity where we can take the things that we believe in and make them into law, and that's my focus. And so that's where I need to spend my efforts, not trying to score political points and look good among the chedron classes. I don't care about that. And that's why, frankly, we ran on a very specific agenda.

Remember the better way agenda that I got all House Republicans to run on? We're almost done executing it. We've done the regulatory reform. We've done the tax reform.

We've done the rebuilding of the military. The infrastructure, we just passed a big FAA bill the other day. We're going to do a water bill now and our welfare to work program, which is our workforce development. That's up next.

We believe that able-bodied people who are receiving welfare benefits ought to go to work or at least go to school as a condition of getting those benefits because what we realize is when you do that, people go to work, people go to school, people go out and get out of poverty. This is what we are and what we believe. We did this in Wisconsin with W-2. We did 96 with welfare reform.

We're trying to do it again. And so we're on the cusp of achieving these things. That's where my efforts ought to be focused as Speaker of the House. That's how I see it.

What is likely to get done in the remaining time you have in Congress? Obviously there are a number of the bills that you've passed in the House that have gone to the Senate to die. Yeah, we've got about 400 over there. But actually, so I worked closely with my counterpart over there, Mitch.

They're almost done with personnel issues. They've got more judges. They spent inordinate amount of time approving people. The assistant secretary of this, the ambassador of that, and when they get through that, they can spend more time on legislation.

We anticipate in the next few months a lot of legislation moving through the system the capstone to our regulatory reform agenda. What I mean when I say regulatory reform agenda is we've always believed a two-step process. First Congress passes its bills, then when we're done with those, the administration takes it from there with their cabinet and rewrites regulations so that they work. Obama hyperregulated the economy.

And there's this thing called the congressional view act, which cannot be filibustered. It's one of two things that cannot be filibustered. You can rescind a recent regulation, in this case those Obama regulations, and the bill repealing that regulation cannot be filibustered. It was done once in the last 20 years.

We've done 15 already in law, the 16th is making its way through the system. In one area on just deregulating the energy markets. We lifted the ban on the export of crude oil. We streamlined energy regulations.

And now we are the number one producer of natural gas, and we're permitting LNG sites. We're the number one producer of natural gas. And this year or next year, projections show us we'll be the number one producer of oil. We have since in the last four or five years because of technology discovered in a field in Midland, Texas, in oil field as big as the entire Saudi Arabian oil field.

We have a Saudi Arabia in just this part of Texas, the point being because of our policies and innovation and technology in the free market. We are going to dominate. OPEC doesn't have a number on us anymore. Our dollars are going to our fellow country, and our foreign policies dramatically improved.

Our economy is stabilized. We're going to keep gas prices in an unacceptable ban for consumers like Wisconsinites. This is one sector, not one sector of our economy that will for a long time benefit from this regulatory agenda. So I really believe we've made some profound differences.

The capstone of our regulatory form agenda gets your question, is our replacement of Dodd-Frank. We already have a bill out of the house. We have a bill out of the Senate, which is pretty amazing. So we're going to get that done.

So what's to come is finishing off on the effort to replace Dodd-Frank, which is just killing community banks. I mean, just go to ask any community banker in Wisconsin. This is where almost all of our businesses get their money from, families. So this will bring tremendous relief to community bankers.

I think that's really good for our economy. The next thing is we're working on people. We want to make two-year school cool again. We want to emphasize career and vocational, technical assistance, technical education.

We have technical colleges here. The other state's home community colleges. You know what? Well, we have MATC and Gateway and Black Hawk.

They're really good. But this area has been so deeply micromanaged from the federal government. We're getting rid of all that. And we're sending that stuff back to the states so that our local economies, local technical colleges, local employers, local leaders can come up with career and technical education to get people from welfare into the workforce.

So we can deal with this labor issue we have, which is not enough people to do jobs that are being made available. So we're going to get that done. So that's a huge step in the right direction. So Dodd-Frank being replaced, the career and technical education, welfare to work reform getting done.

And then we do have some modernization of our infrastructure issues, which won't cost a lot of tax pay money, but fixing these things. It takes four to ten years to get a federal-involved project permitting in America today. We want to knock it down to one year. So we're going to get a lot of infrastructure done, welfare reform done, workforce development done, and more regulatory relief done before the years out.

So that is an enormous amount of accomplishments in a two-year period. So let's say that everything that you say is going to happen in fact happens, and all of the things that you've done are indeed the accomplishments that you're touting. Why Republicans facing what Governor Walker calls a blue wave in 2018? I don't, well, I think it's, let me step up.

I think it's historical. I think it's part of the Trump phenomenon. He has people who love him. He has people who hate him.

You have an enthusiasm gap that I think is what Scott is talking about, because there's so many people motivated with their, so they just don't like the president. They're hyper-motivated. But I think it's history. The history of midterm elections does not speak well for the party who's in the majority.

The history of midterm elections does not speak well for the president's party. The average loss of seats in the house for a president's party in the president's first midterm election is about 32 seats. We have a 24-seat majority. 23 of our members come from Hillary Clinton-Carried districts.

So it's that historical average, that statistic that has everybody talking about this. If you look at the generic ballot today, that's one of the metrics all of our data guys. It actually looks pretty good. We believe that the auction today, we would keep the house representatives.

So the way I look at it is, what do you do about it? Keep getting accomplishments. Keep getting things done. I tell this to our members all the time.

Don't get distracted. Don't get distracted on the latest Trump this, Trump that on MSNBC or CNN. Just focus on doing our jobs. So we told our constituents what we wanted to do if given the opportunity.

Let's go do it. And that's what we're focused our time on. So we really do just focus on getting our work done, so then we have a good story to tell. And we believe we will have a good story to tell come the fall because of the economy, because of our accomplishments, because while the country was very much distracted in the media on this other stuff, we were busy at work focusing on people's problems and trying to make a big difference in their lives.

And we believe we'll have a good story to tell on that. So one of the reasons why I raised all these resources so we can go around the media straight to talk to constituents. One of the reasons that there are these ones that you face a potential blue wave is the record number of retirements. We talk about that a little bit in our last panel and our Haley Bird, who covers Congress.

So when she talks to people, there's just a frustration that the Democrats are inevitably going to take the House of Representatives and that they can't do much policy-wise. You obviously have a different view. Why do they have the sense that they can't accomplish much? I think the national narrative gets hyperventilated and pushed so hard to make people think that.

But when you actually focus on what we're doing in Congress, where we passed a huge FA overall bill just a couple of days ago. That's bipartisan. Our career tech education, that's going to be bipartisan. Our food stamp reforms, the Democrats aren't getting involved in it, but we really believe in it and we're going to push this.

There's so many more things we're going to get done that I think what people are doing is they're looking at the national media and they're buying it into the narrative and they have fatigue of it all. And plus the trend. Just a historical trend has people a little unnerved about that. But what we have learned, we've won six out of one, we're six in one in our special elections.

What we have learned is in our special elections, we can win them by motivating supporters and getting to the polls and communicating directly to them around the media and that does actually work. We're six in one in specials, so we actually think we know how to do this pretty well. And by the way, it costs a lot less money than the other side seems to spend on these specials. So we actually feel like we have a formula to get this done.

Except in Arizona, that was pretty expensive. It was expensive, but she won. That wins a win. It's a win.

By the way, that's what she's from Kohler, Wisconsin. So with this new member of Congress from Arizona, she won a raise in Kohler. I did not know that. Things I learned from Speaker Paul Ryan.

Let me ask one last question before we take a couple questions from the audience. A lot of discussion and speculation about what comes next for you, speculation that you could be the next president of the American Enterprise Institute. I guess first, are you going to be living in Janesville and second, what are you going to be doing? My plan is to figure out my plan in 2019.

He's getting one thing he's done very well. He's getting very good at evading the questions I ask, but he wasn't so much earlier in this career. No, really, I don't know. I think I shouldn't be thinking about it.

I got so much more. I got a lot of work to do still to run to the tape. So I'm just not focusing on that chapter. I'm excited.

I mean, just spending the weekend with my kids this weekend. You know, and I only usually get mostly just Sundays because I've been running around the district on Saturdays. So just this idea that I'm going to have more of that time makes me extremely happy. I'll figure it out then.

I've got no plans on the table right now whatsoever. And I'm just going to figure that takes some time off, come January and just figure it out. Got it. How about some questions from the audience?

Right up here in front. We'll get a seat speaker. A quick question for you. They'll put you on the spot here.

In regard to District 1, the race going on there, of course, Brian being a personal friend to you and a lot of money coming in from, you know, left, you know, Randy Bryce. What tip position are you going to take on that and how are we going to ensure that, you know, that blue weight doesn't happen? Yeah, the position I'm going to take is I'm for the Republican taking the seat. Yeah, so Brian just thought, you know, Brian was one of my senior legislative staffers, especially in budget issues.

I think somebody called him my driver. Never had a driver until, you know, I had a security detail. So I don't know how that one got going. But the filing deadline is not closed yet, so I'm obviously going to withhold comments on candidates until we know who exactly all is in the race.

But I am very, very confident we will keep the seat Republican. I really am. For a whole multitude of reasons. The district is resilient.

The district is Republican. Screnock won the district pretty handily. So I feel very confident we're going to keep the seat and I'm very confident that we're going to have a good member there. So, another question.

Yeah, first of all, thank you for 20 good years. We really appreciate it. Thank you. And now because I've been so nice to you, I've got a really easy question.

Yeah, I hope you appreciate it. Okay. Okay, thanks. Thanks again.

Yeah, thanks. Bye bye. Bye. Bye.

Oh, you. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Okay, thank you for joining me. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye.