After voting in favor of cloture on the Ryan-Murray budget deal, Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) told reporters that Representative Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) spent much of a shared flight back to Wisconsin on Friday talking with him about the bicameral agreement. The two often have the same flights, Johnson said, and “have a lot of face time.”
“He didn’t have to have any kind of big pitch with me,” Johnson added. “I understood what he had to do going into this process.”
And the senator, in turn, did a little lobbying of his own. He said he sent Peggy Noonan’s column on the budget to every Republican senator. “On Saturday when I woke up, I said, ‘Well, this is pretty much my thinking on this,’” he said.
When I asked if he felt much pressure from Republican colleagues to vote against cloture, he said, “No, not at all.”
“I would say there was no pressure one way or the other,” he added.
Johnson is one of twelve Republican senators to support cloture on the deal. Senator Johnny Isakson (R., Ga.), another of the twelve, said he also felt little pressure from either side.
“I was against the shutdown in September and spoke out vehemently against it, and I proved to be right that it was a big mistake,” he told National Review Online.