Where Hare's job was to evict the future Speaker of the House
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Jim Woodhill's house at 154 D Street in south-east Washington, roughly a block and a half from the Capitol Hill Club — where Republicans go to be unobserved — and beside the Cannon House Office Building.
Paul Ryan and Pat Toomey both rented rooms there. Jonathan Hare, as Woodhill's friend, could stay whenever he was in town.
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Ryan's family lived in Wisconsin, and to qualify for the discounted rate he had to be genuinely crashing rather than occupying — taking the master bedroom only when it was free.
Which made it Hare's job, every time he came to town, to kick him out of it.
That is the whole arrangement, and it is a more exact portrait of a man's relationship to money than any amount of budget-committee testimony. He was the ranking fiscal conservative in the House and he was structuring his own housing to save a few hundred dollars a month.
Ryan tried to teach Hare to work out, using the P90X program. Hare's assessment: the most in-shape person he has ever met in his life — he had to shower repeatedly through the day because of how hard he trained.
Eventually Ryan stopped renting the room and slept in his congressional office to save the money. That part is not only Hare's account: Ryan's practice of sleeping on a cot in his office was well known in Washington and widely reported, continuing for roughly two decades.
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One of Hare's oldest friends and the second patron in this record — whose Capitol Hill house held a future Senator and a future Speaker
Open →housemateHousemate, chairman of the Budget Committee, later Speaker
Open →housemateHousemate, Club for Growth, then Senator
Open →the politics of the householdA breed that no longer exists, and two men who were the real thing
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