Paul Ryan elected as 54th Speaker of US House of Representatives

Republican Paul Ryan was on 30 October 2015 elected as the 54th speaker of the US House of Representatives after fetching the votes of 236 members by the full House of Representatives. Only nine House Republicans voted against Ryan on the House floor. He succeeds John Boehner of Ohio.

Following his election, Ryan was sworn in as Speaker of the House. He took the oath on his own copy of the New American bible and kept the gavel he wielded as Chairman of the powerful tax writing committee.

With this, Ryan, the nine-term congressman from Wisconsin, becomes the third Catholic in a row in the position, after John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi. He first worked on Capitol Hill as a legislative aide in 1992 and won his House seat in 1998 when he was 28.

During his tenure in the House, Ryan became known as a policy wonk and attracted national attention for his sweeping proposals to overhaul Medicare and restructure the tax code.

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