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 About two-thirds of the approximately 40 House "Freedom Caucus"
members voted to back Ryan for speaker if he formally enters the
contest, according to the Republican lawmakers who emerged from a
closed-door session to discuss Ryan's fate.
That was less than the 80 percent needed under Freedom Caucus rules
to give Ryan a formal endorsement for speaker.
Nonetheless, Ryan may have secured just enough votes, when combined
with other Republican lawmakers, to narrowly win the speakership,
replacing retiring Speaker John Boehner, several of the conservative
lawmakers said.
Ryan, in a statement, called the support from a supermajority of the
conservative Freedom Caucus "a positive step toward a unified
Republican team." He said he also looked forward to hearing from two
other House Republican groups by the end of the week; both are
expected to back him
Republicans are scheduled to vote on nominating a new speaker on
Oct. 28, followed by a vote by the full House on Oct. 29.
 "The bottom line is if he (Ryan) wants to be speaker, he's got the
votes as of tonight," said Representative Mick Mulvaney, a member of
the Freedom Caucus who voted for Ryan.
A Ryan spokesman said Ryan was not yet ready to announce his
candidacy for speaker because he still had to hear from other
Republican groups on whether they would support him.
But those groups' support was expected and that could clear the way
for the 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate and current
chairman of the House's tax-writing Ways and Means Committee to
formally announce by week's end that he is seeking the speakership.
Late on Tuesday, Ryan said he would pursue the top House job if his
fellow Republicans united behind him.
The speaker has a major say on legislation that moves through the
House and is next in line for the presidency behind the vice
president if something were to happen to the president.
Ryan also laid down a series of conditions he wanted to extract from
rank-and-file Republicans, including a rules change that would make
it more difficult for individual House members to force a vote to
oust the speaker.
He spent part of Wednesday meeting privately with the Freedom Caucus
and other factions of the 247 Republicans who hold majority control
of the House.
The Freedom Caucus issued a statement praising Ryan as a "policy
entrepreneur who has developed conservative reforms dealing with a
wide variety of subjects." It said he had promised to advance
limited government principles and decentralize power to members.
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"While no consensus exists among members of the House Freedom Caucus
regarding Chairman Ryan's preconditions for serving, we believe that
these issues can be resolved within our conference in due time," the
statement said.
The Republican Party infighting, which has been on the boil even
before Boehner's retirement announcement last month, has
overshadowed a stark deadline Congress faces.
If Congress fails to increase the federal government's statutory
debt limit by Nov. 3, the Treasury Department has warned of possible
catastrophic consequences that could lead to a historic default.
A default, which Boehner wants to avoid before he leaves office,
could shake financial markets and the economy, but the
Republican-controlled Congress had no clear plan yet to prevent it.
For now, the House Republican leadership has not settled on when it
would vote to raise the debt limit or what would be in a bill
dealing with it. "We're talking a lot about it right now," House
Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy told Reuters.
Earlier on Wednesday, the House, in a partisan vote, passed a
Republican bill requiring the Treasury to keep borrowing to pay the
principal and interest on certain obligations if the debt exceeds
the statutory limit.
While the Freedom Caucus is relatively new, having organized early
this year, hard line conservatives - many of them small-government
Tea Party activists - have had an outsized influence on major fiscal
decisions since 2011, when Republicans took control of the House
from Democrats.
Since then, the House has repeatedly flirted with a default on
Washington's financial obligations. Conservatives forced a 17-day
government shutdown in 2013 as they tried to kill the landmark
healthcare law known as Obamacare.
(Additional reporting by Andy Sullivan, Susan Heavey and Lindsay
Dunsmuir; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh, James Dalgleish and Leslie
Adler)
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