Two weeks ago, Congressman Paul Ryan officially took over the speaker’s gavel from John Boehner.

“The House is broken,” Ryan said in his speech following his election. “We are not solving problems. We are adding to them.”

We can only hope his rhetoric is transformed into meaningful change in the House of Representatives.

Unfortunately, judging by the behavior of the Republican caucus in recent years and the newly anointed speaker’s statements, this seems unlikely. Republicans in Congress have been spiteful and immature ever since they gained control of the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014.

The attitude that began with Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell declaring the main goal of Congressional Republicans was to “make [President Barack] Obama a one-term president”  in 2010 has only continued.

The 2012-13 and 2013-14 sessions of Congress are the least productive back-to-back sessions on record. Talk about a do-nothing Congress.

Just last week, Ryan already signaled his speakership will be more of the same obstructionism we’ve seen from Republicans: he announced he will not bring an immigration bill to the floor during the remainder of Obama’s presidency. Republican obstructionism has only been intensified with the fracturing of the Republican caucus itself. In the last few election cycles, firebrand Tea Party conservatives descended on Congress.

Some of them even were elected through primary defeats of establishment Republicans, most notably Dave Brat’s stunning defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

These fresh faces unabashedly scoffed at any notion of compromise and even bucked their own Republican leadership if they felt they were working too closely with Democrats. These “Republicans” broke off into their own caucuses, fracturing the power and influence of the House Republicans and especially Boehner. They wore Boehner down, leading to his ultimate resignation.

The abrasiveness of these members has been so off-putting that Republicans could not find a single member of their caucus who wanted Boehner’s old job — it took weeks to cajole Ryan to begrudgingly accept the job.

This new brand of conservatism sees compromise as weakness, rather than a strength that quite literally built our country, and Democrats as enemies, rather than colleagues who represent interests of the other half of Americans. The extremism of these members of Congress has forced Obama into a box for the majority of his presidency as Congress became increasingly dysfunctional.

It becomes deeply hypocritical when these Republicans criticize Obama for taking executive actions while they simultaneously refuse to pass anything in Congress. It is because of these members of Congress that government in Washington is broken.

That said, we all are watching Ryan assume the speakership in hopes he will turn the page. He has turned out to be the only Republican in the House of Representatives who a majority of the fractured Republican caucus would get behind, but is already faltering under pressures from the right to continue the obstructionism we have all grown so tired of.

“The people of this country have done all of us a great honor. Now, let’s prove ourselves worthy of it,” Ryan said in an appeal to bipartisanship and cooperation at the end of his acceptance speech.

As a fellow Wisconsinite, I challenge Ryan to prove himself worthy of this opportunity. I challenge him to stand up to the extremism that has seeped into the Republican caucus, recognize Democrats in Congress as colleagues rather than adversaries and actually work towards enacting meaningful legislation to improve the lives of the American people.