On July 28th, Mark Meadows, a Republican representative from North Carolina, walked to the well of the House and filed a motion to vacate the chair. It’s an obscure parliamentary tool that allows any member of the House to trigger a vote to oust the Speaker. The only other time it had been used was in 1910, during a rebellion by forty-two Progressive Republicans, the Party radicals of the day, against their Speaker, Joseph Gurney Cannon, who was accused of running the House like a tyrant.
Meadows is one of the more active members of the House Freedom Caucus, an invitation-only group of about forty right-wing conservatives that formed at the beginning of this year. Since 2010, when the Party won back the chamber, the House has been engaged in a series of clashes over taxes and spending. Two years ago, House Republicans brought about a government shutdown over the Affordable Care Act and nearly caused the United States to default on its debt. This week, as Congress raced to meet a December 11th deadline to pass the annual legislation that funds the government, the members of the Freedom Caucus had new demands: they wanted to cut funding for Planned Parenthood and restrict Syrian refugees from entering the United States, policies that, if attached to the spending bills, could face a veto from Obama and, potentially, lead to another government shutdown.
To the general public, these fights have played out as a battle between President Obama and Republicans in Congress. But the more critical divide is within the Republican Party, as House Speaker John Boehner discovered. Boehner, who is from Ohio, was elected to Congress in 1990 and rose to the Speakership in 2010. His tenure was marked by an increasingly futile effort to control a group of conservatives that Devin Nunes, a Republican from California and an ally of Boehner’s, once described as “lemmings with suicide vests.” In 2013, to the bafflement of some colleagues, Boehner supported the shutdown, in the hope that the public backlash would expose the group as hopelessly radical. It didn’t work. The group continued to defy Boehner. He tried to regain control as Speaker by marginalizing its members, and they decided that he must be forced out.
Meadows, who was elected in 2012, spent months weighing whether to launch the attack. “It was probably one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done,” he told me recently. “It was a lonely period of time here on Capitol Hill. Even my closest friends didn’t necessarily think it was the right move.”
The decisive moment came on June 4th, when Meadows and his wife were being given a private tour of the Library of Congress. In the South Exhibition Gallery of the Thomas Jefferson Building, below stained-glass ceilings etched with the names of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, the guide showed them one of the first printed copies of the Declaration. Meadows was surprised to see, at the bottom of the document, only the name of John Hancock, in large block type. The guide explained that about two hundred copies of that version, known as the Dunlap Broadside, were printed on July 4, 1776, and one of them was sent off to King George. It was only several weeks later, in early August, that Hancock’s fellow-revolutionaries convened to sign the document.
“He was committing treason,” Meadows said. “When I heard that, it hit me profoundly that this motion to vacate could have only one signature. I wrestled with it for weeks.”
Meadows was feeling pressure from his constituents, who were angry that the G.O.P. leadership kept losing to Obama. “I got an e-mail from a gentleman back home,” Meadows told me. “He said, ‘I’ve worked hard and I’ve given money and yet nothing is happening.’ And this was from a country-club Republican, not a Tea Party activist. That had a real impact.”
On the morning of July 28th, Meadows’s fifty-sixth birthday, he got a voice mail from his son, Blake, encouraging him to go forward with the anti-Boehner plot. Blake read some lines from a famous Teddy Roosevelt speech. “It is not the critic who counts,” Roosevelt said. “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood,” and who, “at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.” Listening to the message brought tears to Meadows’s eyes. “I still keep it on my phone,” he told me.
Because there had been only one previous motion to vacate the chair, Meadows had to consult with a parliamentarian. His motion echoed the style and language of the Declaration’s “long train of abuses.” At about 5 p.m., during a series of votes on unrelated legislation, he waded through the crowded House floor, handed a copy of the resolution to the House clerk, and signed his name.
The resolution declared that Boehner “endeavored to consolidate power and centralize decision-making, bypassing the majority of the 435 Members of Congress and the people they represent.” Boehner had “caused the power of Congress to atrophy, thereby making Congress subservient to the Executive and Judicial branches,” and he “uses the power of the office to punish Members.” It provided details about several rules and parliamentary maneuvers that Boehner had allegedly used to control the chamber, and it ended, “Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That the office of Speaker of the House of Representatives is hereby declared to be vacant.”
The news broke about twenty minutes later, and the subject of conversation on the House floor quickly changed from the bill under debate to Meadows’s effort to overthrow Boehner. “Washington, D.C., had stopped listening,” Meadows told me. “It’s part of why we’re seeing the non-conventional candidates of both parties doing better than a number of us would have anticipated.” His motion was an “act of desperation,” he told me, because he “saw the power of the House of Representatives disappearing.”
The next day, Boehner, asked for his reaction, responded, “You’ve got a member here and a member there who are off the reservation. No big deal.”
Boehner’s troubles and the rise of the Freedom Caucus are the product of resentments and expectations that the G.O.P. leadership has struggled for years to either address or dismiss. In 2009 and 2010, Democrats, who then controlled both the House and the Senate, pushed through the most aggressive domestic agenda since the Great Society. In response, during the 2010 midterm elections Republicans promised to overturn Obama’s entire agenda—the Affordable Care Act, financial regulation, stimulus spending, climate-change regulations—and dramatically cut government. Just before the election, the three House Republican leaders, Boehner, Eric Cantor, and Kevin McCarthy, promoted a manifesto, called “A Pledge to America,” that, among other things, promised to cut a hundred billion dollars from the budget and return spending to pre-Obama levels. The Republicans won sixty-three seats, taking control of the House, and expanded their ranks in the Senate. In November, 2010, House Republicans unanimously elected Boehner Speaker.
Jeff Duncan, a husky forty-nine-year-old former real-estate executive and auctioneer from South Carolina who was first elected in 2010, recently reread the “Pledge.” Sitting in his office in early November, he handed me a marked-up copy and shook his head. “We came up short in so many ways,” he said.
The Republicans’ first budget cut only thirty-eight billion dollars. “That was the first violation of the pledge and those ideals we ran on,” Duncan said. “We also said that we would repeal Obamacare and we’d use every tool at our disposal, not just feel-good votes. And we didn’t. We said we would cut spending in a way that protected veterans, seniors, and the military. And the spending cuts that we got, known as the sequester, didn’t do that. They adversely affected the military, they adversely affected seniors and veterans.” They promised to stop borrowing money and failed, he said. Instead they kept losing to Obama, who was easily reëlected in 2012.
In January of 2013, when Boehner was reëlected as Speaker, a dozen Republicans withheld their votes. In August, Meadows sent a letter to Boehner recommending that he offer Obama a trade, which read more like a threat: if the President agreed to defund the Affordable Care Act, House Republicans would continue to fund the government.
The idea had little currency inside the House, but it found an eager audience among activists and conservative media outlets. Nunes, who is the chairman of the House Committee on Intelligence, told me that the biggest change he’s seen since he arrived in Congress, in 2002, is the rise of online media outlets and for-profit groups that spread what he views as bad, sometimes false information, which House members then feel obliged to address. The change has transformed Nunes from one of the most conservative members of Congress to one of the biggest critics of the Freedom Caucus and its tactics.
“I used to spend ninety per cent of my constituent response time on people who call, e-mail, or send a letter, such as, ‘I really like this bill, H.R. 123,’ and they really believe in it because they heard about it through one of the groups that they belong to, but their view was based on actual legislation,” Nunes said. “Ten per cent were about ‘Chemtrails from airplanes are poisoning me’ to every other conspiracy theory that’s out there. And that has essentially flipped on its head.” The overwhelming majority of his constituent mail is now about the far-out ideas, and only a small portion is “based on something that is mostly true.” He added, “It’s dramatically changed politics and politicians, and what they’re doing.”
Nunes first heard about the shutdown strategy in 2013 from a caller on a talk-radio show back home in the late summer. “I said, ‘I don’t know where you’re hearing this from, but it doesn’t work,’ ” he told me. Then the idea went viral. “By the time we got back here in September, you had over half the members of our caucus who really believed we could shut the government down and ultimately Obama would repeal Obamacare.”
Boehner could have brought a clean version of the funding legislation to the House floor; this could have kept the government open, but it would have passed only with the help of Democratic votes. Instead, he adopted the Meadows strategy, allowing the funding for the federal government to lapse as a demonstration against Obamacare. Tom Cole, a Republican congressman from Oklahoma and a close ally of Boehner’s, was baffled. Cole has a Ph.D. in British history and has worked as a political consultant and senior official at several Republican Party organizations. A week into the sixteen-day government shutdown of October, 2013, he was having dinner with Boehner and a few other members. Republicans were universally blamed for the shutdown; cable news was filled with images of shuttered parks and federal landmarks, and the White House, as Cole, Nunes, and others had predicted, refused any demands to negotiate.
“Why in the world are we letting the guys that wouldn’t vote for you effectively dictate strategy for the conference?” Cole asked Boehner. (Boehner declined to comment for this story.)
According to Cole, Boehner responded, “I’ve tried to teach them over and over and over again that you’ve got to be united, and there’s a limit to what we can do, but this is a fight they wanted. Let them have the fight. Then maybe they’ll learn their lesson.”
The public face and strategist for the Freedom Caucus is Raúl Labrador, from Idaho, who was elected in the wave of 2010 and revels in the mischief-making that has characterized the House since then. In early October, we talked in his office, which was decorated with Idaho-potato merchandise. Labrador noted that the Idaho Potato Commission, a state agency established in 1937, had successfully turned a local product into a global brand. “It’s a marketing thing,” he said. “It’s been amazing.”
He insisted that the strategy behind the government shutdown was sound, but that its subtlety was lost when Senator Ted Cruz, who positioned himself as an ally of the House rebels, seized the credit for it. “Ted Cruz was out there saying, ‘Defund Obamacare or we’ll shut down the government,’ ” Labrador, who has endorsed Rand Paul for President in 2016, told me. “Our position was more nuanced,” he added, insisting that he and his fellow hard-liners were willing to settle for a one-year delay of Obamacare.
He accused Boehner of adopting Cruz’s more extreme rhetoric as a way of insuring the strategy’s failure and embarrassing the right-wingers in the House. “In the meantime, he was negotiating”—with Obama—“behind closed doors for his position,” he said. “Went ahead with the shutdown, and then went on national TV and said, ‘Well, you know, I did what the conservatives in my caucus wanted. And those crazies caused me to shut down the government.’ That was never our position.”
Unlike many Republicans, Labrador did not see the shutdown as a permanent stain on the Party. He grabbed one of two large poster-board polling charts leaning against his desk; it was titled “Before /After 2013 Shutdown” and showed the Republican Party’s approval ratings quickly recovering. “Within a couple of months, people forgot what happened,” he said. “So our favorables went back up, and our unfavorables went back down.” Boehner’s lesson was meant to make the rebellious members listen; instead, they learned that they didn’t need to.
Labrador then pointed to another chart, which showed that the G.O.P.’s favorable ratings this year dropped from forty-one per cent, in January, to thirty-two per cent, in July. “This is what happens when we do nothing,” he said. “This is the new G.O.P. majority in 2015, when we stand for nothing.” The problem, in his view, was that the Party was “governing,” he said, adding air quotes to the word. “If people just want to ‘govern,’ which means bringing more government, they’re always going to choose the Democrat.”
The innovation that Labrador and his colleagues brought to the Republican conference was a willingness to use tactics that Boehner and his allies saw as beyond the pale. “We don’t want a shutdown, we don’t want a default on the debt, but when the other side knows that you’re unwilling to do it you will always lose,” Labrador said. In his view, Boehner dangerously misunderstood Obama and had an outdated view of political combat in Washington. “You have somebody in the White House who plays hardball,” Labrador said. “He wants to fundamentally change America. And when you have a guy whose only job is to ‘govern,’ and doesn’t realize that the other guy is trying to fundamentally change America, you just don’t have an even match.”
Cole believes that Labrador and his faction have wildly unrealistic ideas about what can be accomplished in a divided government. “A lot of Boehner’s critics frankly know that, and yet they still demanded that he achieve the impossible,” he said. “You’re not going to repeal Obamacare while a guy named Obama is President of the United States. I mean, for God’s sake, I don’t know what more he could do.”
Cole insisted that, given the obstacles, Boehner’s record since 2011 was impressive. The budget deals he negotiated with Obama reduced the deficit from $1.4 trillion in 2009 to $439 billion and achieved some entitlement reform. Boehner made most of the Bush-era tax cuts permanent; he banned earmarks, pet projects that lawmakers can insert into laws, and which were badly abused the last time Republicans were in power. Boehner also helped create the largest Republican majority since 1928.
“The tragedy is, a lot of people wanted and demanded more than he could ever deliver,” Cole said. “Fast-forward to 2015, you got exactly the same people recommending exactly the same strategy, which would have exactly the same results. I’m not saying John Boehner was a bad teacher. I think he was an excellent teacher. I just don’t think he had the brightest students in the world.”
In mid-January, Republicans from both houses gathered in Hershey, Pennsylvania, for a retreat. Boehner now presided over a formidable majority; two months earlier, in the midterm elections, the G.O.P. expanded its control of the House by thirteen seats and captured the Senate by winning nine seats there. But Labrador and his allies saw the victory as a vindication of their approach. In Hershey, while the leadership met to plot its strategy for the new Congress, Labrador and eight colleagues met in secret to plan their own agenda. “That was the first time we got together and decided we were a group, and not just a bunch of pissed-off guys,” Mick Mulvaney, a congressman from South Carolina who was a founding member of the Freedom Caucus, told me.
Despite the majority, Boehner’s grip on the chamber was weakening. Ninety-eight per cent of House incumbents win reëlection, but, in June of 2014, Boehner’s deputy, Eric Cantor, of Virginia, was defeated in a primary by David Brat, a fifty-one-year-old college professor whose candidacy was championed by conservative talk radio. Brat ran against Cantor’s ties to Wall Street and his alleged sympathies for immigration reform that includes a pathway to citizenship for many undocumented immigrants. Boehner had been pondering retirement, but now his most likely successor had been defeated. The day after Cantor’s defeat, Boehner called Paul Ryan, a congressman from Wisconsin and the Party’s 2012 Vice-Presidential nominee, and pleaded with him to replace Cantor as Majority Leader. When Ryan declined, Boehner decided to stay on as Speaker. “He was looking to get out, and Eric screwed it up,” a former top aide to Boehner told me.
Brat aligned himself with Labrador, Meadows, Mulvaney, and their allies. “Voters look at us and say, ‘O.K., we’ll give you the House. Get it right, start fighting,’ ” Brat told me recently in his office, which is decorated with pictures of the Founders, Greek philosophers, and Biblical figures. “We didn’t fight. Republicans said, ‘Well, if you give us the Senate, then we’re going to fight like crazy against executive overreach and all of this.’ We haven’t fought. Boehner said we were going to fight ‘tooth and nail’ against amnesty. Didn’t lift a finger.” The “biggest factor” in his victory over Cantor, he said, was expressed by a recent poll by Fox News that found that sixty per cent of Republican primary voters “feel betrayed” by Republican politicians.
After the election, the rebels began fighting with Boehner for control of the machinery of the House. The first front was the Republican Study Committee, a sort of internal think tank that tries to push legislation to the right. In recent years, it had grown to a hundred and seventy-five members, who saw it as a seal of approval for conservative lawmakers. Labrador and his allies had a plan: if one of them was elected chairman of the R.S.C., the committee could be transformed from a sleepy policy-writing collective into an instrument for advancing their more confrontational tactics. Labrador’s faction backed Mulvaney, who had voted against Boehner in 2013 and helped instigate the shutdown, for the chair, but the plan was thwarted after Boehner’s allies filled the committee with supporters. In mid-November, Mulvaney was handily defeated by the leadership’s preferred candidate, Bill Flores, a former oil-and-gas executive from Texas.
“The leadership overreached,” Mulvaney told me. “It took away the one relief valve that conservatives have had for a long time. If you were conservative, at least you know you could go into the R.S.C. and vent.” After the vote, Labrador remarked to the defeated Mulvaney that the conservatives needed to start their own group.
On January 6, 2015, Boehner was reëlected as Speaker, but twenty-five Republicans refused to support him, thirteen more than in 2013. He began to clamp down. “Voting against the Speaker flips a switch,” Brat said. “You don’t get on any good committees, you don’t get on the money committees, you don’t get money. The leadership shuts you off from PAC funding, and so on.” Jeff Duncan, of South Carolina, had voted against Boehner and he immediately felt the backlash. He was a member of the leadership’s whip team, charged with rounding up votes on crucial pieces of legislation. During a reception in Hershey, it became clear that he was no longer welcome on the whip team. “I kind of felt the stares from other members and all that,” he told me. He resigned from the team the next day, and eventually joined the Freedom Caucus.
In Hershey, the new caucus struggled over a name for themselves. Mulvaney had been part of a similar group when he was in the South Carolina state senate. It was called the William Wallace Caucus, after the character from “Braveheart” who leads the Scots fighting for independence against the English. (“He’s the guy who gets hung, drawn, and quartered at the end of the movie,” Mulvaney said.) One of the working titles for the group was the Reasonable Nutjob Caucus. “We had twenty names, and all of them were terrible,” Mulvaney said. “None of us liked the Freedom Caucus, either, but it was so generic and so universally awful that we had no reason to be against it.”
The nine members needed to grow to twenty-nine, so that, when voting as a bloc with Democrats, they could defeat any Boehner priority. The group had two rules for new members: they had to be willing to vote against Boehner legislation, but they also had to be willing to support him when the legislation met some, if not all, of the Freedom Caucus’s goals.
Boehner’s control of the chamber relied on a firm agreement with his Republican members that, no matter how they felt about policy, they would always vote with their party on procedural measures, especially so-called rules, which define the parameters of debate on the House floor. Voting against a rule, Labrador told me, was the equivalent of “going nuclear.” Brat said, “If you start threatening rules, then that starts questioning the whole process, the way the place is run.” Mulvaney added, “Ever since I got here, in 2010, the one thing they said is you never ever, ever, ever vote against a rule. And what we told the guys we recruited into the Freedom Caucus was that you have to be able to do it.”
Even as a founding member of the Freedom Caucus, Mulvaney had tried to stay on good terms with Boehner. And although he hadn’t voted for Boehner for Speaker in 2013, he supported him in 2015 because he believed there was no viable alternative. “I took no end of crap for it from the right,” Mulvaney said. “My office has never had the level of vitriol on any issue that even approached the vote for Speaker in January of 2015.”
In February, Mulvaney was at a meeting of House Republicans at the Capitol Hill Club, a few blocks from the House, to which members regularly retreat to discuss fund-raising and other political matters. The Freedom Caucus was making its first play for influence, threatening to hold up funding for the Department of Homeland Security unless Obama’s immigration measures were defunded. Boehner was aghast, but at the meeting he made a pitch for the members to put their differences aside. Mulvaney was encouraged.
Then he looked down at a text from a staffer. A group called the American Action Network, for which a former Boehner aide served as a board member, was running attack ads against Mulvaney in South Carolina. Similar ads ran against other House members who were holding up the Homeland Security funding, accusing them of being “willing to put our security at risk by jeopardizing critical security funding.” Boehner publicly denied any knowledge of the ads, but Mulvaney was furious.
“Once you attack us in our home districts, there’s really no going back from that,” he said. “You can’t walk into a meeting and say, ‘Let’s all be on the same team’ while at the same moment you’re attacking members of the team. It was the beginning of the end.”
Once again, Ted Cruz inserted himself into the fight, backing the Freedom Caucus’s tactics but also earning a private rebuke. “You’ve talked to us about the Freedom Caucus more than Ted Cruz has talked to us about the Freedom Caucus,” Labrador told me when I mentioned the view among Democrats that “Speaker Cruz” controlled Labrador and his allies. But, once again, the caucus’s strategy failed; Boehner relied on Democrats to pass the D.H.S. funding bill: a hundred and eighty-two Democrats and just seventy-five Republicans voted for it.
In June, the Freedom Caucus went nuclear. Boehner brought a bill to the floor that would grant Obama “trade promotion authority,” the right to negotiate trade pacts with only an up or down vote in Congress for approval. Despite the Freedom Caucus’s support for free trade, it opposed the bill, mostly on the ground that it would cede congressional power to the President. The caucus organized a vote against the rule that would bring the legislation to the floor.
Patrick McHenry, of North Carolina, one of the House leadership’s lieutenants in charge of corralling votes on the floor, confronted Mulvaney, who told McHenry that he had thirty-four votes lined up against the rule. McHenry laughed and bet him a case of beer that he didn’t have even twenty. Thirty-four Republicans voted against the rule, once again forcing Boehner to pass a top priority with Democratic support. (McHenry paid off the bet in Guinness.)
The tit-for-tat retaliation continued. Meadows was kicked off a subcommittee that he chaired. Duncan, the chairman of the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, which oversees American policy toward Latin America, says that he wasn’t allowed to go on international congressional trips, a normal perk for most members. “That was one of the slaps on the hand I got from the Boehner administration,” Duncan said.
After Rod Blum, who represents a swing district in Iowa, voted against Boehner, the National Republican Congressional Committee, which helps fund the reëlection efforts of House incumbents, refused to support him. “There’s some anger that he’s not getting N.R.C.C. support,” a Republican member of Congress who often disagrees with the Freedom Caucus told me. “It’s his first day in office and he votes against the Speaker, the largest funder of the N.R.C.C. What the fuck? I mean, come on. You can’t help stupid.”
But the leadership’s efforts to punish members frequently backfired. “Some of the reward-and-punishment mechanisms that have existed in the institution effectively for decades, centuries, don’t work anymore,” Greg Walden, a Republican congressman from Oregon who runs the N.R.C.C. and is close to Boehner, said. “You try to provide some party discipline, and you create a martyr.” At the mention of Labrador, Walden rolled his eyes. But he denied that the N.R.C.C. is used as a tool to punish members who vote against leadership. “That’d probably be illegal, but in either case it would destroy the N.R.C.C.,” he said.
In July, Meadows filed his motion to vacate, despite the objections of the Freedom Caucus. “We weren’t in favor,” Labrador said. “The board”—the group’s nine founders—“told Meadows not to.” But the motion was quickly embraced by outside conservative groups and by talk radio, which turned the issue into a litmus test on the right. According to Mulvaney, one moderate Republican told Boehner that he’d likely face a primary challenge if he voted for him, so he wouldn’t. “If that moderate was telling John that story, my guess is that he heard it from a lot of different people,” Mulvaney said.
On Wednesday, September 23rd, Boehner was in Oregon raising money and he had breakfast with Walden. “He was really frustrated,” Walden told me. “It put Republicans in a tough position to have to make that vote to have to defend him. He said, ‘I’m gonna rip the scab off on Friday.’ ”
On Thursday, after the Pope had come and gone in Washington, an event that Boehner, who is Catholic, later described, tearfully, as the highlight of his career, Boehner called Mulvaney, Labrador, and several other Freedom Caucus members to his office. Meadows had filed the motion in a manner such that, at any point, it could be called to the floor—as “a privileged motion”—for a vote. Boehner asked Labrador and the others if they were really going to go forward with the motion to vacate. “Is there any way at all I can get you guys not to vote for this?’’ Boehner asked.
“Mr. Speaker, you know that we didn’t want this motion to be filed,” Labrador said. “But if somebody goes to the floor and does the privileged motion, I think you’re in a worse position today than you were a few months ago.” Labrador told Boehner that Republicans could not win the Presidency if Boehner remained as Speaker, because conservatives wouldn’t be energized.
“You have two choices, Mr. Speaker,” Labrador told Boehner. “Either you change the way you’re running this place, which you have been unwilling to do, or you step down.”
The next morning, Boehner announced that he would retire. “It is clear to me now that many of the members of this conference want a change,” he told his colleagues at a private meeting, “and want new leadership to guide through the rough shores ahead.”
In the late afternoon of October 29th, Boehner’s last day as Speaker, Labrador found him alone in his private office, smoking a cigarette and looking out the window at Washington’s monuments. Boehner’s office was cleared out, and his remaining personal effects were gathered on his desk. “This is all I got left, right here,” Boehner said.
That morning, Labrador and his cohort had won their biggest prize: the elevation of Paul Ryan, one of the most conservative House Republicans, to replace Boehner. Kevin McCarthy, who had moved up one slot in the leadership after Cantor was ousted, tried to secure the Speakership, but the Freedom Caucus withheld its support, and McCarthy withdrew from the race. The Party turned to Paul Ryan as the only person who could reunite the warring factions.
But first Ryan had to make sure that the Freedom Caucus wouldn’t spurn him. He met with members of the group several times. “The first thing we told him was that we were not going to accept any of his demands,” Labrador said. “He had five—I don’t remember what they were.” Labrador and his allies had their own demands, and pressed Ryan for a series of reforms that would make the House more democratic. “If the process is not opened up, the only way you have an opportunity to have your policy considered is if you kiss the ring,” Labrador said. “And obviously we’re not ring kissers.”
Labrador said that Ryan was “shocked” when he heard how the Freedom Caucus had been treated by Boehner. At one point, Ryan tried to commiserate by pointing out how angry members were when Boehner bypassed the Ways and Means Committee, which Ryan chaired, on a crucial piece of Medicare legislation. There was an uncomfortable silence. Mulvaney said he put his hand on Ryan’s shoulder and explained, “Paul, none of us are on Ways and Means.” It was a turning point. “That was the moment that we realized there was a little bit of us in Paul, and Paul realized we weren’t as crazy as everybody tried to make us out to be.”
The two sides got off to a decent start: Ryan was elected Speaker and lost only ten Republican votes. Brat voted against him, but Labrador, Duncan, Mulvaney, and Meadows all supported him. “In Ryan, we have somebody who understands what Obama’s trying to do,” Labrador said. “He understands that we have to have a bright contrast between the two sides and that only through that contrast are you going to be able to win the battle of ideas. Boehner was never about ideas. He was about the institution, which makes him a good, honorable person but doesn’t make him the type of leader that we needed at this time.”
This week will present Ryan with a major test of the new relationship. Boehner, in one of his last acts as Speaker, negotiated a budget deal with Obama and the Senate to raise the debt ceiling until March, 2017, after a new President is sworn in, and set funding levels for the government for the next two years. But Boehner left the final vote on the deal for Ryan to pass, by the end of this week. Last week, Mulvaney met with Ryan, and he pressed the new Speaker to include the language on Planned Parenthood and Syrian refugees in the spending bill, which must pass by December 11th. “There has to be something that speaks to the base,” Mulvaney said. Labrador told me, “Paul needs to realize the honeymoon is over and start bringing us some conservative policy.” Asked if there would be another government shutdown, Labrador replied, “I’m not sure.”
He added, “The final exam for Paul Ryan will be in January, 2017, when there is a Speaker election, and we will look at his body of work and determine whether he gets a passing grade or not.”
Ryan represents a bridge between Boehner’s generation and the members elected since 2010, and some in the older guard told me they don’t know if Ryan can control Labrador’s faction any better than Boehner could. “The question remains: can we change the underlying political dynamic that brought us to this point?” Charlie Dent, the head of the Tuesday Group, a caucus of fifty-six center-right Republicans, told me. He said that the Republican conference was divided into three groups: seventy to a hundred governing conservatives, who always voted for the imperfect legislation that kept the government running; seventy to eighty “hope yes, vote no” Republicans, who voted against those bills but secretly hoped they would pass; and the forty to sixty members of the rejectionist wing, dominated by the Freedom Caucus, who voted against everything and considered government shutdowns a routine part of negotiating with Obama. “Paul Ryan’s got his work cut out for him to expand the governing wing of the Republican Party,” Dent said. “There shouldn’t be too much accommodation or appeasement of those who are part of the rejectionist wing.”
Nunes told me that Ryan needed to figure out how to counter the rising populist forces in the Party. “It’s the difference between a democracy and a democratic republic,” he said. “We are a democratic republic, and yet populist rhetoric, speaking in platitudes, can lead to bad things happening when it’s just pure, unfettered kind of mob-style movements that are out there. And that’s what we’re kind of facing now.” Dent agreed. “We need to help redefine what it means to be a conservative,” he said. “Stability, order, temperance, balance, incrementalism are all important conservative virtues. Disorder, instability, chaos, intemperance, and anarchy are not.”
Conservative critics argue that the real problem with the Freedom Caucus is that it empowers the Democrats. Tom McClintock, a California Republican, resigned from the group in September. “I had high hopes,” he said. “I think that they are the most sincere conservatives in the House. But despite their good intentions the practical effect of their tactics is to dramatically shift the center of political gravity in the House to the left.”
McClintock said that the same parliamentary brinkmanship that the Freedom Caucus unleashed could be turned against conservatives if a small band of moderate Republicans, such as Dent and his Tuesday Group, defied their leadership and joined the Democrats to pass immigration reform or higher spending levels or a return of earmarks. “Those are just a few of the conservative nightmares that could now escape from this Pandora’s box that the Freedom Caucus has opened,” he said. “Good intentions are paving the road that the Freedom Caucus is taking us down, but I don’t think conservatives are going to like where it leads.”
Cole argued that if the rebels didn’t back off from their most radical demands they risked doing much broader damage to the Republican Party. “I guarantee you, you shut down the government, you default on the debt, you can kiss the Republican majority goodbye,” he said. “Or you nominate the wrong kind of Presidential candidate that simply appeals to Republicans. If you don’t get somebody to start changing the math among minorities and millennials, then we won’t have a President, and, over time, this majority itself will be in danger.”
Most of the Freedom Caucus members are accustomed to losing. Many of them had a hard time taking credit for how much they have transformed Congress and the Republican Party in the past few years, but during one moment of reflection Labrador basked in his achievements, including Boehner’s fall. “I came here to change Washington five years ago, and I think I have accomplished that in a big way,” he said. At their meeting on Boehner’s last day, the two men spoke for twenty minutes and then said goodbye. “You’re a good man,” Labrador told him. “And I wish you luck.” ♦
