http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/14/a-house-divided
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
There is much much more at the link. Definitely worth reading the whole thing.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.”
