How this passage from former House speaker John Boehner’s memoir explains Kevin McCarthy’s drubbing

John Boehner viewed the tea party rebels who tormented him throughout his time as speaker of the House as a group that wanted only “to throw sand in the gears of the hated federal government until it fails and they’ve finally proved that it’s beyond saving.”

“What they’re really interested in,” Boehner continued in his memoir, “On the House,” “is chaos.”

It would be tough to blame Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) for coming to the same conclusion this week.

As McCarthy attempts to win the vote for House speaker, after failing repeatedly, he’s faced with learning the lesson Boehner did years ago: The anti-establishment wing of the Republican Party is devoted to showing allegiance to its own ideological principles, not to ensuring that governmental institutions run smoothly.

McCarthy, an affable veteran in the House, has tried to work constructively with the conservative wing of his conference for over a decade. He was Boehner’s House whip when the tea party carried the GOP to victory in 2010. Boehner relied on him to cajole the new faces into the party fold. McCarthy opened up his office as a hangout, and he held listening sessions in an attempt, with mixed success, to get Boehner the votes he needed.

McCarthy relented on a handful of their demands Thursday morning, according to the Washington Post. The most significant would allow just one lawmaker to invoke a vote to unseat the speaker of the House at any time. Currently, the rule requires five members.

The change to the rule, called the “motion to vacate,” would give enormous power to McCarthy’s adversaries on every future vote.

This week, McCarthy’s foes have caused chaos on Capitol Hill. If he takes the gavel under the new rule, he faces the risk of a different kind of chaos for the next two years.

McCarthy tried to win over the right

As speaker, Boehner entrusted McCarthy with corralling the anti-establishment members. “Kevin probably has a better handle on the freshmen than anybody else here,” Boehner told Robert Draper at the time.

Boehner knew the stakes. He’d helped Newt Gingrich draft and then sell the “Contract with America” in 1994, which ushered in a class of strident outsiders determined to shrink government. The freshmen were in lockstep behind Gingrich, until they weren’t. In the summer of 1997, they plotted a failed coup to oust him.

The tea party class of 2010 ran raucous campaigns invoking the Revolutionary War and stoking anti-Barack Obama fervor. Some vowed to shutter government agencies. Others promised to shut down the government to get big spending cuts or to defund the Affordable Care Act, which they called Obamacare. Most of the tea party candidates weren’t career politicians and swore to hold the establishment accountable to the conservative ideal of small government. They had no allegiance to the Republican Party. In fact, they saw themselves as adversaries to it.

Boehner and McCarthy quickly realized that this wasn’t just empty campaign rhetoric. The new class of Republicans was willing, and even eager, to put principle first, at the expense of a functioning government. The tea party members saw compromise as a loss, even when deals would cut their way, and so Boehner’s speakership was defined by a relentless series of crises over funding the government.

“A lot of us feel that we’re here on a mission, and the mission is now,” Rep. Tim Griffin, a tea party freshman from Arkansas, said in 2011. “We’re not that concerned about the political consequences.”

The tea party’s influence on Capitol Hill became formidable. In the year leading up to a 16-day shutdown, Republicans, tea party and establishment alike, beat the drum for a showdown that would pit Affordable Care Act funding against funding the entire government.

In January 2013, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas wrote in the Houston Chronicle that “it may be necessary to partially shut down the government in order to secure the long-term fiscal wellbeing of our country, rather than plod along the path of Greece, Italy and Spain.”

Outside conservative groups wove the threat of a shutdown into a plan that became the House Republican blueprint to defund the Affordable Care Act. Conservative groups also funded a nationwide campaign to pressure Republicans who weren’t on board, including running attack ads against sitting lawmakers. Moderate figures like Sen. Lamar Alexander retired rather than risk a primary from the right.

In the final weeks before the government closed at the end of 2013, the Washington Post reported that leading tea party lawmakers were pleased with the trajectory. Rep. Michele Bachmann said in response to a question about the shutdown, “We’re very excited. It’s exactly what we wanted, and we got it. People will be very grateful.” Rep. John Culberson said, “It’s wonderful. We’re 100 percent united!” For her part, Bachmann said after publication that she was taken out of context.

Republicans got little in exchange for reopening the government 16 days later. The lesson many conservatives in the party took from the fiasco was they needed to be more committed to their values, not more open to compromise.

Despite the pain they’d caused congressional leaders, top Republicans like McCarthy and Boehner have stumped and raised money for anti-establishment, anti-spending, outsider House candidates. McCarthy was out on the trail for them just this year. Groups affiliated with McCarthy spent $1 million on the campaigns of the very lawmakers who voted against him this week, according to a Politico analysis. He’d given big to other adversaries in previous cycles.

“Our job is not to coronate the biggest fundraiser or rubber stamp, the status quo, or keep on going along to get along,” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) said on the floor Wednesday, according to Politico.

The tea party reinvented

By 2015, the tea party had dissipated, but only after successfully pulling the Republican Party its way.

It was now routine for Republican presidential candidates to name government agencies they thought should be shuttered. Outsider candidates began to dominate and still dominate the field. Calls for political revolution got louder.

Most of the original class of tea party outsiders lost in the next two elections. Congressional Republicans dropped the tea party moniker. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), once a tea partyer, formed a new conservative group called the House Freedom Caucus. The caucus has been the thorn in the side of party leaders since, holding up votes for often ambiguous reasons. Peers in the House are increasingly incensed by the group’s tactics.

Most of the 19 Republicans who didn’t support McCarthy’s bid this week are affiliated with the Freedom Caucus, which doesn’t formally disclose its members. (Some voted for Jordan instead. Jordan told them to support McCarthy, as he did.)

House Republicans overwhelmingly supported McCarthy for speaker, and they’ve lost patience with the holdouts. Some have started calling them the “Taliban 19,″ and others are openly telling reporters they are pissed off, according to Politico.

If McCarthy gets a chance at a speakership, he’ll face the same battles as he has for the last decade. The question will be whether he can tame the chaos.

Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.