Many of the members felt affection for Boehner on a personal level, his brusque moxie rubbing off on them in ways that were often unconscious. But their tactical disagreements with him were elevated by the fact that his leadership team did not represent the conference. Boehner, Cantor, and McCarthy represented states (Ohio, Virginia, and California) that Obama had carried twice, and all three officials identified more with the party’s champagne-sipping managerial wing than its piss-and-vinegar populist sect.
Boehner suffered the brunt of this frustration and did little to quell it. The Speaker’s approach had begun to grate on members—his sermonizing, his secretive negotiations with Obama, and most recently, his retaliation against Republican dissenters. In early December, the Speaker had authorized the removal of four uncooperative Republicans from key committees. After two years of brutal infighting, Boehner’s punitive strike was intended to send a message.
It backfired. The members became right-wing martyrs, enlisting outside help to stir outrage against the GOP leadership. “This is not 1995, when nobody knew what was going on in Washington,” Tim Huelskamp, one of the conservative renegades, told Roll Call. “Since then we’ve got Fox News. We’ve got Twitter. We’ve got Facebook.”3
Huelskamp, a Kansas congressman representing one of the biggest farming districts in America, had received the harshest sentence of them all: He was kicked off the Agriculture Committee. “He was just a born asshole,” Boehner says of his former colleague. “He didn’t even have to try.”
Incensed, Huelskamp became one of the first to pledge opposition to Boehner and began recruiting others to join a revolt. It was this reputation that earned Huelskamp a phone call from Jim Bridenstine, a young Oklahoman who had just won a congressional seat in November 2012.
Bridenstine had sworn publicly not to support Boehner for Speaker, a promise that energized the base in his conservative district. Once he was elected, however, the arm-twisting began. Tom Cole, the dean of the Oklahoma delegation and a close ally of Boehner’s, called Bridenstine repeatedly, urging him to reconsider. When Bridenstine wouldn’t budge, the talks got less friendly. Finally, on January 2, as Bridenstine was boarding his flight to Washington, Cole called with a closing threat: If Bridenstine didn’t vote for Boehner, he would lose his promised seat on the Armed Services Committee. Bridenstine, a former Navy fighter pilot, was outraged. Hearing his story, Huelskamp invited him to a top-secret meeting that night at a colleague’s apartment.
Problem was, Huelskamp hadn’t mentioned this to anybody else. When Bridenstine banged on Fincher’s door, everyone froze. The room was already rife with tension; some of the attendees, everyone knew, were acting as eyes and ears for the leadership. By relaying updates to Boehner—or, in some instances, to Cantor—the spies would earn eternal goodwill from the men who could dictate everything from committee assignments to campaign contributions.
It was Raúl Labrador, the Tea Party hard-liner from Idaho, who finally answered the door. Standing over six feet tall and weighing every bit of 250 pounds, Labrador decided to moonlight as a bouncer. “We don’t know who you are,” he told Bridenstine.
“I’m Jim Bridenstine, a new member of Congress. Tim Huelskamp invited me.”
“But we don’t know who you are,” Labrador replied. “We don’t know who you’re for.”
Bridenstine was bewildered. He had campaigned on a refusal to back Boehner. And yet these professional politicians, these grown men playing Whodunit on a Wednesday night, couldn’t identify him. “I don’t have time for this,” he told Labrador. “Here’s my number. Call if you change your mind.”
It was barely an hour later when the phone rang. “We need you,” Labrador told Bridenstine. “And we need other freshmen like you. Bring some buddies.”
Bridenstine did as he was told. Before long he was back on Fincher’s doorstep, flanked by a pair of fellow newbies, Florida’s Ted Yoho and Texas’s Steve Stockman, who had also made noise about opposing Boehner. (Stockman had previously served a single congressional term in the 1990s.) Another rookie member, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who had been sworn in early after winning a special election, was waiting as they stepped inside.
Massie made sure they knew the math: In a Speaker’s race, every member of the House is eligible to cast a vote, and Boehner would need an outright majority to win. If all 435 members voted, that meant Boehner needed 218. With 234 Republicans in the chamber, Boehner could lose only 16 of them. If the conservative rebels could collect 17 votes, Boehner would be denied a majority, and another round of balloting would commence. Not in nearly a century had a sitting Speaker been forced to a second ballot; if they could so humiliate Boehner, the thinking went, he would step aside—or be forced out in a subsequent round of voting.
The incoming freshmen looked around the room with confusion. There had to be two dozen of them in total, more than enough to prevent Boehner from reaching his majority threshold. Why all the fuss?
“You guys don’t get it,” Labrador told them. “We need thirty.”
“That’s dumb. Why do we need thirty?”
A hush fell over the mob. It was Bridenstine, the baby-faced door banger, challenging Labrador.
“We need thirty to get to seventeen,” Labrador growled in response. “Because half of the people in this room are going to cave tomorrow.”
Bridenstine glanced from side to side. “Okay. Who’s going to cave? Raise your hands.”
Nervous laughter. No hands.
“You still don’t get it,” Labrador said. “There are people in this room working for Boehner. We just don’t know who they are.”
At this, the chuckling ceased. Bridenstine, the brave novice, glanced all around him, clearly expecting a chorus of vehement denial to Labrador’s allegation of espionage. Nothing but suspenseful stares. It was true. They all knew it. Now, so did Bridenstine.
Boehner wasn’t the only one with moles. Cantor was keeping close tabs on the meeting, too, which made sense given that some of the rebels were prepared to elevate him to the speakership. At one point, Fincher’s phone beeped; he excitedly announced to his colleagues that Cantor was calling and scurried back into his bedroom to speak with the majority leader privately. Adding to the mystery, some Boehner spies were actually posing as Cantor spies, pledging fidelity to the number two in order to protect their cover. One of them, Lynn Westmoreland, a Georgia congressman and known ally of the Speaker’s, was eventually called out by one of his colleagues. “Why are you here, Lynn? Boehner already put you on good committees.”
“Well,” Westmoreland said, smiling, “if Cantor’s the Speaker, maybe I’ll get even better committees.”
As eyes rolled throughout the room, Huelskamp whipped out his iPad and tapped out a few words on the screen, showing it silently to the rookies: “Works for Boehner. Don’t trust him.”
Bridenstine was growing impatient. “Okay,” he declared. “Let’s just sign our names. That way we’re all on the record. A pledge to vote against John Boehner.”
This wasn’t a new idea; in fact, some of the members had already scribbled their autographs on scraps of paper in an envelope. (Labrador would keep these records for years to come, preserving the sacred text for indebted archivists.) But not everyone was ready to sign. Some were still on the fence about opposing Boehner; others found this ritual of an ink oath a tad ostentatious.