“When we won the majority in 1994, we barely had talk radio. The only people using the Internet were a couple geeks in Palo Alto. There was no Facebook, Twitter. There was no Breitbart.com. And there was no Fox News,” Boehner says. “It’s hard to calculate how much more information people have about their government than they did back then. A hundred times? A thousand times? They’ve been buried under all this information, and much of is either untrue or misleading, and it has pushed people farther and farther away from the middle and into their echo chambers.”
Boehner had given up on getting fair treatment from talk radio. Once upon a time he spoke regularly with Sean Hannity, and he would play golf with Rush Limbaugh during frequent trips to Palm Beach. But those relationships had frayed since his becoming Speaker. Nuance and pragmatism don’t play well on the airwaves; there was little audience to be gained by realistically assessing the expectations for Republicans in a divided government under a Democratic president. In Boehner’s view, it was the sudden popularity of fanatical radio host Mark Levin in the years after 9/11 that influenced the others. “Levin went really crazy right and got a big audience, and he dragged Hannity to the dark side; he dragged Rush to the dark side,” Boehner said. “I used to talk to them all the time, and suddenly they’re beating the living shit out of me.”
But there was still hope for Ailes. Boehner had known the Fox News chairman and CEO since the early 1990s, when he was a rookie congressman and Ailes was a powerful media consultant to then-President George H. W. Bush. Their friendship grew over the years, and even when Fox News was bludgeoning his speakership, Boehner would always find himself breaking bread with Ailes during swings through Manhattan.
This meeting would have a different tone. Boehner was at his wit’s end with cable news and its insatiable appetite for conflict-driven coverage. Ailes was giving a platform to people who had no reasonable claim to one; his network was incentivizing lawmakers to do more wrecking than building, more gossiping than governing. This wasn’t merely a question of ideology. There was a difference, to Boehner, between Jim Jordan and Louie Gohmert: Both congressmen made life miserable for their party’s leadership, but only one could offer a lucid rationale for why.
Boehner could deal with fringe characters in his conference: Gohmert, Steve King, Michele Bachmann. What he couldn’t deal with anymore was seeing them on national television, broadcasting their batshittiness to tens of millions of people in prime time.
The Speaker had come to ask Ailes a favor: Stop putting these people on your network.
Ailes was not inclined to agree to this. His on-air talent, and the guests they booked, were part of a well-oiled ratings machine. Dictating a blacklist to Hannity at the behest of the Speaker would not go over well. But Ailes was not unsympathetic to Boehner’s plight. He, too, had observed that the GOP was becoming anarchic; Ailes had even agreed to give the Gang of Eight some breathing room at the outset of their immigration push. (It didn’t last.) Moreover, his boss, News Corp executive chairman Rupert Murdoch, was a known moderate on certain issues and had voiced discomfort with the GOP’s absolutist wing and its allied hosts on his channel.
“What happened to immigration reform? Why not pass that bill?” Murdoch had asked Eric Cantor during a dinner in the fall of 2013.
“Rupert,” Cantor replied, “Have you watched your network?”
Now Ailes was giving Boehner the same answer that Murdoch had given Cantor months earlier. “Don’t worry about them,” Ailes said, referring to his resident provocateurs. “They’re just getting ratings.”
But the Speaker wouldn’t be dismissed that easily. He had come equipped with a sweetener for his request, something that the Fox boss could sink his teeth into. Ailes owned a special loathing for the Clinton family and particularly for its matriarch, whom he found manipulative and unfit for office. Boehner knew this. And although he did not share the right’s loathing of Hillary, the Speaker was actively building an in-house opposition research firm to damage her presidential prospects in 2016. Unbeknownst to the public, Boehner was about to launch a select committee in Congress to investigate her handling of the Benghazi attacks that killed four Americans while she was secretary of state. He had come to give Ailes a heads-up, hoping it would persuade the cable kingpin to pull the “crazies” off his airwaves.
Boehner’s plan backfired. Rather than rejoice at the Speaker’s news, the word Benghazi tripped a switch. Suddenly high-strung and wary of his surroundings, Ailes proceeded to unpack for Boehner the outlines of an elaborate, interconnected plot to take him down. It started with Ailes’s belief that Obama really was a Muslim who really had been born outside the United States. He described how the White House was monitoring him around the clock because of these views. He concluded by assuring Boehner that his house had been fortified with combat-trained security personnel and “safe rooms” where he couldn’t be observed.
“It was the most bizarre meeting I’d ever had in my life. He had black helicopters flying all around his head that morning,” Boehner recalls. “It was every conspiracy theory you’ve ever heard, and I’m throwing cold water on all this bullshit. Ratings were ratings to Murdoch, but I began to realize that Ailes believed in all this crazy stuff.”
The Speaker had come with hopes of quieting the furor on Fox News. He left more concerned than ever about the threat it posed to the country.
REGROUPING AT THE DAWN OF 2014, THE REBELS LICKED THEIR WOUNDS and pondered two principal lessons learned from the past year.
First, they recognized, their problem was less with any one person—even Boehner—and more with the top-down processes of the House, where legislative influence is derived from seniority, fund-raising ability, and proximity to power. The incentive structures of Congress were beginning to shift; many Republicans now feared the ire of their base more than a rebuke from their party’s leadership. But this transformation wasn’t happening quickly enough for the insurgents in the House GOP. Only by reforming the process, and breaking into the inner sanctum of power, could they transform Congress.
Second, they agreed, no one outside their small circle could be trusted anymore. Cantor had undermined them by offering citizenship to illegal minors. Steve Scalise had fired the RSC’s popular executive director and booted the Heritage Foundation from its weekly meetings. Even Paul Ryan had sold them out, trading away the sequester cuts and basking in the afterglow of a bipartisan compromise they had vigorously opposed.
The result of these twin realizations—a need to disturb the procedural status quo and an imperative to distinguish themselves from the rest of the conference—was a series of embryonic talks about a smaller, purer group of conservatives. It would be invitation-only. It would have strict rules governing how members could vote. It would, if properly organized and executed, empower the rebels to serve as a veto on their party’s leadership, denying them the numbers needed to pass ligislation.
None of this would be easy. Standing up a new caucus takes time, money, and logistical savvy. The House hard-liners who wanted freedom from the RSC and its nominal “conservative” membership faced a series of hurdles before they could spin off as their own autonomous group. In the meantime, they had the House Liberty Caucus.